Can't update from 1.016 to 1.017 on Windows 8

[zespri]

Hello,

Installed Win 8, Installed Steam, installed AI Wars, AVWW and Tidalis. Went in game on each and hit the update button. The first two games updated no problem, but tidalis after downloading the update shows small white square window without any controls in it. The window tilte is TidalisAutoupdater-windows. Tried several times, same result.

Please advise.

[x4000]

I'm not sure what to advise, unfortunately -- we don't have windows 8 with any of us.

[x4000]

That said -- the only thing different about the various game's autoupdaters is what graphics they use, what program they launch after they finish, and what their name is. But their core function is identical. So you could copy one of the ones from another game, rename it, and run it that way.

You could also manually unzip the update file from runtimedata/updates if you like.

[zespri]

Thank you for getting back to me, I'll try the above and let you know.

[zespri]

Copying updater from AI Wars into tidalis folder and running it helped. You might want to update tidalis updater, as it refuses to work under Windows 8 for me.

[Amelie]

This comes off as pretty lazy, honestly, and does very 'A Valley Without Wind' things to your image. Between having to dig for and manually unzip the update into a Steam directory and having to root around for a settings.dat due to a near-total lack of meaningful in-game options (and all I was looking for was volume control), my enthusiasm for the game was dead long before I could actually play it.

[x4000]

In terms of the volume settings, I have no idea why you didn't just go into the in-game volume controls and actually set the volume.  There's nothing in the settings.dat file that requires you to edit it manually, goodness that would be cheesy.  None of our games have ever required that.

[Amelie]

You're right, totally my mistake, I'd somehow missed the settings button multiple times. Consider that bit apologetically withdrawn; things were frustratingly arcane for a while.

[x4000]

No worries.

In terms of the updater, by the way, this is just something that windows 8 broke, not us directly.  There's limited support for windows 8 for this game, which is three years old at this point.  Granted, the game works great in windows 8, except to update you can't use the auto-updater apparently.  Given how many AAA games make you download much more byzantine things, that doesn't seem like a drastic thing for those who want to update.  On our end, it has been more than a bit tricky to update this game because it was still on the older steam2 platform.  I now see that it's been migrated to steam3 by Valve, but that wasn't until pretty recently.  Prior to that doing updates was a big ordeal, and this is a game for which we have still lost $40,000 in making at the moment.  We're very proud of it, but it's basically been a $40k gift to players in terms of the amount of production effort that went into it versus how much it's earned.  Aka, we've never made a dime on this in terms of positive money, not even close.

We very much believe in supporting our games, but this is a pretty minor thing that only affects one OS version of one OS (thanks Microsoft), and it's on a very poor-selling (but critically loved) title.

[x4000]

Incidentally, this is now the default build on steam (1.017).  It turned out to take less time than I thought, and not cause any issues like I was worried it might.

Cheers!

[Seally]

I know this is a rather old topic, but since the issue still remains, I would like to point out that setting the updater's compatibility mode to Windows 7 works (for me at least. I'm using 8.1 though).

[x4000]

Awesome, thanks for the tip!