Hi there,

I just wanted to report that in 1.05 (Linux version, played on Ubuntu 9.10), when I move my cursor over the available options regarding sex, races etc, the texts to be displayed are wrong, half of them consisting solely of numbers (the commentary to "Male" is "1"; the commentary to "Female" is the proper commentary to "Male", the commentary for the first race on the list is "2", to the third one - "3", and so on). I wanted to start a new game to experience the added content, but I'd prefer to be able to read the info about my character's traits during character creation

Hm, I can't reproduce this (also on Linux) - all the mouseovers on the character creation screen seem to work fine for me. Were you playing around with language packs or anything? Did you maybe install the new version on top of an old version (instead of to a fresh dir)?

Nope, I haven't played with any language packs. I have 3 versions side-by-side in their own subdirectories. I finished the game in the 1_03b version and I don't see the bug (screen no. 1). To my surprise I noticed that the 1_04a_beta version I still have ALSO produces the bug... the next two screens, which display the bug, are from the 1_05 version I downloaded today and which I'm running from its own directory. (The same bug is, as I said, displayed by the 1_04a_beta version.)

version 1.03b:


version 1.05:




(The images are clickable)

Weird. Does temporarily moving ~/.basilisk_games out of the way help things? (Or in particular just the file ~/.basilisk_games/book2_saved_games/eb2.cfg) Does it say "Language: english" out on the main page?

I'm out of ideas if that doesn't actually do the trick. Seems like there's gotta be something else odd going on...

Thanks for the reply! Well, to be sure I just renamed the whole directory. I had to enter my registration code again and the game started full-screen, but unfortunately YES, the bug is still in operation. And yes, it says "Language: english" in the main menu.

Is there any other place in which Eschalon puts its files? Still, 1_03b does not have the bug on my machine, and 1_05 has it...

There was a format change to the file that stores the character editor text, sometime around 1.04. As long as you are using the correct datapak file with the correct executable, it should be fine.

Version 1.05 on Linux works completely fine here. I think you have mixed a newer executable with an older datapak file. Erase all program files (except for your saved game) and re-download the latest Linux build. You probably need a fresh install.

Well, OK. I'll delete everything and reinstall again, although, as I said, I'm running a freshly downloaded game out of its own subdirectory. I'll try to have this done this evening / tomorrow.

edit: I just installed 1.05 on an Ubuntu 10.04 machine I use at work (don't tell anyone) and it works fine. I wonder what's wrong with my setup at home.

Honestly, guys, I have no idea what's going on. As I wrote above, I checked that a fresh install on a computer at work works fine.

Back home, I extracted a freshly downloaded tar.gz into a new directory on a separate drive. I then renamed the eb2.cfg file from the .basilisk_games directory in my $HOME. Unfortunately, I'm getting the bug again.

After that I ran 1_03b from a different directory and it checked that it runs fine.

How can a completely new copy of the game on my harddrive become somehow polluted? Where does the game look for its files? Apart from renaming / deleting the .basilisk_games directory, what else can I do?


In other words: what should I delete from my system to be 100% sure a new installation of Eschalon 2 will run properly? I seem to have established that deleting the .basilisk_games directory is not enough...

Yeah, that's you and us, too. :)

I doubt that anything in ~/.basilisk_games would make a difference, really; that was just a shot in the dark.

How exactly are you launching the games? Do you "cd" to the dir and then run "./eschalon_book_2" so that you're sure you're running the copy in your current directory?

This is just a shot in the dark too, but here's the md5sum and sha1sum of my 1.05 datapak:

I run a script runme.sh with the following:

This is how I've been running the game since its release, and in 1.03b it gives me no problems. I have to do so because the new build still requires GLIBC_2.11!

I checked and my cheksums are identical.

Hmmm... I don't know how Book 2 deals with translations and the like, but if it uses some kind of system calls to determine what translation to use, those functions would be a part of glibc - I wonder if your "sandbox" version of glibc is what's causing the problems here. Like it's reporting data that it shouldn't necessarily report and Book 2 is getting confused about it and ending up with the behavior that you've seen.

It'd be interesting to see if this is happening for anyone else who's doing the sandbox-glibc thing.

I GOT IT, I think. Thanks! will post more in a sec

edit: so, mystery solved. Back in may, I used Obiwan's solution in this post to run the game. I of course forgot the details after 5 months... but the method includes making symbolic links to the game's datapak, launchscreenpak and general.cfg INSIDE THE lib DIRECTORY of the glibc 2.11 directory! That's why the game was using the old paks! I made new links and it works perfectly well now!

I'm sorry to have drawn your attention to a problem which I should've been able to solve myself, but, again, thanks a lot for your help!