Game crashes before loading

[Crane]

Hi everyone,

I also have a crash problem with the original game (not ROTS)at startup after installing the new patch 1.0.7.
I use win7Pro 64 with dot.net 4.0.

Description
Stopped working
Pfad der fehlerhaften Anwendung: C:\Matrix Games\Distant Worlds\DistantWorlds.exe

Problemsignatur
Problemereignisame: APPCRASH
Application Name: DistantWorlds.exe
Application Version: 1.0.7.0
Application Timestamp: 4c12bf78
Fault Module Name: KERNELBASE.dll
Fault Module Version: 6.1.7601.17514
Fault Module Timestamp: 4ce7bafa
Exception Code: e0434f4d
Exception Offset: 0000b727
Betriebsystemversion: 6.1.7601.2.1.0.256.48
Gebietsschema-ID: 1031

I must admit I have no ideas. Can anyone help?

(edit: everything works fine after reinstalling and going back to 1.0.6.)


Greetings
Crane

[Data]

Hi Crane and welcome to the forum, the fact that if work fine with 1.0.6 but not with 1.0.7 kinda confirms your setup is ok. I was thinking the .NET is newer than the one recomended for the game but it works with 1.0.6, maybe 1.0.7 hits an incompatibility.
How exactly did you apply 1.0.7? you used the game updater or downloaded it and installed it manually?

[Crane]

Thanks for the welcome and your answer, Data.
I tried both ways installing with the same result.
Greetings
Crane

[Crane]

Just tried something found by google
command prompt: "Regsvr32 C:\Windows\System32\Kernelbase.dll"

It said:
"The module 'C:\Windows\System32\Kernelbase.dll' was loaded but the entry-point DllRegisterServer was not found. Make sure that "c:\windows\System32\Kernelbase.dll" is a valid DLL or OCX file and then try again.


... but it really i s the correct adress.

Greetings
Crane

[Data]

Yap, registering dll's manually helps sometimes but I've never heard of this helping with any DW issue so far. Still, it's the only lead we've got so far; if it is this, than trying the 1.0.7 on another windows where you don't get this message might be a good test, see if it behaves the same way there also. At the very least it will eliminate this dll as a possible root cause.

[marc420]

Wow.

If you're the sort to read a tech support forum before you buy a game, this should send you running for the hills. These guys apparently don't have a clue as to what they are doing. No way on earth should a piece of software have these sorts of problems.

The problems obviously began with ROTS and the equivalent 1.07 update to DW. They broke something when they did this. But, instead of trying to figure it out, they have their customers running around jumping through hoops to reconfigure their computers.

I worked for years with a programming group that worked in C# and .net. We never had problems like this. Heck, this sounds like it never would have passed our beta testing. Serious install problems requiring a customer to reconfigure Windows and uninstall and reinstall .net .... that would definitely be a 'bug' that would flunk a beta test.

I can't believe a company is asking customers to do this sort of stuff. This is insane.

Me, I do some programming myself in .net. So, no way is it even thinkable that I'm going to even think about messing with my computer, which in every other way related to .net is working fine, in order to wage what sounds like an hours-long fight to install some silly game. Not a chance. I can write my own .net programs, install them and run them with no problems ... and there's no way I'm even going to think about messing with that to solve some problem that some wacky game programmers can't solve in their own code.

There are lots of .net programs and programmers out there. Lots of people write .net programs that don't have these sorts of problems. They broke something or did something they shouldn't have done when they did the expansion. Now they've got their customers jumping through hoops because they can't or won't fix it.

Sure glad I read this before I plunked down any money. Wow. There are some seriously incompetent people around here, ranging from the programmers who wrote this to the support people telling customers to seriously reconfigure windows to run a game, and I hope I remember never to do business with them in the future.

I hope people know what they are doing when they start running some of these serious re-configurations of windows. If you don't think of yourself as a 'geek', in the long run you might be a whole lot happier if you just returned this game and its buggy install and got your money back before you mess up your computer doing this sort of stuff. Please be careful.

[princej]

oUCH , in my case ,it was not the game or the programmers , but the way that the OS was configured on my new" computer. Of all the pc's I installed it on DW worked perfectly and I had no problems running the game or its exspansions until I got an HP. Infact, I honestly cant recomend that anyone buys an HP anymore because windows 7 may be a great OS on the right brand but an HP appears to me to be a different monster as its hard to get anything to run on this thing without modifications. (just a thought that it might not be the programmers , but the brand or speciffic model of pc that some may be using)

[Data]

Until the actual root cause is found we're just speculating, that's why is safer to hold off on casting blames...or inflate the issue to the point of blaming the entire game or developers and such.

[Tzven]

Marc,

Having worked in a dev environment, you should know that there are many possible causes for software crashes. Consider the number of variables the application needs to account for, processor, OS, DirectX, external libraries (just to name a small few). If any one of those variables is corrupted, then it's entirely possible for the application to crash or even fail to load. Even poorly written third party applications may crash your application, and there's not a thing you can do about that.

In my case the blame lies firmly on Microsoft's shoulder. My .Net framework was corrupted, and as it's now a core component of Windows 7, I couldn't simply re-install it. My options were to either do a lot of digging in the registry or to do a completely fresh install of W7.

Either way, I'm having a lot of fun with the game and I strongly recommend it.

[Data]

Either way, I'm having a lot of fun with the game and I strongly recommend it.

All unavoidable problems aside, this is the best thing to have from any game.

[xx32racer32xx]

The only thing that fixed this problem for me was rebooting windows after I installed return of the shakturi.

DW works fine after install but i got this error screen until I rebooted on the expansion

I hope this fixes any future problems

[Data]

fixing by rebooting windows could indicate that the registry was not properly updated with the game info