My confusing 10-day journey to run a UWP game under Windows 10

Our recent review of Forza Horizon 4, arguably the biggest new game from Microsoft this holiday season, is packed with praise. Combinations of Car-sim Turn 10 veterans and stunning open world Playground Games are on display in this captivating take on the "Horizon" series fork. We also tested the racing game on a variety of hardware, and it was impressive on both the Xbox One X and the high-end Windows 10 systems … but it has an asterisk important.

Sadly, FH4The first pre-release patch of the game made the game unplayable on our platform. Worse still, loading the game on any other test bench caused the same crash again and again – without an error message.

We have released this statement after more than a week of reciprocal relationships with Microsoft and the representatives of Turn 10, as well as a promise of tracking any solution found. Fortunately, at least, the game is running again on Windows 10. But that has not softened the bitter taste of our experience running games and applications of the Universal Windows Platform (UWP) – and this Bitter taste has been expected from time to time for over a year.

The approach of the atrocious smoke screen

Microsoft's "Xbox Play Anywhere" initiative was launched at the end of 2016 with the launch of Recore, a mediocre 3D action game. Honestly, the Play Anywhere advantage of this game – to work on both Xbox One consoles and Windows 10 PCs, provided they have the same Microsoft account information and a paid copy of the digital version of the game – was the most interesting aspect.

From now on, every new game released by Microsoft on Xbox One comes with this benefit. To claim copies of Windows 10, you must search for the same game through the Microsoft Store interface and then install its UWP version on your system. Compared to other digital distribution platforms such as Steam, Origin, Battle.net and Uplay, Microsoft's position is much safer. In particular, you can not scroll through Windows Explorer folders (even "hidden") and extract the installed UWP files, let alone see where they are installed or which files and folders require the most space on your hard drive. (You will need to visit your Win10 control panel and scroll through its "Applications" tab to find this information.)

This could work very well if the system works as advertised: to allow cross-platform support for games and applications between PCs and consoles, while adding a thick layer of security and guaranteed by Microsoft on the PC side. But when UWP do not work, this smoke screen approach is obtuse and atrocious.

I now have four separate games, all titles owned by Microsoft, to stop working in Windows 10 for one reason or another. My first issue was published in June 2017, when the publisher returned to 2016 Forza Horizon 3 and improved it for a PC launch. Trying to install this version resulted in a nightmare loop of errors and confusion, and one of Microsoft's official public relations officials summarized my problems by transferring my file to a Microsoft engineer. . As this representative says:

Sam was unable to play Forza Horizon 3 on his PC, and it was a nightmare of error codes and unclear explanations on the official Microsoft forums. In addition, he can not install or uninstall the game. He also said that Windows was constantly trying to download data gigs. He has reviewed his data plan this month.

The error code in question for attempts to install or uninstall the game, "0x80070003", failed to target a source of error; it seemed to invade both games and applications, and the messages posted on the forum at the time included questions entirely in capitals that remained unanswered. And since this installation was placed on my smallest SSD drive, I pulled my hair and wondered why I could not just go into a folder and force a delete.

In the troubleshooting process that followed, my assigned engineer asked me to take the following steps:

• Reset the Windows Store cache using the "wsreset.exe" command
• Reproduce the error (trying to download the game but failing) and run the wscollect.exe command that created a * .cab file.
• Open Windows PowerShell as an administrator and point to the FH3 executable with a "get-appxpackage" prompt
• Poke on a pair of possible install entries in this same Powershell with a "remove-appxpackage" prompt
• Look for an "AppxManifest.xml" file, then copy it to a requested folder with a long gibberish name.
• Failed, because I could not have a look in the protected WindowsApp folder, as requested. instead, I received this error: "This access control entry is corrupted"
• Load the Windows command prompt as administrator and try to manually locate the folder in question (which also failed).

All of this ended when Microsoft threw its hands in the air and asked me to reinstall this year's Windows Creators update, which worked well, even though it created a demand additional 70 GB on my Comcast account, whose bandwidth is saturated. Strangely, even after doing all this, the official Halo application under Windows 10 again has not loaded (and does not charge to date).

The last release I had with Microsoft on this issue was on June 29, 2017: "We are now working to clarify the issues related to the Halo application. We will get back to the situation as soon as updates are available." ".

Back to the pool "wsreset"

In January of this year, attempts to load the file published by Microsoft Gears of War 4 on my PC running Windows 10, the time passed, but this time without an error code. A small boot screen appeared after trying to load the game. It would disappear without any indication of what might happen next. No blackout in full screen for a match; no copyright window; and certainly no error code or confirmation that the process is somehow stopped.

Microsoft representatives have proposed similar steps with this problem: a command "wsreset", an entry in the game in the "Applications" tab of the control panel, then a selection of "Reset application" . If these two steps failed (which was the case), I would have to completely uninstall and reinstall the game. Oddly enough, I was asked to uninstall the game, turn off my computer, and then d & # 3939; wait 10 full minutes before restarting. "This wait time is important for the complete deletion of files and avoids being" linked again "during the relocation," I was told. (My colleagues at Ars Technica agree that waiting 10 minutes between uninstalling and reinstalling on a PC makes sense … when the machine is turned on, the application of this wait when the machine is off seems strange to us.)

The uninstallation and the relocation did the trick, anyway. At that time, one of the steps was to "log in to the account to which the game right had been awarded", even though I had only one Microsoft account on the PC concerned. I can not even imagine the nightmare that multi-user computers have to undergo with this type of credentials verification, but it's clear that this is part of the UWP ecosystem – to confirm that a game or a application is attributed to its paying user.

Burned by … Afterburner?

Last weeks Forza Horizon 4 I gave identical headaches – the game would crash after showing this startup window with zero error code or an indication that the crash had actually occurred. Oddly, it only started after installing a patch of several gigs during the pre-release review period. Before that, the game had started with zero incidents.

Once this problem appeared, I followed the same steps as for Gears 4 earlier this year. In total, I downloaded the 45 GB game four times, which significantly reduced my September data set. Representatives of Microsoft have once again weighed on the issue, but it is only when the game was officially launched (in this odious "payment for a special edition for a few days of early access") that A member of the Turn 10 development team came up with a solution: disable any graphics card overclocking software.

It went around. With MSI Afterburner disabled, I could run the game. (I was experiencing the same problem when I was testing the updated EVGA X1 software, designed for Nvidia's 2000-class GPU.) At the time of the press, the PC version of the game remains uncorrected. has not yet been extended to paying players. The only recourse for this block is to disable all game-related background applications that you can think of (including streaming software such as OBS) until you publish it. a fix.

In a hilarious way, this check before launching the applications in the background only performs one check. So, as soon as the FH4 the splash screen turns into copyright notice, we can double click on MSI Afterburner, then take advantage of the overclocking options of the standard GPU while pushing our PCs to the limit. MSI Afterburner is essential on the hardware configuration to be able to execute the complete 4K mode of the game with a locked update at 60 frames / s; without overclocking MSI, I have to switch to the serious parameter setting mode to avoid infancy inferior to 60.

Blame game-do this crash in UWP, too?

A member of FH4 The team claimed that UWP was not to blame in a final email about my personal woes. But I have trouble taking this suggestion for cash. When standard Windows executables do not succeed but do not crash due to, for example, a power surge or other hardware-specific failure, error codes and crash notices are common – and they are often easily exposed by crash logs. UWP applications keep this kind of information under the seal of secrecy. They are looking for licenses and other system information before starting an executable, and we have seen these failures time and time again.

In fact, I was unable to load the file published by Microsoft. Sea of ​​Thieves on the same Windows 10 computer during the same test period, with exactly the same error message without error message, no less. But this the game's failures have been fixed by a simple uninstall and reinstallation.

When the standard UWP game download is 20GB and up, is this really a viable solution? Should paying customers be stuck waiting for random and unexplained accidents and then be followed by periods of redelivery and prayer that get bored and out of their favorite games? And what do we say to users who dare to connect multiple family accounts to a single PC, which turns out to be more complicated than the single Microsoft account of my benchmark?

This is by no means a complete overview of the clustercuss that is UWP. Windows 10 error reporting forums are full of confused screams in the same way, as are popular game boards like ResetERA. But this year, Microsoft's Xbox Play Anywhere portfolio is sorely lacking solid, proprietary software. Waiting for the tastes of Crackdown 3 and Halo InfinityMicrosoft's Xbox and Windows teams may be able to take this opportunity to clear things up; his biggest vacation publication-2017 has already been a victim. Hoping that other Microsoft games, future and past, will overcome the UWP hump, and soon.