FreeOrion

After installing RC7 on WinXP SP2 (+.NET 2.0), the game will complain that some configuration files are missing and consequently not run. Installing RC7 over RC6 fixes this; so maybe there are indeed some configuration files missing in RC7 that were installed with RC6.

For me, just python was missing. Works like a charm now. Nice work Geoff.

I'm informed by tzlaine that he's re-uploaded the RC7 installer, and it should have python in it now.

New RC7: when starting a new game an error message will pop up ("python25.dll missing"). Copying the python25.dll from the python to the freeorion directory fixes this.

Isn't there a python25.dll in c:\WINDOWS\system32? There should be; the Python installer should have put it there.

I've looked, and no, there isn't. The python25.dll was placed in the python directory, c:\python\.

Just wanted to let you know that I've downloaded RC7 just this morning, and installed (first time installing FreeOrion), and I get the error described in the original post.

Just wanted to let you know that whatever you re-uploaded, it didn't fix the problem.

Installing python (from the python website) didn't fix anything. And now that I look, there was already a python25.dll in the FreeOrion directory. I'll try installing RC6, then RC7 over the top.

i had previously installed RC5. i attempted to install RC6, in a different directory to the previous install. the main menu loaded but the button images didn't - the console indicated that freeorion was looking in the wrong directory - the directory that RC5 was installed to. so i uninstalled everything and installed RC7 (the new version with python) into the initial directory, and it all works apparently as intended. so i guess perhaps the RC7 install doesn't set the working directory correctly?

The issue here is probably your pre-existing config.xml in C:\Documents and Settings\UserName\Application Data\FreeOrion

If this file is not present, such as after a fresh install, it is created when FreeOrion is run. If you have an older version of the file that's incompatible with the newer release, it will be loaded, and the loading will fail, or might succeed but point to the wrong location for images and such. So, after installing a new release, delete that file, and probably the entire contents of that directory, since your old saves are probably incompatible as well, and you don't need the log files for anything.

i see, that makes sense. it would probably be a good idea for the uninstall program to delete the contents of that directory automatically...?

No, because that would delete your saved games, which people might expect not to happen.

Better would be, if parsing config.xml fails somehow, to revert to using the defaults that are used if there is no config.xml. This would require someone figuring out how to make than happen, though...

or at uninstall give the option to delete saved games, logs and configuration files. by the time i reinstalled i'd forgotten that that directory was even there so i didn't look there to solve my problem. at the least, a new install should rewrite config.xml to reflect the path to the new install.

It's not likely anyone's going to write as script to parse config.xml and update just the data directory when installing, so the only practical solution is to delete the file, either when trying to load it, or when installing. Trying to do it when installing is a bit of a kludge, though.

It might be possible to embed a version string in the file, and reject it if they don't match.