OK - I'm going to bore you-all with needless detail, but it's a funny story. s7rikeback and myself were just discussing this very error message via PM. I just got a new laptop yesterday, to replace my poor old 6 year old Dell that the hard drive crashed in a few weeks ago. I put my UPlay SH4 on this new beast, and my Steam SH3 & SH5. All function as intended. They all run excellently in the new beast. So I started to bring in my modding stuff. Imagine my horror when I could NOT get Silent 3Ditor to run! Same message. Missing DirectX components, and it would then open my web browser (did I say you could do that??) and take me to the DirectX download page. I'd run the web installer. I'd download and run the full package. Every time, it would fail. So while browsing through the computer and going into every nook and cranny I could find on the thing, trying to find my dotNet Framework installs and "test" them. Trying to find the DirectX files, and which ones are in there? When I came upon the "Windows Features", which is different in Win10 than it was in Win7 or XP, to say the least. Anyway, looking through there, you can see which components of a Windows install are active or not. So I've got a couple of dotNet installs, IE11 (how unimpressive), etc., and down in slot #6 is a "Legacy Components" checkbox that is empty. I click on the title, and under it is Direct Play, which is part of DirectX...
- I tick those two boxes and tried S3Ditor again. Still failed with the missing DirectX files. So I then took my SH4 Gold DVD and got the DirectX9c install files off of it (same files as the MS download), set the installer to WinXP compatibility and Run as Administrator. The DirectX9c install completed successfully now, and after a re-start, I tried S3Ditor again and it failed again. So I ran its msi installer again, which brings up a "Repair or Remove?" dialog. I chose "repair" and lo and behold, it worked! Sixteen hours of messing with this... I don't know whether to think myself thick for not having found it sooner, or whether to pat myself on the back for having found it at all... web searches do little to nothing for you. "Oh, windows already has all the components it needs to run all games. If the game doesn't run, talk to the author and have them update the game for you." ee-yeah, right... So try that "Legacy Components / Direct Play" thing, then do the DirectXv9c install again, then do an S3Ditor repair, cross your fingers, and maybe it'll do it for you too! This machine has Build 1809, 17763.437, and just updated itself today when I forced it to, and had dotNet v4.8 because of that, and still wouldn't install DirectXv9c. I do not understand how all of my Silent Hunter games would work fine, but S3Ditor would not... Sorry 'bout the verbosity - I've had too much coffee trying to get this to go!...
