MiniFAQ: Win7 Issues - Solutions to GFWL profiles, poor framerate, etc

[genmos]

thought I would post my findings after an unreasonable amount of time wasted just to get this game running ship shape in windows 7, the 2 most common problems posted all over the internets over and over again with no definitive answers, and no faq entries or pinned stickies here have simple solutions really. all sorts of rain dances and fudging around with gfwl updates, PCCompat.xml, softwall/av, game configs, etc have been posted here and there, but these were the only necessary steps afaik.

a solution posted on the microsoft help site has you deleting oem system files if you can believe it (browse this amusing thread), which of course has nothing to do with anything here besides obfuscating the fact that gfwl in win7 is not backwards compatible with previoius versions of gfwl drm, as proven in other games that use this as well. the game is not even 5 years old, was not expecting this much trouble at all but it definitely is possible to get running properly. will update with any other problems I come across.



Generating local profile(s) and saving the game:

this gfwl drm is incompatible with win7, so no amount of updating to the client will fix this. luckily there is a workaround here with app compatibility settings for executables in windows, from within your game install folder.

Solution: right click to properties for 'viva pinata.exe', under compatibility tab set to any version of windows vista.

then run the game and create your profile, and update gfwl if necessary to get connected for achievements and such. vista compat is only needed on first run to get your gfwl profile associated with the game, after this you can go back and uncheck compat mode, and it should load/save your profile as normal.

Profile login fails after updating GFWL:

Microsoft in their neverending parade of incompetence and ongoing PC gaming sabotage campaign, has decided to link local windows accounts to online windows live IDs in their latest iteration of the GFWL marketplace, what this means is

a. you can no longer generate any local profiles offline
b. you can no longer use any profiles not associated with the assigned windows login
c. you can no longer access any of your old profiles without the Windows Live ID sign-in Assistant (which they have not packaged with their new redistributables, to make updating as complex and inconvenient as possible)

Solution: update your gfwl install in this order -

1. xlive redistributable
http://download.gfwl.xboxlive.com/co...liveredist.msi

2. gfwl client
http://download.gfwl.xboxlive.com/co...gfwlclient.msi

3. live id sign-in assistant (make sure to download the proper 32/64 bit version)
http://www.microsoft.com/download/en...ng=en&id=15106

*important: the windows automatic update service must be enabled and started for this install to work, even though it does not get updated by anything in the process, you can disable this after

forum sticky needs updating I think, it just just links to the marketplace landing page. good luck finding all these packages and instructions from there.

Crashing, hanging, poor framerates on adequate hardware:

this game is incompatible with the themed window manager in win7. in my experience, performance would consistently degrade from being smoothly capped at the limit of 60 fps, to single digit frames within a few minutes or so of game time without question, making it completely unplayable regardless of video or resolution settings. modern multicore cpus like intel core/sandy bridge should be having no problem with this, no matter how many cores it's using, so obviously something is wrong.

Solution: under the same compatibility tab as above, check 'Disable visual themes' and 'Disable desktop composition'.

your skins and windows themes will be disabled while the game is running, and revert back to normal as soon as you exit the app. but now performance should be stable, this will also fix the game freezing up on start/exit, and most likely failing to detect proper default resolution and settings, other common issues that have been posted about. interesting since it's not even capable of running in windowed mode, but there's your problem.

Antialiasing with Nvidia:

for those with extra gpu headroom for graphics, antialiasing is a bit tricky in this game as well due to non-standard rendering ported over from the x360:

- using nvidia inspector or somesuch, set aa compat bits to 0x00411245
- aa mode 'override any application setting'
- shadow quality must be set to normal or lower, aa does not work with max shadows
- latest nvidia drivers should already include an existing sli profile if needed
- no hit to performance at all on gtx560ti with 8xQ multisampling, but even 2-4x is a huge improvement, haven't tried anything like ss/fxaa yet

[shrly]

Gee, this sounds really simple. Thanks for posting. I wish I'd had this before I tried to finish the game in Windows 7. I don't remember, now, what I did to make it work. I assure you I didn't go into any system files. I NEVER play around with those since I don't have the knowledge and don't like blindly playing with files.

Thanks again.