Tales of Zestiria - Doesn't launch with TZFix

Hi all,

Not sure if the correct place for this as it’s not precisely about SpecialK, but thought I would ask.

I’ve had TZFix working for a while. IIRC a while back it stopped working, and there was some GitHub snafu that required changing the upgrade frequency to “never”. Now the game once again doesn’t launch for me, regardless of “never” or not.

If I uninstall TZFix, the game works fine, but of course is only 30 fps.

If I install TZFix (via SKIM), the game no longer launches. TalesOfZestiria.exe shows for a moment in Task Manager with 20k RAM footprint, then quits. No sound effect, no logs are generated in /logs. (Other than the installer.log from when it’s installed.)

My previous save date is Dec 2019, so it was working then – probably something changed between then and now. IIRC I had tried running the game a couple months back and it didn’t work then either, so it’s probably not the new-ish Win 10 “Hardware-accelerated GPU scheduling” (?). I don’t have Reshade or Rivatuner or anything like that, only culprits on that front could be Nvidia Shadowplay etc. and Windows/Xbox Game Bar. I tried disabling both, didn’t seem to fix the issue.

I should mention that I have a laptop in case that’s relevant – previously, I manually added TalesOfZestiria.exe to the Nvidia Control Panel and specified that it should use the Nvidia GPU. Now I added the .exe to the new Win 10 interface for the same thing.

Is there another spot to check to look for logs that might reveal when in the process it fails? I would imagine if it’s that early, Steam or D3D or Windows or someone doesn’t like the way TZFix is hooking in, perhaps? Or other tips, things to check, config options to try changing, etc.?

Thanks to Kaldaien and team, and condolences about how the Steam thing turned out.

To be honest, the Steam overlay’s logs are your best bet. When it’s not actively causing weird software compat. problems, it’s actually got some super helpful logs.

It’s baffling that SK is not even generating its own logs, this is maybe a problem with Steam or anti-virus. It’s a 32-bit game, so that does lead to all sorts of anti-virus shenanigans.

I’m not sure where to look for those logs; [main Steam directory]/logs didn’t seem to contain anything relevant.

However, after trying a whole bunch of random stuff, I did happen upon the solution. Upon right-clicking TalesOfZestiria.exe, Properties, Compatibility tab… “Disable fullscreen optimizations” was checked for some reason. Unchecked that, it launches.

Thanks, and hope this helps anyone else with this issue!

The overlay logs for Steam is stored directly in the Steam folder, and called the same as their overlay DLLs (which I’ve forgotten what they’re called)… something like “gameoverlayrenderer” maybe?

Whoops, didn’t check there, they are indeed there… GameOverlayRenderer.log. Let’s see if I can recreate the issue…

Yep, neither any logs in [steam], nor [steam]/logs, nor [zestiria]/logs, are being updated – the game is closing before anything can write to any of those. I imagine there might be something logged in Windows Event Viewer but I’m not sure how to enable or query that.

Of course, after fixing the issue, all these logs do update. I could upload if they would be useful, but I doubt they would be of particular interest to anyone. Certainly let me know if so.

This here is due to an incompatibility with D3D9.dll and that toggle of Windows. Basically when “Disable fullscreen optimizations” are enabled, Windows attempt to invoke the compatibility layer to disable the optimizations by taking the “legacy” path instead. The problem, however, is that whatever the compatibility shim attempts to do, it conflicts with some third party DLL injections that makes use of D3D9.dll as the injection method.

Known tools that experiences this issue is Special K and ReShade.

A similar issue can be experienced with both tools when used as DXGI.dll for DirectX 11-based games, with the difference being that the game doesn’t silently crash on launch as instead the “Disable fullscreen optimizations” simply won’t have an effect on the game.

1 Like