My confusing, 10-day journey to getting a UWP game to work on Windows 10

Four games, 15 months, Windows 10, and a zoo of confusing crashes later...

Read the whole story

 

[Stuka87]

Took me ages just to get the Demo to download. Then once I got it, it had some massive memory leak that would consume every byte of system and video memory within 30 seconds (16GB of system, RX480 Nitro+ GPU). Which would then make it unplayable.

So, I uninstalled it and will just move on.

 

[killerhurtalot]

Aside from a download error on gears 4 that made me to redownload 50 GB of data, I had zero issues with UWP games...

I've played GoW4, Forza motorsport 6, 7, Horizon 3, 4, Recore (besides the existing bugs in the game itself that existed on both console and PC version), phantom dust and cuphead with absolute zero issues......

Now that HDR is fixed, Forza Horizon 4 runs damn well on my B7A Oled TV.

On a 6 year old PC (with a gtx 1070) with Windows 10 home...

Edit:Using a old version of Evga precision x OC software though.

I've gotten rid of most of the useless crap from years ago (like rivatuner from when I had a gtx 670) since they run in the background and sometimes screws shit up...

 

[CobraA2]

Afterburner comes bundled with Rivatuner Statistics Server, which hooks executables for its on screen display, which is notorious for crashing all kinds of games, not just UWP games.

 

[orangpelupa]

btw, the constant suggestions by the official Microsoft reps to “just redownload the (multi-gigabyte) software and try it again”, causing untold amounts of worthless data usage, are both idiotic and insulting.

Sure, no problem, it’s not like i have capped internet or anything

Or you know, those of us with stuck with rural DSL where re-downloading 15gb+ could take nearly half a day... Downloading that also sucks up the bandwidth for the entire house so no streaming netflix or watching videos during that time. I haven't purchased a UWP game because I can't simply download it from work where we have fiber and transfer it to my home computer like I can with ANY other platform. Transferring a game from one computer to the next is simply a requirement for me.

Yep this is super annoying. The system-level "torrent" that allows windows update to be shared to another PC on the same network also doesn't work for UWP games. Uhu ugh

Heck, even ps4 allows you to download from other sites ps4 and copy the game. If you comfortable with local proxy, ps4 also allow you to download the game manually to a phone, pc, whatever and then manually pushed to ps4.

 

[Legatum_of_Kain]

I only have two games on UWP that I have not touched recently. I might have to give them a try either now or when the next windows 10 version comes out just to see.


That being said, I was angered because after the exclusive UWP store games, they got released on Steam later on, after a year or two.


I'd much rather purchase them in GoG... but I'm loving more and more DRM free games the more time passes.

 

[GrumpyOctopus]

This entire escapade sounds eerily similar to my own ill-advised adventures with getting cracked game executables running under an old version of Wine. I haven't done any recently, but I did once have quite the collection. The Elder Scrolls series up to Oblivion, the Mass Effect trilogy, Fallout 1-3, and a handful of others, all running under Linux with varying degrees of success and shader glitches. It's a delicate game of config file hacks and dark magic gleaned from obscure forum posts.

Now, I mostly just run Steam. As fun as it was, I ain't got time for these kinds of shenanigans anymore. Honestly, I'm astonished that a modern, paid product like this has glitches on par with my jury-rigged Linux nonsense.

 

[fabarati]

So yeah. I had the same issue. It's not afterburner, it's Rivatuner Statistics Server. It doesn't need to be off, it just needs to not run when the game is launching.

But (and now I'm gonna sound like a douche, and I'm gonna take that hit, because this is kind of douchey of me) I also said in the comments of the review. Even detailed how to get around it.

 

[Mungus the Unhyphenated]

I keep thinking that Microsoft has a vision of making UWP games a sort of "software XBox". Closed, store-based, console-like environment.

Up until a year or two ago, that might have made sense. XBox hardware isn't a profit-maker; why not push standards for any desktop or laptop PC to be an XBox too, and prop up sales of PCs and Windows...

But PC gaming looks to have pulled out of the slump that had the doomsayers sounding the alarm. At this point, XBox-PC integration seems increasingly pointless. Consoles and PCs both have their respective places and market share. Cross-platform play and keyboard/mouse support coming to XBox solidifies that. Gamers can buy into whichever platform fits best.

Mostly, UWP for gaining will mainly satisfy publishers who want the licensing lock-in of a walled garden. It can be made more consumer-friendly if they can make it more reliable, but that's beside the point. Its primarily publisher- and licensing-friendly.

Big-name publishers would rather all games ran in a console-style walled garden, and UWP games will continue to be an outlet for that. Microsoft will promote it just to keep Windows relevant to those publishers, in spite of Win32 gaming not going away any time soon.

I'd rather see Microsoft offer Win32 versions; there's no reason not to in today's market -- except that there are publishers who want anything BUT that. So PC gaming gets dragged into the walled garden of console gaming, like it or not.

 

[adr_]

Anyways, in a day when 16GB of memory is becoming the standard, companies can afford to put a bit more explanation into their error messages.

Or maybe an API that says "hey, if I exit with an error code, you should open this file I'm telling you about right now and print the associated error message from that file." That takes all of 10-20KB of ram. I'd expect it to take around 600 bytes, but hey, a fresh .net WPF project in vs2017 uses 90+ MB to open a blank window.

 

[grommit!]

Frankly, I don't know what you all are doing to your PCs to make the Windows Store so unreliable.

"Works for me" is never a good argument given the diversity of the PC ecosystem. With UWP, Microsoft had the opportunity to build a more reliable and robust platform from scratch. Yet people are still having all sorts of issues with it. At this point, the chances I'll be buying a UWP game are about as good as me buying a GFWL one.

"Doesn't work for me" is just as bad.

To be clear, I have had problems installing things from the Windows Store before. They were all solved by running wsreset.exe. But the benefits have far outweighed the issues. Having a single software repository that remembers what I purchase, downloads things in a single click, keeps everything up to date automatically, uninstalls everything cleanly, built directly into the OS is absolutely beneficial.

The point isn't whether it works for you or not. It's that Microsoft had the chance to apply the lessons learned from their own (and others) experience to produce something more reliable and easier to troubleshoot than the competition. Instead, it appears they did the opposite.

 

[Pierre B.]

Afterburner comes bundled with Rivatuner Statistics Server, which hooks executables for its on screen display, which is notorious for crashing all kinds of games, not just UWP games.

Exactly. This may well be another case of Microsoft getting a bad rep due to the crappiness of other vendors.

Obviously, from the fact that the UWP game worked with afterburner disabled during launch, UWP must protect against virus and cheaters by refusing to be hooked by other apps. Given this, the lack of feedback is mostly understandable: you don't want to help them.

It used to be that Windows would crash due to bad drivers and software calling undocumented API or calling documented API wrong but lucking into not causing ill harm until an OS patch made it not work anymore. Windows had a bad rep due to all the shoddy softwares people ran.

Still, not getting crash dumps for UWP truly hinders diagnostics.

 

[killerhurtalot]

Frankly, I don't know what you all are doing to your PCs to make the Windows Store so unreliable.

"Works for me" is never a good argument given the diversity of the PC ecosystem. With UWP, Microsoft had the opportunity to build a more reliable and robust platform from scratch. Yet people are still having all sorts of issues with it. At this point, the chances I'll be buying a UWP game are about as good as me buying a GFWL one.

"Doesn't work for me" is just as bad.

To be clear, I have had problems installing things from the Windows Store before. They were all solved by running wsreset.exe. But the benefits have far outweighed the issues. Having a single software repository that remembers what I purchase, downloads things in a single click, keeps everything up to date automatically, uninstalls everything cleanly, built directly into the OS is absolutely beneficial.

The point isn't whether it works for you or not. It's that Microsoft had the chance to apply the lessons learned from their own (and others) experience to produce something more reliable and easier to troubleshoot than the competition. Instead, it appears they did the opposite.

Except in this case, the crash was caused by a 3rd party application that's been shown to crash numerous other games as well.

TLDR: Get rid of your software that tries to hook executables to monitor performance. It causes issues with more than just UWP apps.

 

[xrmb]

Oh my god, I can't wait to get home and disable afterburner... I bought FH3 and was never able to play it, and of course you can't return digital downloads.

I spent days searching the internet... afterburner was not mentioned once. But it would explain why a clean windows installed worked... until i reinstalled all my software and latest drivers.

 

[Voldenuit]

Actually, one would have to commend Microsoft for providing a consistently bad experience each and every time they tried to do something with PC gaming since the Xbox. Too bad DirectX updates are so uneventful!

Remember DirectXes 3 through 6? Those were pretty painful. From breaking compatibility with games, peripherals, sound cards, to failing to install, and failing to fail to install gracefully, they were a nightmare.

Back on topic, I have avoided UWP games since the lack of delta patches on Gigantic cost me hundreds of gigabytes of data, as the game continued to try to re-download and re-install itself. And the fix provided was a wsreset scenario, iirc, which prompted yet more downloads.

I'm not going to say Steam has the best implementation on data use; to my surprise, it was Battle.Net, which found my Overwatch, HOTS and Destiny files on a separate drive after reinstalling my OS, and automatically reintegrating them into the launcher.

But Steam is still much better than UWP for games. At the risk of repeating myself, my experiences with UWP have been so bad that I now avoid all UWP games, even games I had been previously interested in. If I see a game is on the Windows Store, that's the kiss of death as far as my dollars are concerned.

 

[grommit!]

Frankly, I don't know what you all are doing to your PCs to make the Windows Store so unreliable.

"Works for me" is never a good argument given the diversity of the PC ecosystem. With UWP, Microsoft had the opportunity to build a more reliable and robust platform from scratch. Yet people are still having all sorts of issues with it. At this point, the chances I'll be buying a UWP game are about as good as me buying a GFWL one.

"Doesn't work for me" is just as bad.

To be clear, I have had problems installing things from the Windows Store before. They were all solved by running wsreset.exe. But the benefits have far outweighed the issues. Having a single software repository that remembers what I purchase, downloads things in a single click, keeps everything up to date automatically, uninstalls everything cleanly, built directly into the OS is absolutely beneficial.

The point isn't whether it works for you or not. It's that Microsoft had the chance to apply the lessons learned from their own (and others) experience to produce something more reliable and easier to troubleshoot than the competition. Instead, it appears they did the opposite.

Except in this case, the crash was caused by a 3rd party application that's been shown to crash numerous other games as well.

TLDR: Get rid of your software that tries to hook executables to monitor performance. It causes issues with more than just UWP apps.

How is a normal user supposed to discover this? From the article:

When standard Windows executables fail to turn over but don't crash as a result of, say, a power surge or other hardware-specific failure, error codes and crash notices are common—and they're often easily exposed by crash logs. UWP apps keep that kind of information under wraps

The point here is that Microsoft chose to obscure any sort of error reporting, making troubleshooting far more difficult.

 

[Furz]

One of my coworkers had this same problem. When FH3 came out, he got it on PC and I got it on the xbone. We were able to play it together twice, then his copy stopped launching. He tried every fix we could find (we both work for an IT company) and reinstalled Windows twice before giving up and buying an xbone. I haven't tried installing any of the play anywhere games I have on my PC because I was afraid it would result in a broken mess.

I agree with Lee that UWP is awful and needs to go away.

 

[UnnDunn]

Frankly, I don't know what you all are doing to your PCs to make the Windows Store so unreliable.

"Works for me" is never a good argument given the diversity of the PC ecosystem. With UWP, Microsoft had the opportunity to build a more reliable and robust platform from scratch. Yet people are still having all sorts of issues with it. At this point, the chances I'll be buying a UWP game are about as good as me buying a GFWL one.

"Doesn't work for me" is just as bad.

To be clear, I have had problems installing things from the Windows Store before. They were all solved by running wsreset.exe. But the benefits have far outweighed the issues. Having a single software repository that remembers what I purchase, downloads things in a single click, keeps everything up to date automatically, uninstalls everything cleanly, built directly into the OS is absolutely beneficial.

The point isn't whether it works for you or not. It's that Microsoft had the chance to apply the lessons learned from their own (and others) experience to produce something more reliable and easier to troubleshoot than the competition. Instead, it appears they did the opposite.

Except in this case, the crash was caused by a 3rd party application that's been shown to crash numerous other games as well.

TLDR: Get rid of your software that tries to hook executables to monitor performance. It causes issues with more than just UWP apps.

How is a normal user supposed to discover this? From the article:

When standard Windows executables fail to turn over but don't crash as a result of, say, a power surge or other hardware-specific failure, error codes and crash notices are common—and they're often easily exposed by crash logs. UWP apps keep that kind of information under wraps

The point here is that Microsoft chose to obscure any sort of error reporting, making troubleshooting far more difficult.

A normal user wouldn't be running things like Afterburner in the first place.

 

[jnemesh]

This story just reinforces my bias against MS as a publisher and against their pathetic Windows Store and UWP in general. I will NEVER buy an app that requires this heavy handed BS! I don't care what the title is. If it requires UWP, it's not going on my system. PERIOD. MS can get with the program and distribute on Steam like just about every other publisher, or they can kick rocks and watch their game sales dwindle.

 

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

I'm not sure how Microsoft has botched the concept of an app store so badly. I've never had issues like this with any of the competing app stores (including the macOS one, so it's not like the fact that it's a desktop operating system necessitates these kinds of issues).

I'm not saying the Mac App Store is a paragon of usability, but it does work. And you know what else it lets you do? Find apps in Finder and treat them just like any other files.

I think Microsoft over-engineered the hell out of this and needs to go back to the drawing board.

I'm not a subject matter expert(thankfully the tastes of my employer lean more in the direction of 'please de-consumerize Win10 so we can deploy it'); but my understanding is that the Microsoft app store labors under the disadvantage of using much of the same(notoriously clear, understandable, and robust...) components that Windows Update uses (this is why a lot of the cryptic error codes for 'Store' install and update failures overlap with the ones from Windows Update hell); but layer on the Store's own behavior; which combines mediocrity with not-terribly-useful ambition ('Universal Windows Platform' may be a noble dream; but it also means that the store will merrily inform you that your problem is that that app can't be moved to the SD card, behavior I assume makes sense on phones, despite the fact that you are testing on a PC whose only mass storage is a single SATA device. This specific case came up repeatedly during some testing).

I can see the logic of doing it this way; if you adopt the theory(as I assume Microsoft does) that the Windows update/BITS-and-friends transfer mechanism; and Windows servicing stack if that becomes relevant, are the platform-native standard tools to use rather than rolling your own.

It's just that that theory is...somewhat tenuously connected to fact. It's better than it used to be; but Windows update is frankly wobbly and having an attempted replacement for win32, a bunch of new servicing processes(whatever wsappx is up to, the Windows Store background task, the whole 'provisioned' vs. 'installed' thing(which means that a single errant store app in a single profile can break sysprep; cool move there guys) , hooks for both consumer Microsoft and enterprise accounts(at least AAD or federated AD) added on doesn't exactly add up to cause for optimism.

By contrast, the various 3rd party storefronts are architecturally displeasing in the number of random bits and pieces they add on(Steam has how many helper processes now?) rather than depending on platform capabilities; but that also means that they don't depend on platform capabilities; which can be a plus if those are not dependable.

 

[bthylafh]

Anyways, in a day when 16GB of memory is becoming the standard, companies can afford to put a bit more explanation into their error messages.

Or maybe an API that says "hey, if I exit with an error code, you should open this file I'm telling you about right now and print the associated error message from that file." That takes all of 10-20KB of ram. I'd expect it to take around 600 bytes, but hey, a fresh .net WPF project in vs2017 uses 90+ MB to open a blank window.

Instead of, say, opening a Bing search for "how to get help with Windows 10" as Windows 10 did quite frequently indeed in older versions.

 

[grommit!]

The point here is that Microsoft chose to obscure any sort of error reporting, making troubleshooting far more difficult.

A normal user wouldn't be running things like Afterburner in the first place.

LOL, that might be reasonable if it wasn't included on the driver CD provided by the card manufacturer.

The point still stands - Microsoft chose to make troubleshooting more difficult than it had to be.

 

[XSportSeeker]

Kudos for trying Sam, but UWP is basically the same shit platform it has always been, with the very same problems, inherited from at least the Windows Phone days.
I had just about enough of it during the time I owned a Lumia 1020. It's just not worth persisting.
Why Microsoft keeps doubling down on this shit is just something like a disease for some sector or some division there apparently. It'll go until some untimely death just like Windows Phones, and Microsoft finds something else for the people working on it to focus their attention.
It's kinda like Sony mobile division. They have been failing the international market spectacularly for years and years now, it's the worst performing Sony division, and they keep churning out all these mismatched phones with high prices. Yet, Sony won't overhaul the division. It's just there. No one knows why.
It's not that they are particularly horrible, but it's freaking Sony and they are freaking expensive, those phones should be competing with the best Samsung and Google phones at the very least.

Got off a tangent there. UWP will never work. It has had too much time to mature already, yet it still has the exact same problems it had when it was released. It's been what? Over a decade now? And it should be more than clear for Microsoft that this is a failed product and a failed attempt to make a mobile OS like store. It won't catch on. They have the statistics to prove it. I bet the vast majority of people who were forced to take Windows 10S with their devices upgraded to 10 Pro. I bet the absolute vast majority of Windows 10 users never even touched the Windows Store. And I know for a fact that most UWP apps are always versions behind in updates when not outright abandoned in comparison to regular software or even Android/iOS counterparts because this is one thing that has never changed. Microsoft can sometimes bump up development for their own UWP apps, but for all other developers outside Microsoft UWP is the lowest priority if it's even there on their list.

And I keep thinking how much better things could have gone if Microsoft cut development of stuff like Windows Phone and Windows Store early, got back to the drawing board, and started over again, instead of persisting in an obviously failed strategy. Same thing for Sony Xperia. It would've cost the companies a whole lot of money to scrap everything like that, but at least they'd have some chances of changing staff and making it work somehow. The way they are now is just kinda sad.

 

[Don Reba]

Oh my god, I can't wait to get home and disable afterburner... I bought FH3 and was never able to play it, and of course you can't return digital downloads.

You can in just about any other game store.

 

[BradTheGeek]

I work in a small IT shop, and game. Blessedly I have not been exposed to UWP games yet.

However, my own experience with UWP shows it to be half-assed garbage. Some highlights:

-Early builds of Win10 would have the whole UWB subsystem break, no UWP apps would run. This seems to be better in more recent builds.

-Installing UWP apps often fails with no real clue as to the cause.

-UWP seems poorly understood and documented, folder paths are difficult at best when digging for clues, and the powershell commands require a level of arcane knowledge few have.

-And the icing on the cake? Per an ARS article yesterday MS is not focusing on the UWP version of Office. But, it comes preinstalled in Win10 now. If you activate and use it, then decide to switch to the non-UWP version, you lose all sorts of stuff as the non-UWP installer does not know anything about the UWP version (except to remove it) You lose things like:
--Add-ins
--Recent file lists
--custom settings and toolbars/ribbons
--Outlook PSTs, stream autocmpletes, etc.

That last one is a doozie, as people tend to freak out when they lose emails and contacts.

It seems as if it is a poorly finished beta project, intended to create a walled garden as exists on Apple and Play store, but it works like shit and support is nearly non-existent. Even the MS Office team is shying away from it .

Great job MS!

 

[Voldenuit]

The point here is that Microsoft chose to obscure any sort of error reporting, making troubleshooting far more difficult.

A normal user wouldn't be running things like Afterburner in the first place.

LOL, that might be reasonable if it wasn't included on the driver CD provided by the card manufacturer.

The point still stands - Microsoft chose to make troubleshooting more difficult than it had to be.

Me: "Everyone should be using Afterburner."

People: "But what about UWP games that it breaks?"

Me: "Well, nobody should be using UWP games."

 

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Actually, one would have to commend Microsoft for providing a consistently bad experience each and every time they tried to do something with PC gaming since the Xbox. Too bad DirectX updates are so uneventful!

I'm not going to say Steam has the best implementation on data use; to my surprise, it was Battle.Net, which found my Overwatch, HOTS and Destiny files on a separate drive after reinstalling my OS, and automatically reintegrating them into the launcher.

I've found Steam's actual tool, allegedly provided for the purpose, for backing up and restoring some or all of your locally installed stuff to be utter rubbish; but if you just manually copy a game's folder out of its location (steamapps\common\, I think?) and then copy it back to the location on another system or a fresh install, Steam will accept it without complaint(assuming the same account is used, haven't tested between two accounts that both have the game; and assume it wouldn't work if the recipient account doesn't have the game).

Sometimes it just works; worst case you tell Steam to verify local content and it grovels through and possibly downloads a few odds and ends if something has changed since the backup was made. Not something I'd do for fun; but works well enough to allow reinstalls and migrations without hammering the WAN forever.

(edit: also handy if you have some games with a bunch of mods located somewhere in their directory: even if you have unlimited WAN to play with a fresh install from Steam won't restore any mods unless they were obtained via steam; unhelpful for, not at all hypothetically, the lovingly curated collection of NexusDB stuff that any TES or Bethesda-Fallout install usually has.

Steam's verification will presumably clobber anything implemented by direct tinkering with or replacing game files, since that's indistinguishable from corruption to an integrity check; but it takes no action against files and folders in the game directory that aren't on the manifest of what makes up the game; so mods and the like are preserved. That's sometimes even more valuable than the bandwidth savings)

 

[UnnDunn]

The point here is that Microsoft chose to obscure any sort of error reporting, making troubleshooting far more difficult.

A normal user wouldn't be running things like Afterburner in the first place.

LOL, that might be reasonable if it wasn't included on the driver CD provided by the card manufacturer.

The point still stands - Microsoft chose to make troubleshooting more difficult than it had to be.

Manufacturers still ship driver CDs? What is this, 2008?

 

[bthylafh]

This sounds very much like how the bundled Metro apps were in early versions of Windows 10. They'd stop working for no discernable reason and the only way to make them work (often temporarily) was to do a wipe and reinstall of the operating system. I don't think that stopped being a problem until around 1607.

 

[Voldenuit]

Actually, one would have to commend Microsoft for providing a consistently bad experience each and every time they tried to do something with PC gaming since the Xbox. Too bad DirectX updates are so uneventful!

I'm not going to say Steam has the best implementation on data use; to my surprise, it was Battle.Net, which found my Overwatch, HOTS and Destiny files on a separate drive after reinstalling my OS, and automatically reintegrating them into the launcher.

I've found Steam's actual tool, allegedly provided for the purpose, for backing up and restoring some or all of your locally installed stuff to be utter rubbish; but if you just manually copy a game's folder out of its location (steamapps\common\, I think?) and then copy it back to the location on another system or a fresh install, Steam will accept it without complaint(assuming the same account is used, haven't tested between two accounts that both have the game; and assume it wouldn't work if the recipient account doesn't have the game).

Sometimes it just works; worst case you tell Steam to verify local content and it grovels through and possibly downloads a few odds and ends if something has changed since the backup was made. Not something I'd do for fun; but works well enough to allow reinstalls and migrations without hammering the WAN forever.

This is useful information and relevant to my interests (new build with 1 TB NVMe OS drive and 1 TB SATA SSD on horizon).

 

[ferzerp]

The Afterburner issues are with the application detection level setting with Riva Tuner Statistics Server. This isn't really a UWP issue, as it also occurs on non UWP applications. While I agree that UWP is somewhat lackluster, to blame it for this issue is kind of silly.

 

[grommit!]

The point here is that Microsoft chose to obscure any sort of error reporting, making troubleshooting far more difficult.

A normal user wouldn't be running things like Afterburner in the first place.

LOL, that might be reasonable if it wasn't included on the driver CD provided by the card manufacturer.

The point still stands - Microsoft chose to make troubleshooting more difficult than it had to be.

Manufacturers still ship driver CDs? What is this, 2008?

2017 - Didn't use it myself, but this was included with a GTX 1070.

[edit] I'm also looking to sell the card (Canadians only) in the agora

 

[bthylafh]

The Afterburner issues are with the application detection level setting with Riva Tuner Statistics Server. This isn't really a UWP issue, as it also occurs on non UWP applications. While I agree that UWP is somewhat lackluster, to blame it for this issue is kind of silly.

It would be pretty trivial for the game to check if RTSS is running and then pop up an error message asking to close it.

 

[VulcanTourist]

Who does UWP benefit? It's not you or me that benefits from it; it's Microsoft and developers that climb into bed with that platform. I've been avoiding developing any dependence upon UWP apps, knowing that ultimately I will suffer for it. I simply ignore whatever bubblegum they use to promote it and look for alternatives. If a universal non-enterprise version of Desktop-as-a-Service that demands a lifetime subscription comes into being, then I'll be looking for an alternative to Windows itself.

 

[SuinusLatinus]

Frankly, I don't know what you all are doing to your PCs to make the Windows Store so unreliable.

"Works for me" is never a good argument given the diversity of the PC ecosystem. With UWP, Microsoft had the opportunity to build a more reliable and robust platform from scratch. Yet people are still having all sorts of issues with it. At this point, the chances I'll be buying a UWP game are about as good as me buying a GFWL one.

"Doesn't work for me" is just as bad.

To be clear, I have had problems installing things from the Windows Store before. They were all solved by running wsreset.exe. But the benefits have far outweighed the issues. Having a single software repository that remembers what I purchase, downloads things in a single click, keeps everything up to date automatically, uninstalls everything cleanly , built directly into the OS is absolutely beneficial.

So, like Steam, Battle.net and GOG Galaxy but with lots more crashing and less helpful troubleshooting?


edit: forgot /endbold tag...

 

[siliconaddict]

Eesh. Reading this article reinforces my belief that if it ain't broke, don't fix it. I mean I can appreciate that MS is trying to get a consolidated store but when Steam makes your wares look like junk there is a problem.

 

[chriskrum]

The point here is that Microsoft chose to obscure any sort of error reporting, making troubleshooting far more difficult.

A normal user wouldn't be running things like Afterburner in the first place.

LOL, that might be reasonable if it wasn't included on the driver CD provided by the card manufacturer.

The point still stands - Microsoft chose to make troubleshooting more difficult than it had to be.

Me: "Everyone should be using Afterburner."

People: "But what about UWP games that it breaks?"

Me: "Well, nobody should be using UWP games."

You should edit this to "No one should be using Afterburner." It'll gremlin your system.

Ditto for all the other utility programs developers are wont to bundle (shovel) with their graphic cards, sound cards, streamer cards, cameras, mics, etc. etc. And woe to anyone who ends up with multiples of them on their system.

 

[just6979]

"this access control entry is corrupt"

Something in file system got corrupted... not necessarily UWP's fault, simply exacerbated by it's dependency on Win10/NTFS functionality for the Store's DRM.

That did the trick. With MSI Afterburner disabled, I could get the game to run.

Are you fracking kidding me!!?? Of course you have to turn off extra software, especially graphics overlays, before you complain about something being horribly broken!

 

[just6979]

It would be pretty trivial for the game to check if RTSS is running and then pop up an error message asking to close it.

Not their job. Do they have to add checks for all possible OSD software? What about OSD programs that come out or are updated later?

First thing any smart games/graphics troubleshooter does is turn off any and all OSD software, because it's just not the responsiblity of the game dev to overload their testing matrix with things like that.

 

[Wickwick]

Are you fracking kidding me!!?? Of course you have to turn off extra software, especially graphics overlays, before you complain about something being horribly broken!

Why?

A properly-written software ecosystem doesn't care what's running or not. I don't have to turn off VLC to run Chrome.

If Afterburner (or the statistics package) is doing something it shouldn't and it causing crashes then it shouldn't have access to that functionality.

 

[mmiller7]

@arstechnica staff -- you know I think the only thing more annoying than the ads is your new "subscription" pop-up that inevitably appears as I'm clicking the mouse to view the comments.

I can't count how many times I've accidentally clicked the subscribe thing because it loaded a millisecond before I clicked "read comments"

Sorry for the off-topic rant.