Unknown crash on publishing, game runs fine in WED

Hey JCL!

I'm visiting Seattle for a few weeks at the moment, for a company I am doing some contract work for on a gamestudio project. The lead programmer is having some issues that we cannot figure out. The game runs and works fine when we run it from WED, publishing the game to exe, the startup window finishes loading everything, as soon as it finishes the game crashes. We are using 7.50. Any versions above 7.50 refuse to work with this game and we have no idea why.

We have slaved over trying to get this to work for days, there has been no change or solution in sight.

Where can we even begin to diagnose the problem with this crash?

Thank you! Your help is much appreciated JCL.

-David

Sorry for bothering you with something that you are most probably very aware of:
the engine probably still misses a certain file. Maybe a model, maybe an external skin texture of a model.
One test, that you can do: put the exe and the relating files (mainly the ) into the project folder and start it from there - you should make a back up from that folder first, though.

About the point, that any version above 7.50 refuse to work with the game:
maybe, you use a certain entity in an unusual way, and the format of the entity has been changed since 7.50. I experienced something similar when switching from A6.341 to A6.60, because I used an animated terrain with a shifting texture as a river, saving the hmp as an mdl did the job.

(Even somehow senseless suggestions can help to get an idea how to solve a problem. That's the only reason that I dare to answer! )

Maybe some issue with Nexus?

It is likely neither nexus nor a missing file otherwise I think you would have been able to understand the error message, and need not post here.

When no error message appears it is probably a damaged file, I had the same crash once with a sound file that was crippled. The engine can really crash, without error message when a file is crippled. But you should see in the acklog.txt when it happens.

I don't know why your game does not start, but let me give a more general answer, because Gamestudio Support often gets similar questions: unfortunately this is a typical case of how NOT to solve a problem.

You told that your game only runs with a certain old version, but does not work with any other version. So you've decided to stick with that old version because that starts at least. This is an understandable but bad decision.

You're punished with a game that sometimes runs, sometimes not. You can't publish it, and even if you could, it probably would not work on many of your user's machines. Whenever you have a problem like this, FIND THE REASON. If your game does not run with the newest version, I guarantee that more problems will follow. No Gamestudio version had ever a problem to publish - unless there's something very wrong with your game, like a script bug causing random crashes, or a damaged file. You need to find and fix it. It should be able to run with the recent version without any error message before you can publish it.

The troubleshooting section in the manual gives you many suggestions that should suffice for finding the problem. Otherwise, please post here again with some more information, and you'll get help.

check and see if the .exe you create is all lower case for the file extension like myprogram.exe, if it is, try using windows explorer and changing it to myprogram.EXE and seeing if it works then.

An additional question:

After reading this the first time, I thought, dumb me, should have thought of this, but thinking over it, I ask:

What sort of setting tells the engine to write an acklog.txt, when I start the published/resourced game?

You need the -diag command line option for generating an acklog.txt. It does not matter whether the EXE is published or not.