Game doesn't start anymore

Hi guys,
I've played hundreds of games without problems before some years ago, recently wanted to get in the game again and played a few matches. In my last game I was lagging unfortunately, so I tried to leave. However, when using the menu my PC froze so had to force quit the game with Task manager.

Now, when I try to start the game (both from the FAF client or from steam or directly using the *.exe file), the screen turns black, then minimizes and I get a minimized grey screen doing nothing. .

I've tried reinstalling the game from steam (new download) and reinstalling the FAF client as well.
I also removed the game.prefs file. All to no avail unfortunately.

Hope someone can help me with this!
I'm on Windows 11 Home, Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-10700K CPU 3.80GHz

I have a few game logs here of my last 3 tries of playing:

game_21981172.log
game_21981157.log
game_21981052.log

What does the windows event log say?
What graphic card do you have?
Do other games have the same issue?
Try to reinstall graphic card drivers just to narrow down the issue, also have the latest Windows update.

@boaty-mcboatface Even though you stated that you removed your game.prefs file & tried again, lets try doing this:

Go to FAF client > top left menu > Show game.prefs file. You should get a folder open with a game.prefs file inside. Open that file in a text editor like Notepad or Notepad++ & search for primary_adapter. You should get 2 results:

• one will be nested together with the rest of the settings you can change in the games Options menu
• the other will be with a bunch of resolution choices in the options_overrides section.

You do not want the one in the options_overrides section with all the resolution choices. You want the one nestled with the other in-game Options settings. Change the value for that primary_adapter to windowed.

After making that change, save your change while being sure to change the File Type to All so that your saved document saves with the name game.prefs instead of something like game.prefs.txt or similar.

This should allow to you to get into the game & then you can go to the in-game Options > Video to select the resolution you want.

So, weirdly enough, yesterday after also deleting all my custom maps and my windows TEMP folder and restarting my PC, it worked again. Then today, I had the same issue as stated above.

@magge other games have no issue. I have an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080

@MostLostNoob This did the trick for now, thanks! So I should do this every time now I guess..

@boaty-mcboatface You should not have to do it every game. The fact that you do tells me that there's a file permissions issue causing the game to not be able to save changes to the game.prefs file.

Have you at any time run the FAF Client or any version of SCFA as Admin?