Outpost 2 Help!!!! (game crashed when saving) new ver of OP2 1.3.8

[Ricstarr]

Hello,
 I have been playing outpost 2 for awhile now and all of a sudden when I go to save or load the game freezes and crashes!I don't know what to do, I've tried compatibility options, no dice.. I have win 10 64 bit comp any help would be greatly appreciated.
                                                                                         
                                                                                    -Richard M.

[leeor_net]

Does the game completely barf or does it generate a save file? If you can provide a save file it will be helpful in figuring out where the issue may be.

[Hooman]

I've not heard of nor experienced this before. I'm afraid the problem description is a little light on details, so not much I can do to diagnose from the above.

If the game crashes, Windows usually dumps information about the crash, including the EIP value (Extended Instruction Pointer), which shows the crash location, and hopefully part of the stack as well. If it does, paste that here.

If the game hangs without crashing, you can try running it under a debugger, and then pausing it when it hangs. The debugger should display the current state of the program. Look in the registers pane for the EIP value. That should indicate what part of the code it is stuck in. If it's hung, it might help to run and pause it a few times to get a few sample EIP values. A dump of the stack pane might also help, especially if EIP was an unusable value, such as 0. A good free debugger is OllyDbg.


As an aside, maybe we should work on some kind of crash dump auto reporting module for the game. Would be more difficult to handle hangs though.

[Ricstarr]

Thank you for the speedy reply, umm unfortunately I'm not the best with computer jargon what you typed went over my head sorry again not as well versed in programing workings and editing games/programs but if it helps when I started OP2 it gave me an error saying :    Logger.cpp, Line 18: unable to create or open outpost2log.txt    the game starts I can play but when I go to press the save button the game locks up all I can do is close the game hope that can help thanks again for your input.                         
                                                                    -Richard M.

[Hooman]

Oh, you might have a write permission problem. Where is your Outpost 2 folder? And is it writable? If the folder is not writable, it may crash when trying to write the saved game file.

[leeor_net]

Sounds like we need to add a permissions check there in the code to prevent hanging like that versus assuming write permissions.

[lordpalandus]

Where is the folder of the game stored on your hard drive?

Windows 10 is very finicky about programs in program files if you try to save there. Only steam / other distributors manage to get around the problem.

Also, if the game folder is in too many other folders, it can refuse to save as well. I think it needs to be nested in 20 folders though for that to happen.

I also got that same message, but I had no issues saving the game. But I'm using Win8.1 64 bit, so that may be why it works for me, but not you.

[Hooman]

New programs have trouble saving things to Program Files on modern versions of Windows due to write protections. However, because Outpost 2 is old, and there were compatibility shims put in place for older software, writes from Outpost 2 to Program Files should be silently redirected to the within the user's home folder using UAC Virtualization. For details, check out Raymond Chen's article I saved some files into the Program Files directory, and now they’re gone!.

I'm not sure if the same applies to more recently compiled DLLs used by Outpost 2, though I assumed it would be the same for them as the host executable file. Sounds like we might have an issue with the log file though. I would like more details if possible.