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

 

[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.

 

[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.

 

[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?

 

[UnnDunn]

Is this the monthly "complain about UWP" thread? Which will of course dovetail into the inevitable "complain about Windows 10" thread?

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

You know the old saying, if everyone you run into can't use the windows store, you're the asshole?

Call me whatever you want, I can still download and run FH4 on my PC with no problems.

 

[UnnDunn]

Many people run low level programs all the time, for programming, debugging, content creation, and yes, recreation. Windows Store and UWP app developers need to accommodate users, not the other way around.

Why? Because they complain?

Microsoft isn't going to bend over backwards to satisfy a handful of loudmouths complaining that they can't run whatever BS overlay tool they're using.

 

[UnnDunn]

Many people run low level programs all the time, for programming, debugging, content creation, and yes, recreation. Windows Store and UWP app developers need to accommodate users, not the other way around.

Why? Because they complain?

Microsoft isn't going to bend over backwards to satisfy a handful of loudmouths complaining that they can't run whatever BS overlay tool they're using.

Because users are the customer and not the product?

Even Microsoft and Turn10 understand this - that's why they tried to fix Sam's problem instead of telling him to get lost.

I'm saying that Microsoft could have saved themselves and their affiliated developers a lot of trouble if they had made UWP more robust and less obtuse.

In my experience, not a single Steam game I've played has ever complained or crashed because I was using Afterburner (I'm not saying they don't crash for other reasons, software is complex. But I've never had to disable Afterburner to get my games to run...yet).

Microsoft used to have this attitude, modifying Windows in myriad different ways to satisfy the whims of minority interests and maintain compatibility with badly-written legacy software like Afterburner.

It lead to Windows being unwieldy to maintain and keep secure. So now, Microsoft spends a lot less effort catering to idiots who write low-level software that does stupid things, especially with regard to hooking into UWP.

If you're running such software, don't expect Microsoft to be willing or able to help you.

 

[UnnDunn]

My problem with articles like this are they are anecdotal, so this person has a hard time with UWP games, but I didn't see the research or evidence to back up this is a widespread problem for a lot of people. I play multiple UWP games including Forza Horizons 4 on my PC and have never had any problems.

So yet again, we get another opinion piece, which I personally think are garbage by their nature.

You aren't allowed to say that here. UWP is the devil. Do as you're told and accept it.