Fire! Crash...

[Blackadar1]

[&:]

I purchased the game today, digital download (with the disks on the way). Unfortunately, I can't get it to run. The download worked fine and the install worked ok. When I boot the game, the first error I get is about the Indeo Codec not being present on my machine. Of course, the website the message sends you to asks for money. I've checked other threads and found a link to the old free codec. I downloaded it and...it says I have a more current version.

Ok, so I skip that error and get to the loading screen. I hear the music in the background, see the bar load and when they yell "fire", the game crashes to desktop. So, again, I checked the threads on this board and, yes, I have Adobe flash. I redownloaded it to no avail.

I've been mucking with this for about 4 hours now, which is pretty much the limit of my patience. I've loaded my dxdiag file to this post, but I don't know how much good it'll do. I've tried everything I could find on this forum and I'm going to go insane if I hear the loading music one more time.

As it is, I ordered the DL and the hard copy version of the game. I'd appreciate it if you'd hold off sending me the hard copy because there's no need if we can't get it to work.

[Gil R.]

It'll definitely work, assuming that your computer meets the various specs. No one has not been able to get it to run once they updated the right video drivers, etc. For now, don't waste more time -- sometime tonight or tomorrow morning someone with technical expertise will be able to help.

[Blackadar1]

Another hour today spent to no avail...including redownloading and reinstalling the game. 

[Gil R.]

No, no, no -- do not waste a single second on this until you hear from the technical people. It's clear that you need to update stuff on your computer that has NOTHING to do with the game itself. I'm not qualified to tell you what it is, so please wait until one of them sees your posts.

[ericbabe]

One person whose game crashed at the same place as yours found that he also needed to download Adobe Shockwave as well as Adobe Flash.  I'm not sure why he needed to do this, as on our "clean install" machines we only need to install Flash -- and in our tests in which Flash is not properly installed the loading sequence merely shows a white blank rectangle, but in his case the Flash components were definitely causing a crash which he seems to have solved by installing Shockwave.  So please try installing Shockwave.

[Blackadar1]

Thanks for the suggestion, but I already have Shockwave installed.

[ericbabe]

It does seem to be crashing at the point in the game in which the Flash animation is being called, so I still tend to suspect this is the problem.  If you don't mind, I'm going to build a special version of the game that bypasses the initial flash code.  Would you mind testing this to see whether the Flash drivers are the problem here?  Send me an e-mail at ericbabe@west-civ.com and then I can send you a new copy of the FOF .exe and .dll files.

[ericbabe]

I'll make it an .ini file option and include it in future builds...

[Blackadar1]

ORIGINAL: ericbabe

It does seem to be crashing at the point in the game in which the Flash animation is being called, so I still tend to suspect this is the problem. If you don't mind, I'm going to build a special version of the game that bypasses the initial flash code. Would you mind testing this to see whether the Flash drivers are the problem here? Send me an e-mail at ericbabe@west-civ.com and then I can send you a new copy of the FOF .exe and .dll files.

To be truthful, I'd really rather not. I had a bad experience on something similar many years ago and ended up with a corrupted hard drive. But the only alternative is to ask for a refund, so I'll give it a shot. I've sent you an email.