L++: Networked multiplayer Lemmings

[ccexplore]

Vista, okay... unfortunately I don't have a machine with Vista to test it myself. From what I've read about it on the net, I believe the problem might come from the inaccessibility of certain directories under Vista.

L++ tries to access files inside its own subdirectories when it loads the sprites, levels or configuration files, or when it writes changes to them. network/, orig/ and test/ are subdirectories of (lpp's own folder)/levels/.<snip>

I've run other games on Vista that reads/writes files under their own subdirectories and they work fine, so I'm a little skeptical that's the cause here.  Moreover, if it's indeed the cause, then wouldn't simply running the program elevated take care of it?  (To run a program elevated in Vista, right-click on the icon and select "Run As Administrator", then click OK on the UAC prompt that pops up.  I think there are also compatibility settings you can set to always run the program elevated.)

[Simon]

Yes, after RubiX trying all these tips, it still did not work for him. Now I believe it's a bug of L++ itself, especially as you can run other such games.

-- Simon

[RubiX]

Yea, tried lots of different tests I could think of to get it running on vista.  I'm just sticking with playing it on my laptop for now, no big deal, it plays nice on it.

InsaneSteve, and anyone else up for it, I (and probably my brother) will be on at 9pm PST tonight (live near Vancouver BC Canada) If you are able to join at this time, would be great.

ICQ:       7174474
MSN:      rubix01 AT gmail.com (trying to save myself from the address being picked up by spambots)

Seeya

[ccexplore]

Hi all, looking forward to doing some Multiplayer lemmings with you guys, but notice I cannot play the game right away.   Looking through the forum I see a guy named Giga saying something about 'not seeing sprites'
I think he should have went into more detail to explain his problem as this is probably what I am seeing also.

:-   The game does open, I get the screen asking for my name, then the menu for single / multi etc
Though next screen is the options to select a level.   Network/orig/test  are unclickable buttons, so I cannot select anything to play.  The only buttons you can click on this screen is the Edit button and the back button.

So , tried extracting again, same issues.
Tried on another computer.  Works great.

Issue appears to be unplayable on Win Vista
Other computer = WIN XP

Thanks.

Well, I've tried it on a Vista computer, extracting the contents of the zip file from http://ewigeliste.ew.funpic.de/lpp/download.php to c:\lpp.  It's working fine for me, I don't even need to elevate.  I've also tried to see what happens if I remove the subfolders under levels, or changing their access permissions (ie. deny write access or list directory access, etc.), and so forth.  None of them replicate a situation where the buttons show up but do not respond to clicking.  Either the buttons aren't there at all (eg. when I remove the folders, or deny "list directory" access to the levels folder), or clicking on them leads to an empty listing consistent with the restricted permissions.

I've even tried full-screen vs. windowed and encountered no differences.

I could try other things but at this point, I think you'll need Simon to add some additional debugging output in his code to get a better idea of where/how it's failing specifically on RubiX's Vista computer.  It may very well have nothing to do with Vista per se (though it's always a good idea to be suspicious of it ).

Actually, one more idea: one thing that's worth checking on the bad computer is to see if you have a copy of alleg42.dll (or maybe just alleg<something>.dll) in c:\windows\system32 folder or the like.  The problem being that the copy in the windows system folders may be overriding the one in the lpp folder (well I'm not 100% sure to be honest, it may depend on exactly how the game loads the DLL), and if it's an older (or possibly newer, if they did a poor job keeping Allegro backward compatible with older versions) version it could cause things to not work in the game.

If you found no such file in the windows system folder, then it's probably something else.  If you do find one, don't delete it though since you may have some other programs that need it.  We can figure out what to do if that's in fact what's happening on that computer.

[RubiX]

Ah thanks for testing it on your own copy of vista , that really is interesting to hear it worked immediately.   Ive tried a lot of different things with no results on buttons being clickable on my desktop computer, and that's my gaming computer which I've never run into a compatibility issue until now, how odd.

I did look for anything in system32 starting with 'alle'  incase I can find that file you were mentioning, but nope, does not exist.

Thanks for your info , this has gone from what I believed was an obvious O/S compatibility issue, to likely something just on my side.  lol

[chaos_defrost]

Ok, I'm on if you want to play some and it's working. I've not had problems getting it to work with Vista, but I'm not great with tech stuff so I can't give any better advice than ccexplore gave, sorry.

[RubiX]

Fun games last night, thanks for joining! 

[RubiX]

Just wondering, seeing as 2 of u guys just tried it on vista, are you running 32 or 64 bit vista O/S ?

Also, did you do more than just try run the game? The game does run for me, its changing directories to try choose a level, that is where this is not working on my vista64 desktop.

Im still fine with playing this on myXP  laptop, but would be nice to find what is going on with my main computer lol.

[ccexplore]

Also, did you do more than just try run the game? The game does run for me, its changing directories to try choose a level, that is where this is not working on my vista64 desktop.

It was pretty clear from my post that I specifically tried to repro your issue with changing directories to choose a level.  But now that you said it's Vista 64-bit, yeah, that's definitely a different platform than the 32-bit Vista that I tested on.

Unfortunately I don't think I have any 64-bit Vista computers I can access or borrow at the moment, though I might be able to try it on a 64-bit Win7 computer and see if anything bad happens.  It's still possible that something else other than the 64-bit Vista is causing your problems.

============

Incidentally, since now you mentioned it's 64-bit Vista, instead of looking in c:\windows\system32 for alleg*.dll, I need you to look in c:\windows\SysWOW64 instead.

[RubiX]

Ok thanks.

Yea I should have checked there myself actually, but nope, not there also.
Just did a full search through the HD for files starting with that, and it only came across an alleg file in the l++ dir.

Me and simon have been messaging each-other and we do find that its just something to do with a call to changing directories.
If I place level files into the root dir for l++  /levels/    I can see them and play them fine.

[RubiX]

Messing about more with some things in the /levels/ dir I have come across some very wierd things.

If I create my own folders/ subdirs such as /levels/test junk/testasdf/blah/blahblah/   
I can Put level files into that folder, run the game and click through those folders and play levels that I placed in that folder normally.

I can move up / down parent folders inside my own created folders.

So I thought, ok I'll just do a copy of all the real folders inside /levels/ and I should be able to navigate them, but nope, wouldnt let me click on them once they were put in my new folder.

 So I tried renaming the folders of /levels/orig    /levels/network   /levels/test   thinking thats got to do it, but nope, it sees the renames but I cannot click them lol.

So I did a new test, inside /levels/orig/   I made a new folder and subdirs here and placed some levels inside , nope wont go into the /levels/orig folder  as its part of the original directory structure, like it is untouchable.

So ONLY if you create your own folders coming from root /levels/    can you actually navigate anything.   Soon as you try copy file structures from the /levels//  dir into your new created folder will things not work. 

So I could make new names up for each dir and subdir and copy the level files into my own named folders and have it work my own way like this.   

 But nothing of the initial folder structure can be copied , it pretty much just locks my new folders out as soon as something is tried to be replicated into a new folder tree that Im making.

(so yea, it does appear this directory issue is only affecting Vista 64 bit, for anyone else wondering what I am doing here)

[ccexplore]

I'm a little confused by your descriptions.  The ./levels/test/ folder for example only contains levels; there are no subfolders, so not much of a structure to speak of.  If you create a new folder under ./levels/ and then copy (don't just move, make a copy) the individual level files inside the ./levels/test/ folder into your newly created folder, can you navigate to the newly created folder or not?  What about copying just a single one of the ./levels/test/ level files into the new folder?

[ccexplore]

Unfortunately I don't think I have any 64-bit Vista computers I can access or borrow at the moment, though I might be able to try it on a 64-bit Win7 computer and see if anything bad happens.

I did not have this problem on 64-bit Win7.  Unzipping everything into c:\lpp, I am able to navigate freely into all of the initial folder structure.

Incidentally, do you use Window to unzip or some other program?  (In all my tests I just unzipped with Windows.)

[RubiX]

I'm a little confused by your descriptions.  The ./levels/test/ folder for example only contains levels; there are no subfolders, so not much of a structure to speak of.  If you create a new folder under ./levels/ and then copy (don't just move, make a copy) the individual level files inside the ./levels/test/ folder into your newly created folder, can you navigate to the newly created folder or not?  What about copying just a single one of the ./levels/test/ level files into the new folder?

Yea this is seriously confusing to explain it properly hehe. 

""If you create a new folder under ./levels/ and then copy (don't just move, make a copy) the individual level files inside the ./levels/test/ folder into your newly created folder, can you navigate to the newly created folder or not?""  <--- Yes to this.  I Can navigate to it and play these levels placed inside my newly created folder. 

But If I did just copy a folder and its subdirs such as    levels/network/2player/1. Lemmings/ into my new folder named /levels/test2/   This will now fail, nothing will be clickable, not even the folder named 'test2' anymore.

example: So if I made an empty folder named /levels/test2/    and run the game, i can navigate to this folder.
If I then copied the tree of /levels/test/   and  put it in my new folder so it looks like this now
/levels/test2/test/ ,and then ran the game,  I would then not even be able to click on anything to navigate it, like I could before doing a copy of that 'test' folder.     

Very strange.

[RubiX]

Unfortunately I don't think I have any 64-bit Vista computers I can access or borrow at the moment, though I might be able to try it on a 64-bit Win7 computer and see if anything bad happens.

I did not have this problem on 64-bit Win7.  Unzipping everything into c:\lpp, I am able to navigate freely into all of the initial folder structure.

Incidentally, do you use Window to unzip or some other program?  (In all my tests I just unzipped with Windows.)

I use winrar actually for my compressed files.  Just incase this did have something to do with the extraction, i'll just try doing a test with windows itself also for unzipping.