During a recent sale I purchased Grim Dawn. Yesterday, I finally down loaded and installed the game. Executing Grim Dawn via the desktop shortcut generated an error box stating that d3dx9_42.dll was missing.

I noticed the file name and made an educated guess that there was an issue with DirectX. During the install process several ms products were installed/updated (MSVC2010, MSVC2012, & MSVC2015). However, DirectX was not updated.

I decided to open setup_grim_dawn_2.15.0.20-1.bin. I found the file:

setup_grim_dawn_2.15.0.20-1.bin:\DirectXpackage\directx_Jun2010_redist.exe


Executing directx_Jun2010_redist.exe (DirectX June 2010 SDK) resulted in the extraction of DirectX setup files to the folder I provided (C:\DeleteMe\). I examined the contents of 'c:\DeleteMe' and found 'DXSETUP.exe'. I executed dxsetup.exe and was able to play Grim Dawn.

I'm wondering if there was an oversight in the packaging/scripting of the setup for Grim Dawn (setup_grim_dawn_2.15.0.20.exe) that caused dxsetup.exe 's failure to launch.

Well done tracking down the solution yourself, and sharing it like this for others who may be stumped.

I think you're assumption is correct - somebody simply forgot to add the directx redist to the dependencies for the installer. It's quite an easy thing to do - most computers with DirectX 9 games installed already have d3dx9_42 on them (unless I'm mistaken, that was the final version of D3DX), so the installer might have worked fine for GOG's when they tested the installer even though they left out a dependency. I'm a bit concerned that they added 3 different MSVC runtimes though - only one should be needed.

For those who are wondering, D3DX is a collection of useful convenience functions for programmers to use with Direct3D 7, 8 and 9, mostly to do with vector and matrix mathematics that are needed often in games. They used to get compiled into the main .exe file of games until Microsoft decided to move them out into a .dll file, at which point they started releasing a new version every 2 months or so (d3dx_42 was the 42nd version of the .dll file).

Complement to find the installer, follow the path "C:\Program Files (x86)\GOGalaxy\Dependencies\__redist\DirectX".