Fixing Trine 1 for Windows

It took me a few hours to get Trine 1 working via Steam on Windows 7 64-bit.  Here is a summary for those who find this post seeking help with the issue.

Symptoms:

Running Trine 1 via Steam client shows you the Trine launcher, but upon clicking the Launch button Trine 1 silently closes without an error. You may or may not see a command prompt window flicker open and close.

Diagnostics:

To diagnose the issue, run trine_launcher.exe outside of steam. This should give you more useful errors.

There is a log file located in \Steam\Steamapps\common\Trine\logs\log.txt

Solutions:

Error: “The program can’t start because PhysXLoader.dll is missing from your computer. Try reinstalling the program to fix the problem.”

Solution: You may have to install the latest NVIDIA PhysX System Software (aka PhysX SDK) from Nvidia.com .  In addition, you may need to edit your system environment variable known as “path” to also include the location of  your PhysX dlls.  Steps: Computer > Properties >Advanced > Environment Variables > (System Variables) > path.    To the string of locations in the system section “path” variable, add “C:\Program Files (x86)\NVIDIA Corporation\PhysX\Common;” (or wherever  your PhysX installation is located).

Error: While attempting to install PhysX,  “The installer has encountered an unexpected error installing this package. This may indicate a problem with this package. The error code is 2738.”

Solution: This appears to be a problem with the windows registry.  This Microsoft one-shot tool should fix it.   Run the installation again.

Error: While attempting to install PhysX, “Installation ended prematurely because of an error.”

Solution: You may have to install the latest NVIDIA PhysX System Software (aka PhysX SDK) from Nvidia.com .

Error: Trine 1 crashes right after intro movie, and the log.txt reads “ERROR: PhysicsLib – Failed to create PhysX SDK”.

Solution: You may have to install the latest NVIDIA PhysX System Software (aka PhysX SDK) from Nvidia.com .   Also, you may be getting this error if  you have dragged some PhysX-related DLLs into your Trine folder rather than just using an environment variable as described above.

It’s working:

Trine 1 is working great for me now. Good luck to you.

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