AI War: Fleet Command starts up with no window (MacOS)

[mpounsett]

I just picked up AI War: Fleet Command for MacOS from Steam.  I'm running whatever the latest version is (updated through Steam).  When I start the game I briefly get a window that appears on my center display (I've got three) which quickly disappears before I can read what's on it.. though it looks vaguely like loading progress text.  I then hear what seems to be the intro music, but I've got nothing on screen.

The AI War application and Window menus are visible in the menu bar.  I've tried selecting the Full Screen option from the Window menu, but that has no effect.

Any suggestions?

[x4000]

Hmm, that is a new one on me. My fist thought is to try verifying your steam cache for the game, to make sure it didn't corrupt any files it downloaded. Usually the oddest launch bugs are caused by that, and the fix is super simple.

Beyond that... The main thing I can think of is that maybe OSX put it on some funky virtual screen? You might try hitting f8 and looking through your virtual screens to see if it is on any of those. My best guess at the moment is a corrupt download, though.

Hope that helps!

[mpounsett]

Hmm, that is a new one on me. My fist thought is to try verifying your steam cache for the game, to make sure it didn't corrupt any files it downloaded. Usually the oddest launch bugs are caused by that, and the fix is super simple.

Okay.  How do I verify that?  What's the fix if something is corrupted?

Beyond that... The main thing I can think of is that maybe OSX put it on some funky virtual screen? You might try hitting f8 and looking through your virtual screens to see if it is on any of those. My best guess at the moment is a corrupt download, though.

I don't have Spaces enabled, so there are no virtual desktops for it to open on.

Thanks!

[x4000]

If something is corrupted, Steam can figure that out and fix it itself, usually.  I've had some trouble with that on my mac, but in general it's supposed to work.

Right-click or command-click the AI War entry in Steam, and then hit Properties.  Then look under the Local Files tab of that, and hit Verify Integrity of Game Cache.

It takes a while, but it will verify that it didn't munge anything up on the download.

[mpounsett]

Right-click or command-click the AI War entry in Steam, and then hit Properties.  Then look under the Local Files tab of that, and hit Verify Integrity of Game Cache.

Okay, thanks.  It says "All files successfully validated."  It actually runs quite quickly (four or five seconds?).

[x4000]

Humm, that is really unexpectedly fast, but sounds good if it fixed the issue.   Is the game running now?

[mpounsett]

Humm, that is really unexpectedly fast, but sounds good if it fixed the issue.   Is the game running now?

Oh, no sorry I thought that was implied.  My bad.  There's no difference in the behaviour of the game.

[x4000]

Hmm, that's odd.  I would suggest trying to run the game manually, rather than from Steam.

You can find those files under /Users/Yourname/Library/Application Support/Steam/SteamApps/common/ai war fleet command/

Running AIWar.app takes Steam out of the equation, in case there is some sort of funky conflict going on there.

Hopefully that works, but in case not I really wonder if the game is launching on some display that is currently disabled or something.  If you have an extra display that is sometimes on, but not in this specific instance, for example.  I'm not an expert on the Mac, and I've never heard of anything like this (usually the game either runs or it doesn't), so I'm kind of shooting in the dark.  Sounds like you have a mildly usual setup, but that's something that the engine we use -- Unity 3D -- should more than be able to handle.

If worst comes to worst, you can always install the game directly from our website, using our OSX installer, on top of the folder above.  That way, if Steam did corrupt the files and it just can't tell, you can fix them that way.  I really can't see that Steam would have been able to check anything useful in 4-5 seconds, it's just not possible.  Normally a verification takes 10-20 minutes or more.

Hope that helps...

[mpounsett]

I get the same behaviour running it manually.

Is there a debug mode I can open the game in?   I ran into this once before with a game that just hadn't been tested on a system with multiple displays -- it was designed to open full screen by default, and would get confused by the multiple displays -- running in debug mode pinpointed the problem.

I'm downloading the demo from Vulturis now.. I'll give that a try as well.

[x4000]

There's not a debug mode that you can launch in, unfortunately.

But, what you can do is update your settings.dat file, if you see that in the RuntimeData folder under the AI War folder.  There is a line that probably says IsFullscreen:1.  Just change the 1 to a 0.  If you don't have a settings.dat file, you can use the attached one (normally don't post a settings.dat file, as it contains license keys; this one just has the parts you need in it).

[mpounsett]

Yep, that fixed it.  It loads up in windowed mode, and from the looks of things it should work fine.

Thanks!

I'm guessing this means there's a bug in fullscreen mode on multi-display machines. 

[x4000]

Awesome that it works!

In terms of multi-display screens, I actually have a multi-display machine on windows, and the game works fine.  But I only have one screen for my mac, so it might be something OSX-specific.  I'm pretty sure there have been some other folks with dual monitors on the mac at least, so there might be just something specific with your drivers or who knows what; there's always edge cases.  But at any rate, the unity engine started out on the mac, so they ought to know how to handle that!   But that doesn't mean there isn't a bug, to be sure.

Anyway, glad it worked out.

[Random Chaos]

I wanted to indicate I had this exact same issue. The settings.dat file fixed it.

Looking at my console log:

8/14/11 1:11:23 PM   AI War[90098]   AI War(90098,0xa09a6540) malloc: *** error for object 0x3478bb2: pointer being freed was not allocated
*** set a breakpoint in malloc_error_break to debug
8/14/11 1:11:23 PM   AI War[90098]   unknown error code: invalid display
8/14/11 1:11:23 PM   AI War[90098]   kCGErrorFailure: Set a breakpoint @ CGErrorBreakpoint() to catch errors as they are logged.
8/14/11 1:11:23 PM   AI War[90098]   unknown error code: invalid share context

AI War error reporting log:

8/14/2011 1:04:05 PM (5.000)
-----------------------------------
ErrorsReportedByEngine-----------------------------------
8/14/2011 1:04:05 PM (5.000)
-----------------------------------Error-----------------------------------Log String: Unable to create OpenGL context.
Stack Trace:

(there was no stack trace)

I also am getting this exact same error with another game that uses Unity3D, so it appears to be a Unity issue with fullscreen on some Macs. Reference: http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/67135-Player-crashing-on-launch-something-to-do-with-screen-size-and-windowing

(FYI: the system specs linked from that Unity thread are my system's)

[Nalgas]

Huh.  I was going to say that I have used the Mac version with two monitors before without problems, and I'm reasonably sure that it was running in fullscreen mode on one of them, not windowed, but it was a while ago, so I may or may not be remembering correctly.  Probably pre-5.0 anyway, now that I think about it, so not all that useful other than from a "When did things go wrong?" point of view.  I'll try hooking it up to the other monitor and see what happens with the current version just out of curiosity after I get something to eat, because it's been a while since I've bothered to hook my MacBook up to the external display.  I'm usually lazy these days and just use the built-in one when I'm stuck playing AI War on here instead of my desktop.  Heh.

[Nalgas]

After further investigation, it does still work for me with two displays in 5.whatever-the-most-recent-version-was-last-time-I-played-on-here-earlier-this-summer.  What really surprised me is that it even mostly works running at 1200x1920.  I am not making that up.  I just happened to have the monitor rotated vertically because of something else I was using it for the other day, and I figured I'd test it that way just to see how badly it'd break.  Other than some of the buttons drawing at the bottom of the screen but having their clickable area closer to the middle of it (the "left side" ones, like map/ctrl/stats and the global ones for monitoring/managing different types of ships and energy reactors and whatnot) while others just entirely show up in the middle of the screen, both clickable region and where they're drawn (like the galaxy map filter controls and the planetary info popups when you mouse over stuff on the galaxy map), I made it through the entire first tutorial in the OS X version, in fullscreen, on dual monitors, playing on the one that was running in 1200x1920, with no problems other than minor graphical/UI glitches like that.  I really did not expect that to work.