all woc mods crash under vista!

davidlallen

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I have bounced here after trying a few other places. It seems to me that any mod built on top of WOC will crash when loaded in vista or windows 7. For background see the BUG bug thread at this post and again at this post, and also this other thread.

I believe the problem comes because the interface theme module writes a file deep into the subdirectory tree under the mod. But, a normal user is not allowed to write into program files, so the game crashes during "init xml".

Although the mod I am working on, Dune Wars, uses WOC, I was not exposed to the early stages where WOC, RevDCM, and bunch of other stuff got merged together.

Can you please point me at an explanation of the file assets/modules/interface/dune theme/resource/civ4.thm ? The "dune theme" is obviously part of the Dune Wars mod. But, the game writes this file during initialization, which is preventing vista users from starting the mod. So I would like to do "something" to avoid using this file.

Knowing nothing about the modular loading structure, I came across file assets/modules/MLF_CIV4ModularLoadingControls.xml, which has a section
Code:
	<Module>
		<Directory>Interface</Directory>
		<bLoad>1</bLoad>
	</Module>
I changed 1 to 0, but this causes a lot of the interface aspects of the mod such as fonts to go back to vanilla. So this is too large a change.

There are over a thousand downloaders of Dune Wars, and this is the #1 reported problem. Nobody using vista or windows 7 can play the mod at all unless they know the secret workaround. I want to find a solution, not a workaround.
 
This is probably of no help to you, but I have been using WoC Lite (which is what got merged into RevDCM) without any problems on Vista. Maybe this is due to me using a non-default install dir (i.e. not one under Programs), but then this issue never was reported for my mod either.

Can you try that dll instead of the RevDCM one ?
 
This is probably of no help to you, but I have been using WoC Lite (which is what got merged into RevDCM) without any problems on Vista. Maybe this is due to me using a non-default install dir (i.e. not one under Programs), but then this issue never was reported for my mod either.

Can you try that dll instead of the RevDCM one ?

The issue will definitely not appear if you have installed civ somewhere not under programs. Is this how you recommend your users install it? Do you have confirmation that somebody *has* used it under vista with both the civ game, and the mod, installed under programs?
 
Rise of Mankind uses RevDCM as it's core. RevDCM has WoC lite in it. I use Windows 7 Personally, and have had only minor issues with WoC (Mostly my fault.) It loads just fine.

I would guess that there is some error in the interface folder, not in WoC.
 
The issue will definitely not appear if you have installed civ somewhere not under programs. Is this how you recommend your users install it? Do you have confirmation that somebody *has* used it under vista with both the civ game, and the mod, installed under programs?

I have no idea where players of my mod install the game, but given that there are a few hundred downloads, I would assume some of them to use the default install dir.
 
Thanks for the counter-examples. Can anybody help me to understand why the file assets/modules/interface/dune theme/resource/civ4.thm is written by WOC while the xml is being read?
 
I just tried the putting my user settings folder in the My documents path and making LoR read only. It worked fine, no issues. LoR doesn't use any WoC modules, I purposely removed the one that comes with RevDCM. Try disabling the better ship scale module in RevDCM, and see if that corrects it. Your best aproach would probably be to un Wocify anything that has been WoCed in Dune Wars.
 
I just tried the putting my user settings folder in the My documents path and making LoR read only. It worked fine, no issues. LoR doesn't use any WoC modules, I purposely removed the one that comes with RevDCM. Try disabling the better ship scale module in RevDCM, and see if that corrects it. Your best aproach would probably be to un Wocify anything that has been WoCed in Dune Wars.

Just to make sure, do you get a the crash by making LoR read only *without* having a user settings folder?

Could you please modify your installer script so that it creates the My Documents directory automatically? (I will be releasing a few patches before the next full version, so the patch script is where I could use the help first.)

Unfortunately for DW, we use WOC pretty heavily, and the person who did it is still around but not contributing as much. I have asked him to de-woc-ify, we will see how it goes.
 
Nevermind. I can't make it read only, windows will not comply. It tells me it makes it read only, but i can still write files in it. Even created a new limited user account, and I could still write and delete files inside LoR in the limited user account, even though it was clearly marked as read only. So I don't know....

Anyway I will work on a function to install the User Settings folder seperately over the next week. But I have no way to test it to see if it works.
 
Hi David if you can point me to what your work is I can get faichele to help. We talk daily on WoC. As far as WoC working with Vista, I have 2 Vista machines. One 32 bit and one 64 bit. It works fine on both. I am going to try to find your mod and install it to see if i can help.
 
Hi David if you can point me to what your work is I can get faichele to help. We talk daily on WoC. As far as WoC working with Vista, I have 2 Vista machines. One 32 bit and one 64 bit. It works fine on both. I am going to try to find your mod and install it to see if i can help.

I see you have posted on the Dune Wars welcome thread, so, welcome to Dune Wars! As far as I know, every DW player who has a normal civ installation is unable to play the game. It crashes during "init xml". I believe this is due to the interfaces module, which is writing a theme file. Keldath has made a big number of local changes, one of which is to change this behavior. If you could help him to sort out just this change, that would be great.

It may be that there are other problems as well, but if you can get the crash on your vista machine, then we will have an excellent way to test fixes.
 
did you ever try making the Civ4BeyondSword.exe "runas administrator"? i've been long time using vista & win7 (both x64, which is believed to be more un-compatible with most apps) to run WoC, with CIV installed in default c:\program files(x86)\firaxis games location.

right click on the short-cut to Civ4BeyondSword.exe, on the "compability" tab, you can check "run as administrator".
 
did you ever try making the Civ4BeyondSword.exe "runas administrator"? i've been long time using vista & win7 (both x64, which is believed to be more un-compatible with most apps) to run WoC, with CIV installed in default c:\program files(x86)\firaxis games location.

right click on the short-cut to Civ4BeyondSword.exe, on the "compability" tab, you can check "run as administrator".

Thanks for the tip. That is the workaround we have suggested to users, but in this thread we are hoping to work out a permanent solution.
 
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