Good morning.

So, I just bought Stranger's Wrath from GoG (how surprising!) and I'm sure it's a great game, but I seem to be unable to start it up. As a preamble, I am using an HP Pavillion dv6 notebook PC with an integrated ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5650 (can provide the rest of the specs, naturally.)

The game downloaded and installed fine, but when I attempt to boot it, I'm unable to select any resolution in the drop-down box in the launcher - it is simply left blank. Clicking Play closes the launcher, but does not actually launch the game.
I did a little googling on the issue and created a config.txt file in my Documents/Oddworld/Stranger's Wrath folder containing:

(wall of text, sorry)



"
#(C) Oddworld Inhabitants Inc 2005, 2010-2011
#(C) Just Add Water (Developments) Ltd 2011
# Stranger's Wrath Config File v2

width=1366
height=768
frequency=60
resolution=custom
fullscreen
vsync
anisotropicon
controller="Custom Keyboard + Mouse"

config="Keyboard + Mouse"
strafeleft="A"
straferight="D"
forward="W"
backward="S"
jump="SPACE"
camera="C"
bounty="CONTROL"
punch="V"
shake="E"
reload="Q"
pause="ESCAPE"
inventory="I"
zoom="X"
fire1="MOUSE1"
fire2="MOUSE2"
cameraleft="MOUSEAXISX-"
cameraright="MOUSEAXISX+"
cameraup="MOUSEAXISY+"
cameradown="MOUSEAXISY-"
left="LEFT"
right="RIGHT"
up="UP"
down="DOWN"
select="RETURN"

config="Custom Keyboard + Mouse"
strafeleft="A"
straferight="D"
forward="W"
backward="S"
jump="SPACE"
camera="C"
bounty="CONTROL"
punch="V"
shake="E"
reload="Q"
pause="ESCAPE"
inventory="I"
zoom="X"
fire1="MOUSE1"
fire2="MOUSE2"
cameraleft="MOUSEAXISX-"
cameraright="MOUSEAXISX+"
cameraup="MOUSEAXISY+"
cameradown="MOUSEAXISY-"
left="LEFT"
"

I did this because I found a post on the steam forums where this apparently fixed the issue for somebody. It's not done anything for me, however. I've also tried it with different resolutions in the config, to no avail.

Is this by any chance a common problem? I'm quite stuck here and, of course, I would prefer not to have now spent money on 1.5 gigs of rubbish bin material.
I am suspecting it is something to do with my graphics card because I have run into a whole heap of other random unrelated issues with it over the relatively short time I have had this laptop for. Apparently HP doesn't let you update them properly, yadi yadi ya, but of course they didn't tell me that in the store I bought it from. I'd appreciate any help you are able to give. Thanks!


Edit: Oh! I should really say, if I attempt to boot the game straight through its .exe, my PC has a bluescreen error and crashes, very nasty.

Have you tried updating the driver for your graphics card and Direct X to the latest available versions? You mean the launcher.exe? What error message does the blue screen give you?

I have exactly the same issue on the dv6 laptop, my card is one down from yours but I have exactly the same issues. Any help?

Im having the same problem! Ive run plenty of Gog games and this is the only one that gives me this problem though!

I'm running the game on a dv6 too with a higher gfx card and it's the same - after searching for an email contact address for gog and constantly getting sent round to the same '6 common problems' page or some such annoyance I fouind myself feeling a little out of the loop. Lots of people are having the same trouble that either the launcher does nothing (with no resolutions appearing and even then clicking play does nothing too) or clicking directly on the application blue screens your computer (laptop in my case). Why doesn't gog make it perfectly clear that they have problems like this or even give us a direct email address to tell them the problems this causes so that they might help?

EDIT: Okay, I originally posted 16 hours ago when the problem first happened and spent 5 hours trying to rectify and solve this issue. Having calmed down (many thanks to whomever discovered the magical powers of dried leaves called 'tea'), I did the following steps....

At first I stumbled across a fix that worked for the steam versions of the game, with a modified cdd.dll file or patch that was meant to help, traced a download spot for it to find a nice little message from the FBI saying they've shut down megaupload and all other sites affiliated to multiupload.com that allowed me the only access to the file on the grounds that I can only imagine it being an intervention of SOPA that stopped a community made fix for people who have problems running the game, and with no fix being made by ATI to run on their systems (or more specifically I believe the Radeon HD laptop intergrated graphics cards) I was furthermore enraged because it seemed that was the first of passive-agressive actions taken by that stupid act that ends up hurting the user because the companies who actually MAKE the software will just turn a blind eye to the people, pretty much saying 'we got your money now there's nothing you can do about it'. Grrr.

So, I installed the game on an old laptop, and it worked fine! It's a 6-year-old Dell machine running a ATI Mobility Radeon 256mb graphics card and its frame-rate was terrible (around 5fps) but it still worked, which puzzled me. So, cracking open the .exe file on my new and old laptops I found differences in the setup coding, specifically with regards to the config.txt file mentioned in the first post. It simply was not present on the HP DV6 (the newer laptop). It was a long shot, but I copied the file across from the old to the new, and when I went to run the game the launcher finally had a resolution option present! I went to run the game, and I had an error message pop up along the lines of 'Failed to create draw' I believe (I'm reluctant to go back after fixing my version as it took me ages to solve!), but by editing the config file, I turned the VSync off and it now runs full screen in my native resoltuion smooth as a button. There are however a couple of graphical glitches, namely the waymarker arrows in the tutorial (I've yet to play past that stage) are slightly cut through by a lack of transparency around the edges of the grass roots that protude through the levels, and the water has odd dots rippling on top of the surface, still they don't render the game unplayable at all and I'm more than happy to overlook that as I believe it's still something to do with the lack of support for the ATI/HP DV6 systems.

So, much like the first entry, it seemed to be a matter of creating a config.txt file in the documents/oddworld/strangers wrath/ folder with a bit of manually editing articles within that to get the whole thing to run.

Phew. As I play through the game, I will continue to update this post if I find any other problems, and my attempts to fix it or (God forbid) my final unplayable part that I have no clue as to how to fix.

Peace.