Problems with Team Fortress 2 and Windows Vista Dreamscene?
Posted in Gaming, Tech Help, Vista | December 7th, 2007 | 1 Comment »
Windows Dreamscene was released not too long ago as a free update for Windows Vista Ultimate users (this was an original feature used to attract people to ultimate). After installing it I had trouble starting Team Fortress 2. The problem was the game would constantly minimize then maximize… non stop. Forcing it to minimize then maximizing it myself didn’t work and eventually the game either crashed or I had to close it via task manager.
Now, I’ve had this problem before, actually, before I installed dreamscene. But most of the time it happened when I clicked on something else while waiting for TF2 to start. But this problem was now happening every time no matter what I did. After several frustrating tries, I noticed it would start minimizing right before the playing of the valve intro (the guy with the hose valve in the back of his head). So I figured I’d attempt to solve the problem by disabling this.
So digging around at Steam’s support site, I stumbled upon the startup options for steam games and noticed this gem at the bottom
-novid or -novideo - When loading a game with this parameter, the intro Valve video will not play.
If you don’t know how to change the startup option, its very simple. Right click the game in steam, then go down to properties.
From here you can click “Set launch options” and fill in the above modifier. Even if you don’t use DreamScene, utilize this option to allow the game to start faster so that you can frag sooner. Game on!
