General Category > AVWW Technical Support

Neither AVWW 1 nor 2 will launch on mac

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x4000:
Hmm, this is super strange.

If you look in the following location: AVWW.app\Contents\Plugins\CSteamworks.bundle\Contents\MacOS

Then you'll find another libsteam_api.dylib.  That should be the only two in that area for Valley 1.  That one, and the one in the root folder.  Removing those two might do the trick.

The relevant area that is being logged is:

[S_API FAIL] SteamAPI_Init() failed; ipcserver GetSteamPath failed.
[S_API FAIL] SteamAPI_Init() failed; unable to locate a running instance of Steam, or a local steamclient.dylib.
Receiving unhandled NULL exception

At the moment I can't see any other thing that would be causing this.  I can send you a private link to the DRM-free version of the game and see if that helps, although on High Sierra that has its own problems with Gatekeeper (any directly-downloaded game does, there).

geekman9097:
Both LibSteam .dylibs Removed, same Issue.

Also tried romeving the .dylib.meta from the location you specified.

https://pastebin.com/Mn3AjwZ7

If Gatekeeper as you refer to it is the Popup of "this app was written by an unidentified developer" I've set that up with a manual bypass.

Actually, If I turn that off and try again...

No change.

I'm not above going into a text file or two to delete a reference to a steam library if that might help.

At the very least, if this never works out, I appreciate the amount of patience you've shown.

x4000:
Hmm, that's really puzzling for sure.  Let's try with a fresh no-steam version.  I will PM you a link to a DRM-free copy of both of them.  Only difference between them and the Steam versions is that they don't log achievements to steam.

Regarding gatekeeper, that's going to come up with the drm-free version downloaded through a browser, so here are some notes on that:

----------

If you look inside the Player.log and find that it's filled with errors about "app translocation," and unauthorized access exceptions and missing files, then that's gatekeeper coming in.

Basically, Gatekeeper on OSX has been told by Apple to move the Whatever.app executable folder into another location, which is randomized and read-only. This is the "GateKeeper Path Randomization" feature.

In the case of all our applications, we have more than just the one folder.  Many osx apps run with all of their files in just one .app structure, so this sort of solution would work -- if you also are writing to the designated user data folder, and not the local randomized read-only path.  So that's two "ifs."

In our case, as with many games, we have other files and folders next to our games that we read from to get images, configuration, music, and so on from.  We also write back out configuration into the same location, rather than to the user data folder.  We find that this helps with portability -- players can throw the game on a thumb drive and not be missing anything.

There is a super simple fix to this, though!  If, through Finder, you copy the downloaded zip file to any other location other than Downloads or Applications prior to unzipping it, then it should start working.  This particular feature of GateKeeper is apparently triggered in the new versions of OSX specifically when an application is downloaded from a web browser and then uncompressed, and then dragged to the Applications folder or run from its current location.  They have a hidden flag set on them.  Applications being downloaded through Steam or the Mac App Store don't have this issue.

For some more info relating to this: https://github.com/potionfactory/LetsMove/issues/56

Here's perhaps an even better source, although it's much older and interestingly talking about Sierra and not High Sierra: https://eclecticlight.co/2016/06/16/macos-sierra-will-break-many-installers-and-updaters/

TLDR:

1. Download the .zip file to the downloads folder.
2. Move the .zip file to some other location in the main disk drive.
3. Uncompress the zip file there, and it should "just work."

geekman9097:
Loading the Direct Download, The Log compalined about a missing steam App ID, which seemed odd.

Nonetheless, I did as it suggested and added a correct steam ID by copying the file from the steam version into the directory now in /documents/

Turning off the running steam opp meant I could remove that and not change the error code thrown. Looks like it's still interfacing with steam, and the files inside confirm that.

Steam off, no steamAppID: https://pastebin.com/RdBBY84E

The main issue in that case seems to be a Steam Not found.

Steam On, no AppID: https://pastebin.com/MhZrCbg8

steam on, AppID: https://pastebin.com/qY1jAPhQ

and my last trick: attempting to remove files discussed earlier.

Leads to a whole bunch of errors relating to could not load Steamworks.bundle. Specifically the fallback handler.

pastebin for posterity: https://pastebin.com/yYxgXkDt

x4000:
Humm... the direct download should indeed note that it's not finding steam, but it shouldn't be trying to actually load any part of steam.  Did you put that into the same steam folder as the other copy of the game?  That would explain that if so.

Regardless, the main problem here are the thread abort exceptions.  Basically something is killing all the threads at a point after steam fails to launch.  I've been operating under the assumption that that was steam throwing an exception and the game not-gracefully shutting down.  But perhaps that's more directly the cause and the steam notices are just incidental.  I've never seen this issue before with anyone, so I'm kind of feeling my way around it.

Do you have any sort of antivirus running that might try to stop an active program from messing with the file system?  In this case, we're messing with only things in the folder tree of where we installed the game, and we're just loading data at the moment, not even saving anything, but something is telling those secondary threads "you die now, thanks."  I've been assuming that was the OS after an unrecoverable error from Steam, and that may still be the case, but now I'm starting to wonder if an external antivirus or similar is doing it.  We've seen vaguely similar things from some antivirus on windows, though not for a few years now.

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