News:

Simutrans Wiki Manual
The official on-line manual for Simutrans. Read and contribute.

Simutrans crashes on startup

Started by BroWCarey, November 16, 2015, 02:26:45 PM

Previous topic - Next topic

0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.

BroWCarey

Have enjoyed Simutrans for years. Just got a new laptop, running Windows 7, 64 bit. Downloaded version 120.1.1, with pak 128. Tried starting it this morning. Got the opening screen asking me my preferred language. I chose English. Brief delay, then took me to the usual options of starting a new game or opening an existing one, etc. But before I could do anything, the program crashed. I got the usual unhelpful message from Windows, informing of the problem, but not identifying the cause, along with the empty promise that they would notify me if a solution were found.

I tried starting the program again, with the same results. Is 120.1.1 a stable release? Any ideas on what might be wrong? I've got 4 GB of RAM, and an Intel Core i3 CPU M 330 @ 2.13 GHz. No other programs were running at the time, so there doesn't seem to be any reason why my computer shouldn't be able to run the program... especially when my old computer ran it without difficulty.

DrSuperGood

You will need to post the particular error which caused the crash. This should be available under "details" or some other button on the error window.

There are 2 windows versions you can try, both of which perform approximately equally. The recommended is GDI since GDI is part of Windows. There is also a SDL version which wraps some windows functionality but may be more or less compatible.

There is also a SDL2 build you can run on Windows but that was intended for Mac OS and so is only available by self-building it. It also has some performance problems when it comes to loading bars, causing loading to execute several times slower than with other builds.

Quote
Is 120.1.1 a stable release?
Yes it is a stable release. I am running a self-build made with MSVC2015 Community Edition on Windows 10 and have experienced no crashes so far. The GCC debug build should be as stable. If you want I can give it to you to try, however as it is built targeting Windows 10 I cannot be sure it will work for you.

BroWCarey

Windows provided no details of the crash, no error message, no specifics. Very frustrating. Hard to pinpoint a problem when Windows won't provide any information other than the obvious, that the program has stopped working and that it is being shut down.

I don't possess the necessary skills to build anything. I can only run what I download from Simutrans website, which specified Windows.

DrSuperGood

Try reinstalling the game to rule out corrupted installation (can happen when migrating versions). You can backup your save files to prevent loss of data.

Windows should always give some details about a crash. Unless it is the result of the application becoming "unresponsive", which is different from a crash anyway.

Ters

Quote from: DrSuperGood on November 16, 2015, 06:47:12 PM
Windows should always give some details about a crash.

Nah. They stopped doing that in Vista, I think. Even the Event viewer has little more to add (the module name, some timestamps and the exception code, which is usually 0xc0000005).

BroWCarey

Downloaded it again and reinstalled. Exactly the same thing. It just tells me the program has stopped working. When I close that notification, Simutrans closes too. This is very frustrating.

DrSuperGood

Try installing at least 2 paksets. Does it crash before or after the pakset selection screen? Try running as an administrator to rule out something wrong with file permissions.

BroWCarey

#7
Will try installing a second pakset. It crashes after pakset selection, just when it reaches the screen where I could choose a map, load a scenario, or a saved game, etc. Will also try running as administrator. Appreciate these suggestions.

---------------

Update: I installed another pakset (128 Japan). When I started the program, as administrator, and chose the same pakset I had been trying to use before, it crashed. On a whim, I started it again, but this time, chose the new pakset, Japan. And it worked! Apparently, there is a problem with pak128 2.5.3

DrSuperGood

Could also possibly be a corrupted auto save/load? I have had a few crashes as the result of one but usually after the crash it loads the default map.

BroWCarey

#9
No, Dr. Supergood... this was a brand new installation, so nothing saved. And this happened with two different downloads of that particular pakset. I may have to try downloading that one a different way, and see if it makes a difference.

------------------------

Downloaded Pak128 separately, and it solved the problem. Thanks, everyone, for your help!  :)

DrSuperGood

So to confirm, you are saying the auto installer for pak128 is installing a broken (crashes on load) build of pak128?

BroWCarey

Yes, evidently that is what is happening.

By the way, I almost didn't respond here. I got a "gentle reminder" from the moderation team today, scolding me for "double-posting" in this thread. Apparently, asking for help and clarifying details and responding to people's attempts to help triggered something I suspect was automatic. Unfortunately, there didn't seem to be a way to reply to that message. There was a link in the email, but it just brought me to a page where, theoretically, I could respond... except there was no user name in the form. And apparently, the moderation team isn't a username.
They threatened (but didn't give) negative moderation points. Kind of made me afraid to reply here at all. Seems to me a couple of years ago, something similar happened, where I was blocked from the forum. When I requested a reason, it turns out there wasn't one, and I was immediately reinstated. Have to wonder if this is all being handled by an over-zealous machine and not a human.

Isaac Eiland-Hall

I was the one who sent the "warning". But really? That's how you characterize it? Here's the text of the "warning" (I put that in quotes because as it itself says, it's a "gentle reminder"):

QuoteBroWCarey,

This is a gentle reminder not to double-post on the forum. One of the posts in question can be found here: ((link to post goes here))

You have not been given any negative moderation points; this is just a gentle reminder.

A double-post is when you post in a thread where you also made the previously last post in the thread, where it has been less than 24 hours.

So, as long as you have not made the latest post AND it has been more than 24h, you may post. Otherwise, please edit/modify your last post instead of creating a new one.

Gentle regards,
-The International Simutrans Forum Moderation Team

Can you please explain to me how that's threatening in any way? It specifically was written to be non-threatening, so if we can improve it, I'd like to know, as really, honestly, the point is to make a gentle reminder.

So if you'd like to reply to the one who sent the reminder of the forum's rules, you may certainly reply to me. I'm not threatening in any way.

The reason we enforce that rule is that multiple posts in a row by the same user take up a lot of vertical space. We allow permanent editing of posts.

So, to clarify, when you say:

QuoteApparently, asking for help and clarifying details and responding to people's attempts to help triggered something I suspect was automatic.

It was definitely not automatic, and definitely had nothing to do with asking for help; but in fact only had to do with double-posting, which the pre-written reply explains.

Again, if you can tell me how to make it seem less threatening, my ears are open. We think of ourselves as a pretty friendly community, and many have remarked as such. So I hope it's just a terrible misunderstanding, and I do apologize that you perceived it that way. :(

DrSuperGood

Who is responsible for the pak128 installer links? Can someone else verify that the pak128 version used by the 120-1-1 auto installer is causing a crash? It is important that this is cleared up since it might be affecting many people and the last thing one wants to happen is that it turns people away from Simutrans.

Ters

The scripts for the nsis installer is in SVN. You shouldn't have much problems digging out the URL. My Simutrans is many weeks out of date at the moment, but the zip pointed to by the script loaded fine for me. It may be that the zip is corrupted on only one (or some) of the SourceForge mirrors, and BroWCarey happened to be routed to that (those) mirror(s). Or maybe the installer caches downloads somewhere, and the first download was corrupted. However, since it's a zip-file, there should be problems extracting it if it was corrupt. Maybe the installer doesn't fail, so that the pak set was only partially installed, though I would think that it would crash earlier in that case.