Carr0t

So I was having this same problem but only with the training mission (not downloaded any Fan Missions yet). Teas of St Lucia loaded fine, but the training mission just dumped me back to the objectives screen once it had finished loading. Disabling EAX fixed my issue. I'm running a Creative SoundBlaster X-Fi Fatal1ty, the old PCI version with a front panel breakout box rather than the newer PCI-e version. This is on Windows 7 64 bit. The thing is, if I disable EAX then the game won't detect more than Stereo sound from my system. When I try and change the value I get told 'Unable to load 3D audio. Surround sound speakers not found'. I've got a 7.1 surround sound setup here, configured as such in the Windows control panel section for speakers and audio. Windows will do a speaker test with sound from each speaker individually, and every other game detects it just fine. When in the TDM menus I just get sound out of the front speakers. When I load into a game level I certainly get *sound* from the centre and rear speakers, but i'm having trouble telling if it's actually doing positional audio or whether it's just outputting the 'left' sound out of all 3 left speakers equally and the 'right' sound out of the right 3.

You can load any non-Steam game into the Steam menu, so that all your games are in one place. Whatever you want to play, you know it's in Steam instead of having to search for the right folder under the start menu or whatever. It's especially handy for stuff like TDM which doesn't install any start menu shortcuts or similar automatically (I like my desktop bare of any icons apart from Recycle Bin. Anything I use regularly, which for games is basically Steam and nothing else, sits on the quick launch bar). If you run a game through Steam in this way it'll add the Steam overlay to the game, so you can chat to friends on Steam and such from 'in-game' without having to alt-tab out every time (which for me, frequently crashes TDM, whereas Steam chat via the overlay doesn't).