Author Topic: Cannot start Alien Bundle purchased from Steam  (Read 1694 times)

Offline mortari

  • Newbie
  • *
  • Posts: 3
Cannot start Alien Bundle purchased from Steam
« on: July 15, 2011, 09:21:36 am »
I purchased the Alien Bundle a couple of weeks ago and finally had time to try out, but it " quits unexpectedly " immediately after I try to start it up.  I am running a newer iMac with OSX 10.6.7.  My computer meets all the requirements for the game.  I have deleted the game twice thinking I might have downloaded a corrupted file from Steam and reloaded ( digging through all my Steam files making sure ANYTHING that says AI was deleted ).  Using Steam I verified the integrity of the game cache and made sure everything was optimized and Steam says I should be ready to go.  Then I read the error report some...

Process:         AI War [14912]
Path:            /Users/JohnDoe/Library/Application Support/Steam/SteamApps/common/ai war fleet command/AIWar.app/Contents/MacOS/AI War
Identifier:      unity.Arcen Games, LLC.AI War
Version:         Unity Player version 3.0.0f5 (3.0.0f5)
Code Type:       X86 (Native)
Parent Process:  launchd [106]

Date/Time:       2011-07-15 07:32:42.589 -0500
OS Version:      Mac OS X 10.6.7 (10J869)
Report Version:  6

Interval Since Last Report:          361722 sec
Crashes Since Last Report:           26
Per-App Interval Since Last Report:  9 sec
Per-App Crashes Since Last Report:   23

Exception Type:  EXC_CRASH (SIGABRT)
Exception Codes: 0x0000000000000000, 0x0000000000000000
Crashed Thread:  0  Dispatch queue: com.apple.main-thread

Application Specific Information:
abort() called


I purchased Light of the Spire obviously in the bundle so I have 5.0.  Is my download from Steam trying to load Version 3 first causing the crash?  After reading the post of the gent who downloaded V3.0 trial and could not get it to start I wondered if I was in the same boat since it looks like I am crashing at the same place he was.  I will post more of the error report if Devs need, but I am sure it is something simple that I am just missing.



Offline x4000

  • Chris McElligott Park, Arcen Founder and Lead Dev
  • Arcen Staff
  • Zenith Council Member Mark III
  • *****
  • Posts: 31,651
Re: Cannot start Alien Bundle purchased from Steam
« Reply #1 on: July 15, 2011, 09:31:25 am »
Version 4.0 of AI War was the first version that even supported OSX, so that's definitely not what you're running into.  The version number you see there is the version number of the Unity 3D engine, not of AI War itself.

I'm still running OSX 10.6.6, so I'm installing 10.6.7 now to see if perhaps Apple broke something there.  But that would be an issue for the entire Unity 3D engine presumably, and I think I would have heard something about that, so I'm not expecting anything -- will let you know once that finishes, though.

It really does sound like it's not properly installed, to be honest.  I've had... some interesting experiences with the Steam client on OSX.  Often it tells me that it's verifying the cache files, but it obviously does no such thing because I've deleted all the files and it doesn't notice.  Things like that.  So I'm not overly trusting that it's actually downloaded everything properly.

One thing you could do to circumvent this is to actually install AI War 5.0 via our direct installer, and just point it to your /Users/JohnDoe/Library/Application Support/Steam/SteamApps/common/ai war fleet command/ folder as the installation target.  That would overwrite whatever the Steam client downloaded with a version that's definitely good, and then you're set to run it from there with the steam client, etc.  Assuming that Steam downloaded all the expansion images and music and such properly, you wouldn't need to download and use those installers separately.

The other thing you might try is running the file /Users/JohnDoe/Library/Application Support/Steam/SteamApps/common/ai war fleet command/AIWar.app directly and see what happens.  It could be that it really has been downloaded properly, and the Steam client is for some reason having trouble launching that.  I only saw that once, roughly a year ago, so that's less likely but it is easy to do.

I'll post again once I get up to 10.6.7, and let you know if the game runs under that.  It should, but it hasn't been tested since I hadn't noticed it was out.
Have ideas or bug reports for one of our games?  Mantis for Suggestions and Bug Reports. Thanks for helping to make our games better!

Offline x4000

  • Chris McElligott Park, Arcen Founder and Lead Dev
  • Arcen Staff
  • Zenith Council Member Mark III
  • *****
  • Posts: 31,651
Re: Cannot start Alien Bundle purchased from Steam
« Reply #2 on: July 15, 2011, 09:53:32 am »
Okay, I'm now actually running OSX 10.6.8, and I can confirm that there are no issues running the game.  My best bet is that the installation is corrupt despite what Steam is telling you, and using the direct installer to install over Steam's copy would solve that.  Hope that helps!
Have ideas or bug reports for one of our games?  Mantis for Suggestions and Bug Reports. Thanks for helping to make our games better!

Offline mortari

  • Newbie
  • *
  • Posts: 3
Re: Cannot start Alien Bundle purchased from Steam
« Reply #3 on: July 15, 2011, 10:28:56 am »
I have tried both suggested methods and have run into the same problem.  I have downloaded direct and over written, down loaded into my apps folder physically removed all the Steam download and moved in the direct down load, and tried launching directly from folder in case it was the Steam launcher.  Success is not in the cards today so I will just go fishing.  Thanks for the quick response and suggestions.

Offline x4000

  • Chris McElligott Park, Arcen Founder and Lead Dev
  • Arcen Staff
  • Zenith Council Member Mark III
  • *****
  • Posts: 31,651
Re: Cannot start Alien Bundle purchased from Steam
« Reply #4 on: July 15, 2011, 10:32:58 am »
Okay, looking back at the forums, I see there were a couple of people with this problem a bit further back: http://www.arcengames.com/forums/index.php/topic,7629.msg63501.html#msg63501

Best we can tell, it's some sort of driver thing on some specific OSX models, or messed up OpenGL.  If you make sure all your software updates are up to date, that would hopefully resolve it, but we'll see.  This is a pretty rare one!
Have ideas or bug reports for one of our games?  Mantis for Suggestions and Bug Reports. Thanks for helping to make our games better!

Offline mortari

  • Newbie
  • *
  • Posts: 3
Re: Cannot start Alien Bundle purchased from Steam
« Reply #5 on: July 15, 2011, 01:11:02 pm »
I have done all of my software updates, but I am still crashing.  I read the thread you linked and everything looks and sounds similar.

Offline x4000

  • Chris McElligott Park, Arcen Founder and Lead Dev
  • Arcen Staff
  • Zenith Council Member Mark III
  • *****
  • Posts: 31,651
Re: Cannot start Alien Bundle purchased from Steam
« Reply #6 on: July 15, 2011, 02:15:40 pm »
You might try seeing if ATI or NVidia have later graphics driver versions than what Apple is distributing directly.

Beyond that... are you running as an admin or as a regular user?  You might try running as an admin temporarily and see if that helps anything.  It shouldn't require that, but that's the only thing that I can think of other than the graphics driver or something in your OS being messed up.  OpenGL is part of the OS itself, so if that's messed up on OSX I'm not sure how to solve it.

It's handy that OSX doesn't have a system registry like windows, so it's less prone to getting broken over time, but there are still lots of system files in any OS, and if they get messed up that can cause downstream issues.  Given the rarity of this sort of report, and the fact that others with the same sort of computer are able to run it fine, I'm thinking that something must be messed up in the OSX install if it's not a driver thing -- but I'm not enough of an expert on OSX to know what to do about that. :/
Have ideas or bug reports for one of our games?  Mantis for Suggestions and Bug Reports. Thanks for helping to make our games better!