Can you help gamers with this possibly simple C++ problem?

[grundman]

Hi all. 1st, know that I am not a programmer or user of C+ anything, I just have done some investigation on my end and believe I know where to turn to for assistance, so HUMBLY, here I go:

A newly released game Warlock: Master of the Arcane is not quite working in Windows XP, nor is it supported in the games minimum system requirements. However, the recent pre-release demo did in fact work without a problem for XP users (its listed as Vista/7 only FYI). Now it does in fact work in XP, the problem is you get a recoverable crash what I think is the C+ debugger with the following error message:

Condition: sky::NewString("Error adding object to hash %s guid=%s", err.c_str(), guid.ToText().c_str()).c_str().LibStudioApplicatio n.cpp(117)

(please note I pasted this and am missing some periods, if this is incomplete I will paste exact error message!)

The reason I beleive this can be made workable is threefold:

1) The demo ran fine, and except for the size of the program, little has changed.

2) You can play the full game now without unrecoverable CTD, as you simply keep pressing 'n' or clicking no on the debug screen several times till it stops erroring and the game seems to play fine other than this annoying distraction, i.e. their doesn't appear to be any missing textures or wonked gameplay that myself and many others can detect.

3) I know from experience that their are several Microsoft DLL's and programs that are included in Vista and beyond that have working XP versions that simply require downloading and installing.

Again, I could be talking out my backside on this and making a fool of myself, and I apologize if that is the case. FWIW, this game is the closest thing to an updated successor to one of my most favorite PC games of all time, Master of Magic (way back in DOS days, remember those kiddies? With all the fun memory management skills one needed to posses to get the best games working?), hence me going to all this trouble. If the game actually crashed completely and had had the same problems in the demo, I wouldn't be here wasting you fine folks surely precious time.

I appreciate your help, and even your thoughts as to the plausibility of this being resolvable. And please, lets nip the obvious 'well duh, why don't you just upgrade to Vista/7 and be done with it, your way behind the times as it is' comments in the bud right now. Thats an entirely different argument for an entirely different forum, right?

Thanks in advance for your time, sincerely all . . .

Grundman

[grundman]

Hey powerusers! Its me again, I thought it was a wee irresponsible for me not to give you the exact error we're getting on this so here it is:

It first shows up when your loading any game, whether new or a saved game at exactly 71%, it doesn't seem to matter what the PC configuration is, after that it comes always at some point of HD access when its loading something, I'm not sure but I think its when its loading something either into memory or on screen, it seems to only happen when your gameplay is asking for something new on screen that is not currently there. Note it doesn't start during the loading of the game from desktop and the FMV of the game dev. and dist and the main menu, only during the actual loading of the game play and during the gameplay itself.

The debug screen gives you this:

Error handler
Warning at location .\LibStudioApplication.cpp(117)

Condition:
sky::NewString("Error adding object to hash %s guid=%s", err.c_str(), guid.ToText().c_str()).c_str()

I hope this helps, I really do appreciate any of you programmers time, you rock!!

Grundman

[HJTrost]

Grundman,

I take it that you don't have access to the source code and compiler. That limits what you can do quite severely. And a lot of what is to follow is highly speculative.

The code snippet listed under "Condition" is not even a complete instruction, merely a reference to a temporary variable (a character string) returned by a function call (sky::NewString). Now there could be something wrong inside the function call, like the variables err or guid not having been assigned a value at that point, or the member function ToText of the guid structure/class misbehaving. A possible reason for this, or another related issue causing your error, to occur is a difference in a system-supplied run-time library between its incarnations in XP on one side and Vista/7 on the other. One of the msvcrt<xx>.dll libraries in the Windows\System32 directory could be a candidate. The only option I see there is to make sure that you have XP at SP3 and have all patches installed, to hopefully get the libraries to their newest versions. If .Net is involved (you may find out in the game documentation), you may need to make sure that that specific .Net version is patched, too - given that .Net patching has a history of breaking things, I never patch any .Net version. The .Net patches are offered together with all other ones but are always recognizable in the index list of patches that Windows Update (or Microsoft Update if you're set up for that) offers.

Sorry, that's probably not much help but I fear you're in a bad spot for better prospects.

Cheers, Jochen