Most people have been having bug-free play experiences with Braid, but there are a number of bugs that have affected folks. My plan is to squash these as quickly as possible.
To that end, here’s a test version of Braid. (It’s a demo, but if you have the full version, you can reinstall that after you are done with this test).
(Note: Link taken down because it’s been superseded by a newer version. See this post.)
Please try this version out if you had any of the following bugs:
- Game crashes on start-up (giving the TODO error or no error).
- Game runs but gives you a black screen, but when you press Escape you can see the menu.
- Game runs very slowly and you wish you could pick a lower resolution so that the game would run faster.
- Can’t move the hand on the puzzle screen.
This version of Braid will attempt to drop into a low-res mode at startup if high-res is too slow. You can also pick various resolutions with the -width and -height command-line options, and those resolutions will work in full-screen mode (if your display adapter supports it). On adapters that can’t go to 1280 pixels wide, Braid should pick the widest available resolution (e.g. 1024) — though I am interested to hear from people about this because I can’t actually test that part here (all my computers are 1280 or over!)
The game detects the pixel shader version at startup. If it’s below 3, it turns off postprocessing (which otherwise caused that black screen problem) and if it’s below 2, the game just gives an error message for now (sorry folks with screens full of boxes — you have pixel shader 1.4 or below, this version still does not support that).
Though you can control the resolution with command-line options, there isn’t yet an interface in the Settings menu to do it. That would come for the final build, but I want to test the internals first.
So please let me know if this fixes your problem!
Thanks,
-Jonathan.
Well I’ve run some test with the new version using:
Core2Duo 1.6
4GB Ram
Geforce 8500 GT
I was able to run the game at 800×600, gaining optimal speed. Tweaking parameters I was able to run it at 1280×1024 forcing 30fps and with post processing at an acceptable speed.
So as for slowness it’s just a question of tweaking parameters now
As for the other issues none of them is happening on my system.
For those of you who are wondering to change resolution do something like this:
-width 800 -height 600
Hi!
Bought Braid on Steam yesterday after a friend showed it to me on his XBox 360. Really impressed, great work! 🙂
I have problems with low FPS and tried using the command line switches, however I got no change. The game is running around 15-20 FPS most of the time, but it’s changed rapidly which makes it hard to play. I tried to go as low as 800 x 600 resolution, no post effects and aiming for 30 fps. Sadly I got no noticable improvements.
My computer specs are:
Windows XP SP 3
AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual 4400+
2 GB RAM
NVIDIA Geforce 8600 GT.
Hopefully someone can come up with a solution so that I can enjoy this game to its fullest!
/Jonas
Excellent! Thanks! Can I ask, though: Do I have to uninstall my full version from Greenhouse before I can install this new version?
Install it in a different directory, that’s what I did.
Just backup your save games just in case.
Works perfect with my old notebook (Intel 1.6GHz, 1024×768).
Hello! Sorry to disturb. I downloaded it right now, and I would like to ask how do you change the language? Like, setting it in english or something, regardless of the system language.
Thank you in advance.
Works perfectly! thank you, i am waiting more from you guys, hope you have even more success with your future games, thanks!
has this version still the SSE2 fix? because i cant run it anymore (screen flashes black and then i get back to desktop)… the only version that works is the 1010 demo…
but thank you for your excellent work… i hope the new resolutions will make the game playable on my machine…
I played the demo (using steam) and did not experience any of the problems. Thanks for making such an excellent game!
Did you use any API/Library to make the game, (or just the DirectX SDK) ?
I played the demo on steam and did not experience any problems. Thanks for making such an excellent game available on the PC!
by the way, would you mind telling if the API/Library used to make this game (or just the DirectX SDK)?
Works great for me, although there seems to be some artefacting around the puzzle part when accessing from the opening section (If that makes any sense?!).
Running on an Advent 4211 (MSI Wind equivalent) using XP Home.
When will we be able to see this update roll out on Steam? I’m dying to play this game!
It works now, but only with: -width 1360 -height 768 -no_vsync_test
I run it on a HDTV LCD, 16:9, 720P (1360×768 default res), 8800GT. Before this version, i could not run it in full screen at all (resolution not suported -!!!-).
It works now by forcing the resolution, but i the vsync wasn’t woking, so i put the -no_vsync_test command line, and now it works as it should be.
I really cannot understand why this “beta” test wasn’t done BEFORE the release of the game. Oh well, better late then never…
Hi, i haven’t more todo error, but in game the screen flashing black continuously. My spec are:
win vista 64bit
4 giga ram
ati hd4870 512 mega
Bye
Finally I can change resolution! Thank you!
…but Greenhouse version is still not updated with these fixes? We should wait a bit, right?
This new test version mostly seems to have solved the “TODO: ‘File Description’ has encountered an error” problem I was having on my Thinkpad X61 tablet (1.6Ghz Core 2 Duo, 2GB, 32-bit Vista Bussiness, Intel 965 Express video chipset). Previously, running with -windowed would work other than the window being too large for my 1024×768 display.
I say mostly because it seems to decide set the resolution to 640×480 when I start it without any command-line options. I suppose it is possible that this is just because at any higher resolution Braid runs at less than 30fps, but I’m not sure if it is likely that it is trying to be that smart.
In any event, it is a great game and I look forward to being able to purchase the full version once a new release is made.
Works perfectly, but now I can’t progress because of the demo restrictions. When can we expect a full version?
Thank you! With custom resolution, the -Xfps and -no_post switches I can now get a satisfactory result on my laptop with integrated graphics card (X3100). I didn’t expect it to be so heavy, I play World of Warcraft with better results… Anyway it’s enjoyable now.
With custom resolutions it looks pretty terrible (grainy) in fullscreen with all numbers I’ve tried so far so I’m running it with -windowed. It might just be because it’s not my monitor’s native resolution. What is the game’s real aspect ratio?
In windowed mode, I can’t open the puzzles anymore (screens with 12-piece puzzles). Either I get graphic errors and it freezes, or I simply can’t move the cursor with the arrow keys. I have to restart the game without parameters to do it.
Resolution was automatically dropped to 640×480 and post processing was turned off on my 1024×600 resolution laptop.
I didn’t notice any of the 4 bugs listed. It worked flawlessly, no framerate drops at all.
Will it be possible to run the game at higher than 60Hz on CRT monitors? I can play full-screen at 60Hz and windowed at 85Hz, but the latter takes away from the experience with the borders, icons, etc.
Works great! Solves all of my former problems!
Thanks!
This one works for me without any problems… until it’s applied to the Steam version, the -windowed workaround works on my machine…
Hi, this version did help me:
– the game not run very slowly when Tim runs reading the books.
– no graphic glitches on top and bottom border of the puzzle screen (i have a 1280×800 resolution screen, ati X1400 mobility).
Thanks!!
Oh, yes, this works , now i can finally play in 1680×1050 with upscaled fullscreen image on my 22″ monitor (imho its better than 1280×1024, but a little blurry =) )
Works great for me too
9800m GTS, p8400, Vista 64
I ha slow-down and tearing, but it’s gone now.
I’m impressed with your work ethic.
Pretty impressed.
Thanks and have a good day sir.
Bought the game on Steam, which just crashes to desktop immediately on startup with no error.
This version starts up with no problems, so I look forward to seeing an update on Steam soon 🙂
When are you planning on adding joystick support and reconfigurable keys?
“-Game runs but gives you a black screen, but when you press Escape you can see the menu.”
… Or at least I can hear the menu sound and if I press the space bar I hear Tim jumping, but I can’t see anything, it’s all black.
Geoff: That’s exactly what it is doing — it is trying to render (in a hidden way) at 1280×720, realizing that is just gong really slowly on your machine, and down-stepping to 640×480. If you use the command-line options you can override this (or, soon, if you set the to-be-added resolution options in the Settings menu).
supersheep: What kind of graphics chip do you have?
Braid is just written in C++ with Direct3D.
Martin: The game’s natural resolution is 1280×720. At anything lower than that, it’s going to look somewhat grainy. Part of what you are seeing is likely your monitor rescaling the game (LCDs are not so great at high-quality rescaling), and part is the game rendering at a lower resolution.
The degraded quality is unfortunate but people seem to prefer being able to run the game at lower visual quality than not being able to run it at all (or running it too slowly).
This version still crashes for me as soon as I run it.
My computer specs are:
Windows XP SP 3
AMD Athlon XP 2800+
1 GB RAM
Ati Radeon 9600XT.
My graphics chip is “SiS Mirage Graphics”.
My computer specs are:
Windows XP
Intel Celeron CPU
988 MB RAM
supersheep: Hmm, this is a tough one. I am not sure what the graphical capabilities of the Mirage Graphics chip are. If you press Escape, do you see anything, or is the screen still black?
Emiliano:
If you get flashing like this, it is likely that you are running some program that keeps trying to pop up notifications in the foreground. A future version of Braid may fix the black flashing, but you still may want to turn that program off since no matter what it would result in degraded performance (hitches during gameplay, for example).
Oblio: I did do a testing sweep with a professional testing firm, but none of these problems came up. Such are the perils of developing on the PC: there are always more problems than you could catch before release.
Anyway, still working on this stuff!
Jonathan, so how did you made the x360 version?? I thought it only accepted C#. Or did you make 2 versions of the game?
Here’s my experience with braid_test_1011 (I’m on Vista 64, Q6700, 4GB, 260GTX with a 1920×1080 HDTV display).
This version seems to fix most issues: Braid now correctly selects 1280×720 and there is no tearing visible! (before, the game would run on 1280×800 with black borders everywhere and there was this tearing issue).
When I now add “-width 1920 -height 1080” to the command line, the game correctly uses the new resolution, however the animation is more jerky and the tearing is back 🙁
When I also add “-no_vsync_test”, the Game runs flawlessly in 1920×1080 super smooth without any hickups or tearing! Maybe the automatic vsync test needs some further work 🙂
Most games for the Xbox 360 are written in C++. XNA Community Games, which you are maybe thinking of, have to be C#. But Braid wasn’t an XNA Community Game.
Big B…. It’s weird, because the vsync test is supposed to be completely turned off now, but obviously it’s not, because a few people are having problems. Looking at that now.
Whoops, apparently I just didn’t disable it correctly. I will post a new test build tonight that has that fixed.
Robin, to get another joystick than the Xbox360 controller to work, you could try the XBOX360 Controller Emulator v3.0 by Racer_S
http://www.tocaedit.com/IB/index.php?automodule=downloads&showfile=4.
This allows you to map any existing joystick axis to a virtual xbox 360 controller. (I haven’t tried it myself, but this looks really good!)
Hi, if i use -no_vsync the screen don’t flashing black.
I havent any other program running with Braid.
Additionally with or no the -no_vsync option in the screen when make the puzzle, the hand move alone in left down direction.
Thanks and bye
I have an ATI Radeon 9200 on my XP laptop running DirectX 9.0c. I thought I’d be able to run the demo, but I guess Pixel Shaders 2.0, though part of this DirectX version, won’t run on my laptop. That’s too bad. If you can figure out a way to make this work without that, I’d love to play.
Odd. This build crashes on start up for me: braid.exe has encountered a problem … etc.
-windowed doesn’t help.
-no_post doesn’t help.
-width and -height aren’t helping.
The current version runs fine without any command line alterations.
1280×1024 LCD
nVidia 6200
Athlon XP 2800+
Windows XP 32bit
(And yes, it was a clean install this time. :P)
Jonathan, please include the -width and -height command-line options in future versions of the full game. Even if you make an interface in the settings menu to control resolution, they will be useful. In my case, I cannot play the game at fullscreen on my TV, because it sets a resolution that the TV doesn’t support, so I can hear the game but get a blank screen. Not the game’s fault: Windows lets me set desktop resolutions that the TV doesn’t support. Don’t know if I should blame the TV or the graphics card drivers. 🙂
It’s great!
But now on my 1280×1024 19″ display it runs at 1280×720 by default. I know, I can fix it with command line, but it would be great if the game will detect max resolution available at my display. I think it’s better to play with black bars but see the correct image, than having a 16:9 game stretched to 5:4 monitor.
Perhaps some launcher application will also help others to fix their problems… You know, just to set up desired resolution and windowed mode.
Thank you anyway!
Yeah, somehow this test version seemed to break on the Athlon XP again. I will follow up via email…
When I press Escape the screen is still black, but as I said I can hear the sound of it (I can also hear the music at the beginning and Tim walking/jumping).
Hello,
thanks for the marvellous game!
I have an old laptop with an ATI Mobility Radeon 9200 built in, running WinXP. In the beginning I experienced the Pixel Shader problem – so I tried “Omega Drivers”. Now I experience the “TODO-Error” which will not go away (also in the new version).
Any ideas what to do?
Ciao,
G
Merc, most displays have an option to scale non native resolutions with a fixed aspect ratio. You could try to enable that on your monitor (or see if your graphic card driver supports this). This should allow you to see the 1280×720 correctly on your display.
@Big B
I went ahead and tested this emulator thing you linked to with my “Dual Action” Logitech Gamepad (ps2 style) and it worked perfectly! Much better than running it’s Logitech Profiler or Joy2Key before I play. I didn’t need to configure it and each button corresponded identically to it’s 360 gamepad counterpart. Just copied all the files in the zip to the root directory and ran Braid.
So this version still crashes on start, but this time not immediately, screen goes black, then game terminates. I have Athlon XP 2700+, 1 GB RAM, GF 6600 and Win XP SP3
Yeah, I think I re-introduced something that breaks on the Athlon XP. I’m not sure what yet. We’ll see if it’s fixed in the next version.
While I haven’t had any issues with Braid (apart from the sometimes head-bangingly frustrating (although at the same time brilliantly clever) stars in the game), I’m very much admiring how much you listen to the feedback and get these fixes out just a few days after release. It’s amazing how many advantages being a single developer has:
1. Bugs can be fixed quickly.
2. Games can be the best ever.
Umm… that’s from the top of my head.
I hope you don’t get caught up in too much bug-fixing and making Braid backwards compatible. The potential your ideas mustn’t be held back by such worldly trivialities! Keep making great games and thinking about them!
I have to wonder if all this bother to release on the PC is worth it. Not trying to be an ass, I’m really wondering it!
It is kind of a pain. It’s a lot more support work, for many fewer actual people buying the game. Meanwhile 9x as many people as bought the game are downloading it from torrent sites. (On the plus side, a lot of torrenters really like the game too! So the game actually has a reasonably big audience. It’s just… y’know…)
The thing about the PC, though, is that it’s a more-free and open platform than the 360, which is important in some ways. What if someone wants to play Braid 20 years from now? They probably aren’t going to be able to download it from XBLA.
Well, I certainly appreciate the effort.
Tried the new build on the laptop. Runs great.
Only problems so far are that the black bars, when arranging the puzzle pieces, are all corrupted and the “screen size” setting is slightly broken on lower resolutions (seems to move the centre of the image to the bottom left of the screen).
Hey Jonathan,
The only problem I’ve had with Braid was the Vsync issue, which you promptly addressed. I just wanted to say how impressed I am by the support you’re giving the game. Any game, especially a PC game, is inevitably going to have issues on release, and Braid is no exception. Had Braid come out of a big publisher though, the best we might have seen these past few days was a press release saying “We’re looking into the issues reported by a small percentage of users.” and possibly a patch a few months down the line.
You on the other hand have reacted immediately to any reported problems and are obviously working diligently to fix them in a reasonable timeframe (Read: Days, not months), and I just had to commend you for it.
Thanks for a wonderful game, and thanks for all the love and effort you continue to put into it!
– Jeff K.
Well, I for one LOVE owning a PC version of the game. My TV isn’t super-hi-res, so it’s great to be able to see all the details of each level.
I have a problem, however: I installed the demo version to help test the game and lo! if it didn’t completely screw my game up. I installed it in a different directory to my Full game, but unfortunately they’ve both become messed up.
I’ve uninstalled the demo, but now I’ve lost all my jigsaw pieces and, most importantly, *****s. It’s pretty annoying 🙁 Please tell me there’s some way to retrieve my save game (wherever the hell it’s installed!).
Thank you… although I have a feeling they’re lost for good 🙁
I also wanted to let you know that release 2, and this new demo version, did NOT solve my VSync issues (although putting -no_sync_test in the command box still fixes it nicely). As I’ve said before, I’m running Vista x86 Home Premium with an 8800GTS. An E6600 CoreDuo and 4GB of RAM.
Also, more importantly (to me) pressing Print Screen does not produce any images 🙁 I have given Braid admin access and installed it on a different HD to the OS. It will quite happily auto-fill a directory called “Shots” when I click Snapshot in the editor, though… it just won’t take a screen grab.
Anyways, sorry to burden your already overflowing inbox! Great job on the PC version!
Ah, historical preservation. That’s a really good point, especially for a game like Braid. Press on sir, press on.
I bought the game off steam and could not play at all unless I used -windowed as a launch option. This fix seems to have done the trick. Thanks for that 🙂
Now I just need to figure out how to get it back to full version!
The Steam version should automatically update pretty soon… I’d recommend not trying to fuss with it.
I have been excited about the game for months.
I tried it from Greenhouse, Steam and the one that starts with an “I”.
I keep getting the message:
Pixel Shader Insufficient:
My graphics . . need higher than 2.0.
I have windows xp
i have installed explorer 7 and DX9
in an attempt to fix it.
I have typed in “-windowed”
my card is radeon 9000
please help me.
Hello, Jonathan
I got the same problem than supersheep.
The game runs indeed, but there is no image on braid window, just a black screen. However, i can hear the music and if I click some buttons (esc, enter, space) something sounds there.
I’m running the game in WinXP SP3, with a Pentium 4 2.40Ghz. Graphics come from a Nvidia GeForce4 MX4000
Some idea why this could be happening?
PlooS
Unfortunately the GeForce4 MX series is not as high-end as the name implies. It is, basically, a GeForce 2; a lot of game developers got mad at Nvidia for them calling it a GeForce 4. It just doesn’t have the pixel shader support that Braid needs in order to run. If you are running an updated version of the download, it is supposed to detect this and tell you the reason why it can’t render. However, some graphics cards lie about what they support, and there is nothing the game can really do about that…