User reported Steam issue

[jamespetts]

A user who has switched to the "beta" branch of Simutrans-Extended on Steam has reported the following:

FATAL ERROR: roadsign_reader_t::read_node() - version 0 not supported. File corrupt?
 Aborting program execution ...

This is a symptom of a pakset incompatibility.

Not having set up Simutrans-Extended on Steam, I do not know what the setup is, so cannot understand how this can be happening. Can anyone set out the position vis a vis Simutrans-Extended on Steam, what the "beta" branch does and how the paksets are set up. 

[martin509]

As far as I'm aware, the Steam release exactly mirrors the nightly build of simutrans-extended/master - it is selectable in the Betas menu. Without seeing the exact setup, my guess is that the game attempted to load a Standard save in Extended because the savegame folder is in Documents and not the main steam directory. If so, then the problem should be fixed by launching a second time.

As far as how the paksets are setup, the nightly build only includes Pak128.Britain-Ex, so when opening the game there is no pakset selection dialog and it immediately tries to open a save.

[jamespetts]

Thank you - and thank you for responding on Github. That is helpful. 

[Roboron]

Steam only ships pak128 by default, so if the user has not "acquired" the pak128.britain DLC, there won't be any Extended compatible pakset installed. Also, if no additional DLC has been acquired, it will try to launch the default pak128, only to fail, of course.

[jamespetts]

Steam only ships pak128 by default, so if the user has not "acquired" the pak128.britain DLC, there won't be any Extended compatible pakset installed. Also, if no additional DLC has been acquired, it will try to launch the default pak128, only to fail, of course.

Thank you for clarifying. Is there a way to make Pak128.Britain-Ex the default for Extended, while retaining Pak128 as the default for Standard?

[MobRules]

(I'm not the original user; I just found this thread while searching for a solution to Steam extended refusing to launch)

I installed the pak128.Britain DLC on Steam, it still won't launch.  Manually added -ex paksets to the paksets folder. Won't launch. So I went back to the standard version, loaded with the Britain pack, then changed back to extended. Won't launch.

Tried installing outside of Steam -- both the .deb and the linux executables. The .deb won't install due to missing libraries, and the executable version won't run due to (different) missing libraries.

I don't have the mental bandwidth right now to figure out manually finding and installing the missing libraries, or figuring out compiling it from code, so *sigh* on to other games, I guess. :^/

Any other tricks I can try before I give up?

[martin509]

(I'm not the original user; I just found this thread while searching for a solution to Steam extended refusing to launch)

I installed the pak128.Britain DLC on Steam, it still won't launch.  Manually added -ex paksets to the paksets folder. Won't launch. So I went back to the standard version, loaded with the Britain pack, then changed back to extended. Won't launch.

Tried installing outside of Steam -- both the .deb and the linux executables. The .deb won't install due to missing libraries, and the executable version won't run due to (different) missing libraries.

I don't have the mental bandwidth right now to figure out manually finding and installing the missing libraries, or figuring out compiling it from code, so *sigh* on to other games, I guess. :^/

Any other tricks I can try before I give up?

It appears the https://bridgewater-brunel.me.uk/downloads/nightly/ link uses builds much newer (dated this morning) than the most recent successful nightly build on Github (dated Sept. 22). If that's the case then the Bridgewater Brunel server build path might currently be broken in some way, as there have been recent major updates to the game's overall deployment path.

I'd suggest going to https://github.com/jamespetts/simutrans-extended/releases/tag/Nightly and downloading simutrans-extended.zip and linux.zip, and unzipping linux.zip into the Simutrans Extended directory.

[MobRules]

Thanks for the help! 

Unfortunately, this just gives me a different library error. (And I get the same one if I try to run from the just-downloaded simutrans-extended without replacing the four files with the linux.zip ones.) This time it's libSDL3.so.0.

I did a package manager search on the library name, but couldn't find anything.

I should have clarified that my previous post was about my attempts yesterday, so it would have been yesterday's build.

My brain has just been -- not as good as it used to be. So there's a good chance I'm doing something wrong somewhere.

[jamespetts]

The master branch has not had any updates since the 21st of September, so no newer build has any new code in it.

[martin509]

Thanks for the help! 

Unfortunately, this just gives me a different library error. (And I get the same one if I try to run from the just-downloaded simutrans-extended without replacing the four files with the linux.zip ones.) This time it's libSDL3.so.0.

I did a package manager search on the library name, but couldn't find anything.

I should have clarified that my previous post was about my attempts yesterday, so it would have been yesterday's build.

My brain has just been -- not as good as it used to be. So there's a good chance I'm doing something wrong somewhere.

Try linux-sdl2.zip. The default build uses recently added SDL3 support which is itself still fairly new, so chances are you have SDL2 installed.

[MobRules]

That worked! Up and running! Thanks