I just purchased The Void last night from Steam (wish I had waited just one more day for them to knock another 25% off but hehe oh well) and after spending all night downloading, it finally finished. However when I started a new game, everything went fine until I got close the "heart" and then the game froze. The voice cut off, and everything locked up. When I minimized and restored that did not work only opening the game up into a black box on my desktop, that I had to use the end process to get rid of. I really want to play this game and can't find any info on similar problems.

Computer

Windows Vista 32bit
2gig ram
Nvidia 9500gt

Everything is up to date so any help would greatly be appreciated.

I'm having the same problem. Froze 4 times in a row. After restarting the game twice it began giving an error message and didn't even start, however, I could not read said message because of the aforementioned black box in my way. I am currently re-downloading it from steam.

I have Vista, which might be our problem. My card is comparable ATI to the OP and I have 6 gigs of RAM (though I'm sure RAM has nothing to do with it).

The Void has no problem with Vista. I've run it on Vista 32, 64 and Win 7 64.

The problem is that the Steam version is a bit "quirky".

Have you guys tried the Steam "fix"? : (LxR, help me on this one, can't find the Shader Fix thread.)

After redownload I was able to at least see the error. Says it cannot find effects30h. In any case, I have not yet looked for a steam "fix" on their forums and will get right to that.

Ah joy, fixed it. Even though the exact way my crash happened was different than most others (no error boxes ect.) it turned out the problem was simple enough. After I dug around on the steam forums more and looked around at different forums, the answer was this.

Step 1. Open the file in:

...\Steam\steamapps\common\the void\data\fsystems.xml

Step 2. Then change:

<system name="cache">
<Path>{shdocs}/Cache</Path>
</system>

to

<system name="cache">
<Path>{documents}/Cache</Path>
</system>

3 times in a row no problems although a few pauses when I got close to the heart, but they were less than a second and resumed normally. Worked fine past that as well even turning all to high. I also uninstalled my newest version of PhysX to the one that came with the game. I did this first, it didn't help but figured might as well post the info anyways.

Step 1. In your Nvidia folder, where the drivers are installed, click the physx installer to uninstall

Step 2. Install the version from ...\Steam\steamapps\common\the void

--------------

So yeah that should fix it, hopefully I don't run into problems later down the road but I do feel some nostalgia having to go and edit files in word pad to get a game working like back in the day. Only problem is it kills the immersion having to retest the place 5 times in a row, but I'll wait till I am back in the mood for spelunking in dream worlds.

The reason for pauses is the absence of actual cache in the folder you typed. You see, the game uses a precompiled database of all possible types of materials ("shaders"). It seems that one of the files in your Cache (in Public Documents) is corrupted or missing. You can delete the precompiled shaders, of course. Then The Void automatically compiles a shader for each new combination of a material and a number of light sources you see on the screen, which immediately causes a slowdown. This becomes less of an issue when you play the game long enough, because most combinations are already compiled by the time you get to the later parts of the game. Save for some rarely used materials.

The precompiled database has every (theoretically) possible combination of materials and light sources, even if the material is only used once in one 5-second long cutscene and is lit by 1 Omni Light. It takes from about 10 to 15 hours to compile it all . A full database in \Users\Public\Documents\My Games\Void\Cache is a around 86 MB.