***HELP!!*** Book I won't start anymore

Macintosh support forum for Eschalon: Book I
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Agamemnon
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***HELP!!*** Book I won't start anymore

Post by Agamemnon »

I folks,
I have a major issue here.

I've been playing Book I a lot over the last week and earlier today while in the middle of playing, my MacBook Pro ran out of battery and shut down.

On restart I didn't notice straight away, but my system time got reset back to 1/1/2001. I reset my time, restarted the machine and restarted Eschlon...

Now Eschalon won't start at all. When I launch the start Window shows up Empty, with a spinning coloured-wheel mouse Icon.

Activity monitor says the app isn;t responding and I have to Force-Quit to stop it.

I found some files in the saved game folder with modified dates at 1/1/2001 I did a 'touch' on them to reset the modified date/time, but it still won't start.

Are there other files accessed at start time where dates are compared that I should touch?

basic situation: CAN'T start at all. I'm resigned not to losing my saved games, but I do want to play.

please help...
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SpottedShroom
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Re: ***HELP!!*** Book I won't start anymore

Post by SpottedShroom »

Try renaming your save directory out of the way and see if Book I will start. If so, then the problem's the game program itself - delete the folder and download it again.

If the problem is with the saved games, make a copy of the directory and try deleting the contents of each slot directory one at a time. When you get to the one that's causing problems, the game should start again.
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Agamemnon
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Re: ***HELP!!*** Book I won't start anymore

Post by Agamemnon »

Hi,
Yep, I had tried that already. The game creates a new "Saved Games Folder" when it tries to start with empty slots, but still no joy.

I did a spotlight search on my disk to find other files that were affected when my machine shutdown unexpectedly and Eschlon wasn't the only app affected. Pretty much anything that was running at the time got corrupted.

My first time in 5 years to have corrupted files on a Mac so a surprise for me.

In the end I decided to restore the machine from a backup I had from last weekend. I've lost some game time but other than that I'm ok now.

As a note for the developers on Book III, it might be worth checking the logic during load where file dates are compared.

anyhow issue is now resolved by restoring a machine backup.

Thanks for taking the time to reply!

Aga.
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BasiliskWrangler
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Re: ***HELP!!*** Book I won't start anymore

Post by BasiliskWrangler »

Have you removed the game, then do fresh install?

We initialize several modules when the game starts- I'm not aware of any being so date sensitive that would cause a crash. I'll have to dig out the source code and take a look. I assume that you have properly reset your system clock?
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Agamemnon
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Re: ***HELP!!*** Book I won't start anymore

Post by Agamemnon »

Hi BW,

No, I didn't try a fresh install. That was next on my list until I discovered other apps were affected as well.

The game was hung rather than crashed. It had got as far as creating a new "Saved Games folder" and displayed the border for the "Start" window, but no content in there. just the Mac spinning rainbow wheel.

If I was thinking like the developer I am I should have posted the thread dump of the hung process. I looked at it myself to see if I could figure out what was going on. I also looked at the open files list to get some hints. Thats how I discovered the bad dates on the save game files in the first place.

If I get a hang again, I'll post those details so you can add a "weird situation" test case for the dev branch :)

all the best,
Aga.
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Agamemnon
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Re: ***HELP!!*** Book I won't start anymore

Post by Agamemnon »

Note: this is a Mac related post, but I don't know how to move it to the Mac forum :(

Just in case anybody else gets this issue. The Only solution is to restore a backup of your machine.

If you want to try to recover...Before you do eventually end up doing a restore, you can try the following:
- open Disk Utility
- run verify permissions
- run repair permissions

try to start the game again.

If it doesn't work, then just do the restore like I said earlier.

If you don't have a backup of your machine. then you are in a whole lot of trouble (you may use other words starting with S or C) that is not related to any Eschalon games: get a Coffee: Strong.
If other programs were affected... wait for a few days...

In Fact, if other programs were affected...
You *will* now have to reinstall mountain Lion. I Did have to do this and it killed me until I accepted it.

After this experience, if you don't start doing backups,
I have no, I mean no, sympathy.

sorry about that,
you gotta get some acceptance into your life, or else you just die.
Aga
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