No single player game possible (WinXP)

[chris]

System:
I'm running FO 0.3.10 Rev. 2607 on a Windows XP machine (XP Home 2002, SP 2) with an ATI MOBILITY RADEON 9600/9700 Series graphics card and the driver 6.14.10.6505 which is the latest one released by the vendor for my machine's setup.

I'm using ZoneAlarm but have confirmed that the trouble has nothing to do with the known problem of this machine set up. The game is running in window mode and all permissions that have been asked for by freeorion* processes have been granted permanently.

I have not installed the game at the default location given in the installer program, but a sub-directory (something like C:\Programs\Games\FreeOrion).

Problem:
I can start freeorion from the desktop and from the command line, default log-level is DEBUG.
When I start a single player game, I get the configuration window ("Galaxy Setup") and use the default values. When I hit OK, the window becomes blank black, while the background music remains active. There is no new debug output in the console (new, meaning after the usual start-up stuff up to the point where the main menu is being displayed)

What I have tried so far (with the help of GeoffTheMedio on IRC):

• I determined that only freeorion.exe and freeoriond.exe are running after I "started" the single player game (Galaxy-Setup>OK), accordingly only freeorion and freeoriond have set permissions in the firewall
• Starting from the console with explicitly given --log-level DEBUG. Result:

  >freeorion
  1215165748 DEBUG : OpenAL initialized. Version 1.1Renderer SoftwareVendor Creative Labs Inc.
  Extensions: EAX EAX2.0 EAX3.0 EAX4.0 EAX5.0 EAX3.0EMULATED EAX4.0EMULATED AL_EXT_OFFSET AL_EXT_LINEAR_DISTANCE AL_EXT_EXPONENT_DISTANCE
  
  1215165748 DEBUG : SDLInit() complete.
  1215165748 DEBUG : GLInit() complete.
  1215165749 DEBUG : Limited FPS to 60

• Running server and client process separately in two console windows, client with --force-external-server option. No output from the server at any point, output from the client as seen at any other occasion.
• Running the program without the ZoneAlarm firewall (or any other, no Windows FW as well) active, no change in behaviour.
• freeorion log file's contents are the same as the debug ouput mentioned above. Logs for freeoriond are empty (zero-byte file)
• Checking the network state with SysInternals' TCPView: Once I hit "Single Player" in the main menu freeoriond starts listening for UDP on port 12345. After confirming the galaxy setup with OK there are three more TCP connections from freeorion popping up. One opens at port 1383 connecting to localhost:1382 and another one vice versa. A third one opened on port 1384 connects to localhost:12346.

[chris]

I installed the game this afternoon on a friend's freshly installed notebook running WinXP. It showed the same behaviour. Both systems use German localisations of Windows. Maybe a problem with localized path names?

[kroddn]

Search for the logfiles and post the freeoriond.log, freeorion.log and AI_1.log to AI_4.log files. Maybe the AI crashes and therefore the game does not continue.

[Geoff the Medio]

Maybe the AI crashes and therefore the game does not continue.

That's likely not the issue; the server doesn't seem to respond to any messages sent from the client, so won't ever get to the stage of starting AIs, let alone having them crash.

[chris]

Yes, that's correct, as I described in my post, the log files are respectively non-existent (AI), empty (server), or identical to the debug output I pasted above (client).

[chris]

I re-installed my complete system and yet no success. Really frustrating not to get the game to work at all. I tried meanwhile on four different setups and systems (all German variants of XP, though).

[chris]

Never mind ...

I found Birth of the Empires (http://sirpustekuchen.si.funpic.de/phpBB3), which actually runs‼

Thanks again to Geoff, who tried to help. Bye.

[smokedart]

I'm actually having this exact same problem. Windows XP SP3, 8800GT 512MB video card, dual core Athlon X2 processor.

freeoriond.log is always empty. I added freeorion and freeoriond to the firewall list. Tried running it with the firewall turned off completely too. Exact same problem.

This is code that I compiled in MSVC2008 using the newest code from Subversion (as of 48 hours ago). Everything compiled fine, and a friend of mine, who followed the same process, is not having the problem at all.

And Chris, thanks for posting and I hear your frustration, but considering this game is still in development, things like this are bound to happen. Hope you come back later to check it out again once things are farther along.

[Geoff the Medio]

Are you also using a German version of XP?

[smokedart]

Nope, English version.

[smokedart]

And I just thought to try downloading the pre-compiled Windows version off of sourceforge. It installed fine, I start it and it fails in exactly the same way.

I've been looking into the server code to see if I can see where it might be stopping (since there is no info coming out in the log) but haven't gotten a handle on the code enough yet.

[Geoff the Medio]

Do please post if you figure something out. (I have no idea what the problem is...)

[smokedart]

(I have no idea what the problem is...)

/cries

[SyriusM]

Hm...:> Maybe I have same problem. I had same log of game like upper here.

After few runs game pop up an error with missed msvcr71.dll library
So, I'm looking for that in google ...
For example this one: http://www.dll-files.com/dllindex/pop.php?msvcr71
Extract it to main game folder.
Run once again FreeOrion.

If works, Say Thank You

[smokedart]

Thanks for the idea, SyriusM, but that didn't fix it for me. :/

I've narrowed it down to the Boost io_service class, but no closer than that yet. I'll keep poking around and report back once I've found it. I'm fuzzy on C++ so I *may* make a change and submit it, otherwise I'll just submit the info in a bug report.