Brink Preparing to Launch... & Nothing.

(r3fleX) #1

Recently needed to start playing Brink again as an ESL cup was announced, however every time i try to start brink, i get the steam message “Preparing to Launch Brink…” it closes and then nothing happens, the game doesn’t start at all and im left looking at my desktop screen.

I have noticed when i try to start the game in my steam status on friends list it shows i am ingame for about 2 seconds before closing and returning to the normal “Online” status.

I have been playing Brink for 270 hours fine…
Last time i played was Aug 21st for Gamescom final, but now that i need to start playing again (cup tomorrow) i need this fixed asap. :eek:

I’ve tried:

  1. Re-installing Brink
  2. Verified Game Integerity
  3. Defragmented cache files
  4. Tried previous ATI drivers - (even though latest 1’s ran the game fine with no issues before)
  5. Tried making exceptions in Firewalls/Anti virus software
  6. Tried launching the application from steam folder returns with an error:
    "

System Setup:
Windows 7 64bit
Intel i5 750
ATI 5850
4GB RAM

Only recent change i can think of is, that i unistalled an NVIDIA PhysX program the other day seeing as i dont use an Nvidia card… however does Brink require this to run? if so could use a download link.

Can someone please help me quickly as time is kinda important here… i’ve tried searching through alot of previous posts about this error and found no official fix from my searching, apart from 1 person re-installing windows 7 which i don’t want to consider atm. :mad:

Thanks for your help.

(HugePinball) #2

[QUOTE=r3fleX;378460]
Only recent change i can think of is, that i unistalled an NVIDIA PhysX program the other day seeing as i dont use an Nvidia card… however does Brink require this to run? if so could use a download link. [/QUOTE]
PhysX is a physics engine (software) that some games use to handle the complex physics calculations in their game engines. It does not require an Nvidia GPU, but the benefit is that if the game supports PhysX hardware acceleration, and you’re running it on a supported Nvidia GPU, then all the PhysX operation will be handled by the GPU rather than the CPU, thus increasing performance.

I’m pretty sure Brink doesn’t use PhysX at all, so I doubt uninstalling it caused your problem directly. Still, it’s not impossible that uninstalling some software like that could’ve done something odd to your system. Have you happened to try System Restore? A Restore Point was probably set when you uninstalled PhysX.

I’ve had similar launch issues with Brink a handful of times - in all but one case simply restarting Steam solved the problem. The other was when I had disabled the Steam overlay, but still had the OSD from ATI Tray Tools enabled. Any third-party graphics hooking applications you might have running should be one of the first things to investigate.

(r3fleX) #3

Well a re-install of steam & the Nvidia PhysX software seems to have solved the problem, i guess Brink does rely on it after all… Thanks.

Just thought i would post the solution incase other’s experiencing exactly the same problem can fix it.

:slight_smile:

(tangoliber) #4

Did you activate Steam Beta Update by any chance? With it activated, I can’t start up Brink…but I get as far as the Brink title on black text before it silently exits out of the game (without any error message.) Once I turn it off, I’m able to startup Brink again.