FILEnetworks Blog: Fix Warhammer 4000 Dawn Of War 2 : Chaos Rising Crashes, Save Errors & More

Another day and another Dawn of War 2 expansion is out. First of all let us answer one of the most commonly asked questions. Do you need to have original Dawn of War 2 installed in order to play this expansion? The answer is no. Chaos Rising is a standalone expansion and it comes with a functioning version of Dawn of War 2 with all the factions and units - should be great news for hard core fans of the series. Anyway the purpose of this article is to highlight solutions for a few issues with the game which some of our readers have raised. Although Chaos Rising does not seem to be packed with bugs, quite a few people seem to be having issues related to saving progress and importing old saves. Hopefully the solutions below will help you have a nag free game play experience.

Cannot save progress in Chaos Rising – save errors and failures

Warhammer 40000 Dawn of War 2 is a GFWL (Games For Windows Live) branded game. As some of you might already know, saves in most such games are managed by the GFWL system itself and you usually need to be logged into a Live profile to save/load in-game progress. But what if you aren’t connected to internet all the time, don’t have an online GFWL account or if you don’t want to be logged into GFWL for some other reason? Don’t worry – this doesn't mean you can’t save progress. With the use of an Windows live offline account, you’ll be able to save/load just fine. Obviously, it doesn't require an internet connection to create or log into one.

Launch the game. Open the Windows Live menu.
If you are already logged onto a profile (local or online), sign out (Create profile button will only become visible when you aren’t logged into anything)
Click on ‘Create new profile’ button.
In the dialog box that pops up DO NOT hit continue. Hitting continue will take you to a registration page for an ONLINE profile – that’s not what we want.
Once in the ‘Create Gamer Profile’ window, scroll down so that you can see the bottom paragraph.
Look for the hyperlinked ‘created a local profile’ link in last paragraph. Clicking this will allow you to create a new offline profile.

The method above will work with any game based on GFWL 3.1.

How to get old Warhammer 40000 Dawn of War 2 savegames working with Chaos Rising?

If you need to use your old Dawn of War 2 saved games with Chaos Rising, you need to log into the same GFWL account you were using back when you were playing the older DoW2 version. This could either be an online live account or an offline profile. We know this is an annoyance but that’s how xlive works. Even the slightest change in saved files will cause crashes or will prevent Xlive detect them as valid save files.

How to fix xlive.dll missing error and crashing at startup

Sometimes you might be greeted with the error "The program cant start because xlive.dll is missing from your computer. Try reinstalling the program to fix this problem" and the game will crash at startup. This error usually occurs when there’s something wrong with your Games for Windows Live installation. You can download GFWL from Microsoft from this location.

Possible fixes for random crashes, crash to desktop (CTD), black screens and other issues you may face with the game

Try the following fixes – try them one by one and see if it solves the problem.

If you have Anti Aliasing forced from your video card’s control panel, disable it. Have the 3D application automatically control AA – do not force it from VGA driver.
Disable anti aliasing through the game configuration file. This seems to fix crashes at startup for a lot of ATI users.
Open the configuration.lua file (which stores settings for Chaos Rising) with a text editor such as Notepad. This file can be found on
C:\Users\Documents\My Games\Dawn of War 2\Settings on Windows Vista/Windows 7 and C:\Documents and Settings\USERNAME\My Documents\My Games\Dawn of War 2\Settings on Windows XP. Find the entry for antialiasing and change it’s value to 0. Save the changes, close the file and re-launch the game.
If you have installed any mods or map packs, this might lead to crashes with Choas Rising. Please replace your DOW2.module with a fresh copy downloaded from Steam. Navigate to DOW2 folder in your local SteamApps directory and rename or delete the DOW2.module file. Then verify integrity of DOW 2 : Chaos Rising using the Steam client. This should restore your dow2.module file to an unaltered state.
Install the latest DirectX runtime – Latest DirectX should be available in your Steam directory but if it’s not (or if you didn’t buy the game from Steam), you can download the latest monthly runtime from here. This is a standalone installer that will work in offline mode as well.
Update Video card drivers –
ATI Drivers: Download the latest ATI Catalyst drivers from this link: http://game.amd.com/us-en/drivers_catalyst.aspx
NVIDIA Drivers: Download latest official NVIDIA drivers from this link: http://www.nvidia.com/Download/index.aspx?lang=en-us

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