With debug video enabled:

07/29/2016 12:48:11 --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
07/29/2016 12:48:11 Start logging session
07/29/2016 12:48:11 Direct3D
07/29/2016 12:48:11 Screen: 1600 x 900
07/29/2016 12:48:11 Scale: 1.00
07/29/2016 12:48:11 Background blt: Enabled
07/29/2016 12:48:11 Use Direct X: Enabled
07/29/2016 12:48:11 Use GPU compositing: Enabled
07/29/2016 12:48:11 LogPixelsY: 96
07/29/2016 12:48:11 DeviceType: 0x1
07/29/2016 12:48:11 Caps: 0x00020000
07/29/2016 12:48:11 Caps2: 0xe0020000
07/29/2016 12:48:11 Caps3: 0x00000320
07/29/2016 12:48:11 DevCaps: 0x0019ae50
07/29/2016 12:48:11 DevCaps2: 0x00000051
07/29/2016 12:48:11 [DX] Buffer Format: 22

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I'm running on Win8.1 (64 bit). My copy is heavily modded, but seems to be crashing before loading mods.

EDIT:

I have the problem worked out, I think. The game is trying to run 1.7a2 on 1.6.4 settings. The two versions of settings.xml are incompatible, and thus the game crashes instantly when it tries to parse it. Deleting settings.xml forces a rewrite, fixing the problem. Thanks to "Natraq" on steam for discovering the settings workaround.

the_shrike 29 Jul 2016:

Deleted mods and rebooted system. Still crashes.

george moromisato 2 Aug 2016:

Here is what I think is happening:

  • The steamapi.dll shipped with Alpha 2 is old—it does not match the SDK being used. I believe this will cause certain APIs (but not all) to crash.
  • At load time, we call the Steam API to get the list of mods. This will crash due to the wrong DLL.
  • Due to a different bug, when Settings.xml is deleted, we skip the code to load the list of mods, and thus avoid the crash.
  • But running the game again, or clicking the Mods button, will try to call Steam APIs and the game will crash.

Now that I've got the correct DLL there, it should not crash.

the_shrike 2 Aug 2016:

Seems to be working for me.