Mono failed to load .dll error

[Vikingfisk]

I bought the anniversary edition of AI war fleet command on steam, and whenever I try to start it up it two error windows pops up saying: "Weird virtualquery result"
and "Fatal gc error- mono failed to load .dll"
I have the crash report in the game directory.
I've tried disabling the anti-virus and firewalls with no luck, also restarting the computer and using memory diagnostics seemed no good either.

[x4000]

Awesome, this should be an easy one: Steam didn't download the entire game properly.  Just do a Verify on your local files (in the Properties for the game's entry in Steam), and Steam will find the missing files and re-download them.  This happens every so often with Steam, and can lead to all sorts of craziness as game engines tend to freak out when part of their required files are mysteriously missing.

Hope that helps!

[keith.lamothe]

(edit:ninja'd; definitely try what Chris said first, but if that doesn't work try the below)

Welcome to the game and to the forums Sorry about the troubles you're encountering.

I've never seen that particular error message and all I can find via google is people reporting this on other games and either getting no response or a developer saying that they've never heard of it before and can't find much on google   It does appear to come from the garbage collector code.

That said, in one case it was a steam version and the developer suggested trying a non-steam install and it worked, so you can give this a try:

1) Go to your steam AIW directory (probably C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\AI War Fleet Command\ ) and run AIWar.exe directly, not through steam.
2) If that doesn't work, first make sure steam is not running at all, then retry.  Just for diagnosis, really, not expecting that this would be a real solution.
3) If #1 didn't work, download and install the base game from here: http://www.arcengames.com/w/index.php/aiwar-downloads
4) Run that non-steam copy, making sure it's not the steam one (steam being on or off should not matter for this.
5) If #4 works, copy the C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\AI War Fleet Command\RuntimeData\Expansions\ folder from your steam install to your non-steam install
6) Run the non-steam copy again.  If it works you're all set as far as the game itself.  You would not get steam integration in terms of the overlay, achievements, etc, though, but I'm not sure how much we can do to make that part work.  Anyway, first step is getting a game that works

Let me know how it goes.

Thanks,
Keith

[Vikingfisk]

Thanks for the quick response!
Yeah I validated and re-validated the files with steam like there was no tomorrow, didn't work...
So currently I am downloading the non-steam version of the base game.

I will follow Keith's steps and see if that resolves it.

Will report back.

[x4000]

Hmm, hopefully that does it then!  We did have one other person say that for whatever reason Steam just wouldn't download things right for them, but then after installing our version over top of the Steam version all was well.  That just blows my mind that that could happen to one (now probably two) people and not to the other 96,000+ people.  Obviously it happens, since it did happen, but I just can't fathom what the mechanism of it happening would be.

[keith.lamothe]

One thing that might possibly be involved is if you have Mono installed on your machine and the game is getting confused about whether to use the embedded stuff (shipped with the game) or the stuff you already had installed... but given the architecture of how Unity incorporates mono with the build I don't think that should be possible.  But one never knows

[x4000]

I'm fairly certain I have Mono installed, or at least I did at one point during which we were starting to use Unity... I'm pretty sure.

[Vikingfisk]

Yeah there was several hits on google about discussions regarding wether anti-virus softwares or other security programs were interfering for unity, or steam was the one to blame for messing up the files.
Regardless still waiting for the non-steam version.

Hopefully that shall fix it.

[Vikingfisk]

Nope, the non-steam version did not work
Same as before, with the error messages.
I don't know if the crash report for the non-steam version would be any use, if would look at it.

[keith.lamothe]

That's... really odd.  I have no idea why it would be doing that.  Something more than 100,000 people own this game and this is the first time (iirc) I've seen those error messages.  My suspicion is therefore that something is odd about the setup of your particular machine, though obviously that explanation doesn't help you run the game   Do you have another machine to test it on?

Just checking, but when you look at the AIW directories (both steam and non-steam) do you see a "AIWar_Data" directory?  In that directory do you see a "Mono" directory?  In that subdirectory, do you see a "mono.dll" file?

[x4000]

Also, if you look inside the AIWar_Data directory, there is an output.log.  Can you post that?  And then inside the RuntimeData folder, there ought to be several different error logs.  Can you post those also?

Beyond that it really sounds like something is messing with the game engine itself in some way.  The reason I thought this would be a super easy fix was because usually that's just a sign that the entire engine isn't there.  Like Keith noted, this is the first time we've had this sort of error where that was not the case.  We did have some issues with false detection with the 2011 version of Kaspersky, but they fixed their issue (it was affecting a lot of games) and their later versions have had no problems.

It's particularly odd that the problem is happening this soon in the process.  Right then it's just trying to load all the dlls for the engine itself, which is very harmless; it may not have even gotten to our game code yet by the time it dies (if there are no error logs in the RuntimeData folder, then that would be why).  When Kaspersky was nailing the game, it gave a different error because it was actively trying to kill the "check for updates" call that is by default on.

So I'm really not sure what is up here.

[Vikingfisk]

Here are the output log, but the runtimedata contains several logs like sysrequirements and such.

[Vikingfisk]

Sorry the logs in the steam version? Or the non steam version?
Anyways there was a debuglog in the non steam version, but not in the steam version?

I attached it.

[x4000]

Hmm, the logs from either version are fine.  What is odd is that output.log that you posted is empty.

And there are some errors in the other error log you posted, but they are harmless errors and also from the 17th, not today.  Were you previously able to run this?

[keith.lamothe]

The output_log.txt is blank, so I guess nothing made it there.  The ArcenDebugLog.txt file contains some entries from 3 or 4 days ago that look like it was trying to run an older version of the dll with the new language files (those taunt names are not used anymore, as they've been renamed).

That's kind of strange, actually: you say that's from the non-steam version?  That you just installed today?  The timestamp on the most recent message in there is from "6/17/2013 8:50:10 AM".  Just curious: is your computer clock set to a different day?  Or perhaps that log file was inadvertently included in the installer, dunno