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Potential solution to The Lab, Accounting and similar games not working?


Physio_sante

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Hey everybody!

After an entire week searching, trying, typing and raging, I finally think someone found a possible solution for some specific cases of game not working properly. This might be a long post, so buckle up your headset! As I said above, this worked for what I think is a pretty specific case: my Microsoft account name had international characters in it. I don't know if this was what was causing the problem, but other user have had the same problem, so it might be. If this isn't your case, I am not saying that this won't work, but I will need your help to see if it does! Are you ready? Let's go then! But before explaining what I did, here is the description of what I was experiencing:

"Here's what is happening: When I launch the games, I have the normal window that appears on my computer screen and I can see the Valve intro for the lab (Accounting intro doesn't show). I can hear the sound of both game, including the entry in what is probably the main screen of The Lab. At this point, both games just show black windows on my computer screen like they aren't loading. During that time in the headset, I am in the dark loading zone with the play area and the loading screen floating in front of me. I can also hear the same thing as on the computer. After letting loading it for a while, the game just seems to crash and I am put back in the White space of the Vive with grey lines. If I open my steam menu, it still shows the game is working as I have the button "Exit game" (or Quit game, I don't remember). If I don't close it, the window stay open on my computer for an undetermined amount of time. Also, when the game crash in the headset, I saw that the Steam VR little window on my computer doesn't show like it should. The little Steam VR window just show ready and doesn't show that the game is still launch and open on my computer."

 

During my research, I stumble on a discussion talking about the same problem and one person, , was finally the lost answer that I was looking for (Thank you so much man, you indeed help someone!!). For those interested, here is the link to the thread : https://community.viveport.com/t5/Technical-Support/Unable-to-play-certain-games/td-p/9779

So, here is dodo_developer solution to this problem : 

"I was unable to play some of the games (including The Lab, VR Funhouse, Trials on Tatooine). I found a solution to this problem. It turns out Vive don't get well with international characters in... Windows user name.

 

I've changed my user name from 'Michał' to 'Admin', and it does not help, but I discovered that old username remains in register. When I've created new Windows user called 'Vive' all games runs without problems. Turns out it was problem with user path to some SteamVR files."

 

To correct this, I created a new user named "Admin" (can be probably everything, just no special character), uninstalled every game I had before uninstalling steam as well. I then logged into Admin, installed steam again (after 1 hour of windows update) and all the game. Suddenly, everything was working just fine! I am not a computer wizard  so there might be extra steps that are not necessary in this solution. If you know more about this, feel free to let us know!

 

Oof.. that was one long post, but I really hope that this help some persons. I now really understand that feeling of frustration that comes with these problems and I really hope that by writing this, I am gonna help other people shorten that feeling.

 

Thank you very much for reading this, I really hope that this help!

Thank you very much again to  for your comment. You truly are my savior!

If you decide to try this, please let us know if this works!

Have fun out there!

 

Max

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, thank you for the detailed report! We've seen reports of non-latin characters in user names causing issues with some Viveport installs, but we haven't correlated this to Steam titles as well. This issue can be quite tricky to troubleshoot overall as it isn't captured in logs or via a specific error message and in some cases, a user isn't even aware that they have non-latin characters in their name due to the way their keyboard is encoded. As you mentioned, the issue remains persistent in the registry further increasing the difficulty of identifying and fixing the problem. In the future, I'll be sure to recommend users set up a new account when they experience similar issues. Cheers! 

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  • 6 months later...

Hello there,

I might have found a way easier solution. Upon purchasing a Vive I experienced the same problem with the same games but thought of this solution as a last resort as I did not want to uninstall and reinstall so many games. I found the whole "international character" thing to be rather interesting, though, and so kept it in mind as I researched further for a solution. By mere coincidence, I happened to discover that under the "users" folder on my pc there were two user folders both with my name but with a slight difference: The international character in one of them had been replaced by a strange character instead. Upon further inspection of the two folders, I found that the folder "openvr" could be found in the folder with the normal name but was missing in the other. I simply copied (not moving) the folder "openvr" into the folder with the strange character. After booting up a couple of games that I had experienced problems with I found it to be all fixed! I hope this will come in handy for anyone who might be unfortunate enough to come across the same issue.

Mikkel

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  • 5 months later...

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