Possible solution to Vista vs Horizons problems

[Deth]

Yea I rebooted this morning and worked again. aaaaaaggggggggggg this is a pain. LOL I think I will go with my idea and just build and XP horizon drive and hook it up when I want to play. LOL.

[Vahrokh]

Updates and addendum to my dirty workarounds.

ATM I am able *on my system, I can't insure yours is like mine so I can't guarantee anything* to exit and restart the game multiple times within the same session, and reboot and still have it start.

I'll post here my latest findings

1) The popup warning about Vista using a compatibility mode desktop (no Aero) is fine, ignore it.

2) No way you just delete Horizons.exe and have it work, I checked the registry and it saves a lot of stuff about the game. Basically when you i.e. check the options, they are written and stored with "horizons.exe" as search key, so the second you put the executable(s) back, they "automagically" get every setting associated again. The amount of registry entries autocreated including in DirectInput and in the game repository (a new Vista feature) make so that you must reinstall Vista to properly get rid of all of them.

3) When you patch, you receive 3 DLLs, called MSVC*71.DLL. I could not reboot and restart the game a second time without deleting them (they seem to be libraries that placed here will override / interfere with the Vista equivalents).

So, try moving them in another folder / backup them away (I zipped them and deleted them, keeping the zip to be sure).

Every time you patch the game check that they are not back again.

4) Make sure you don't do anything else after the boot, before right clicking and executing Horizons.Exe as administrator, getting the error and launching the log in WEB page. The game is running possibly on dangling pointers and who else dares to guess, so don't try your luck by using other software with Horizons.

5) If the game crashes at start, do not restart it. It's pointless, just reboot.

6) I can't guarantee anything about this workaround, it works for me, both on Chaos and Blight.

[CallakDW]

Well I have to say I'm getting sick of this. Mine quit on me again. Same old stuff, and I'm fairly sertain my PC was rebooted several times without incident up untill this last reboot.

You know, I did some poking around, and I read that msvcrt.dll has problems with some applications because the Vista version actually checks for invalid parameters better than it did in past versions. If an application had been passing an invalid parameter, it might have gotten away with it in older versions but not in DX10.

[Yarsgo]

Well, here is what i did to get vista (home version) to work. there are some drawbacks, though...

1. go to c: program files and find the tulga folder.
2. left click on it, look at the properties. mine said "read only"
3. uncheck it, hit apply, and when it prompts you, make it unread everything (files, subfiles, folders).
4. apply, and let it vista do its thing- takes about 4-5 mins here.
5. when u go to log on the game, uncheck the .net and any other scan checks, including the system check button.
6. click "play horizons" and let the update run. takes anywhere from 10-15 minutes here.

game loads up fine after that. problem is everytime i reboot, i gotta go through the same thing as vista turns it back into a read only file and there is no way around that loooong Artifact scan apparently. shortcuts apreciated. as it stands now, takes me about 20 mins to get on the game. once in, it holds it well and i have had no forcible boots.

Oh by the way, I have heard from friends on several other MMO's, they are experiencing the same type of problems with VIsta. It's not just HZ's problem. I'm sure that we shall see some update from our illustrious devs to correct the matter in short fashion.

hope this helps!

Yarsgo

[CallakDW]

Unfortunately that doesn't seem to have had any effect on the problem for me.

[velveeta]

the only sure way for horizons to work for vista, in my experience, is to follow the 'consistently working under vista' thread and just be patient with both the reboots and the devs.
i know i sound like a broken record, but both me and snake have bent our minds to this problem and still can only get my vista machine to run horizons.

so really, my recommendation is follow those directions and get used to rebooting....A LOT!

[CallakDW]

the only sure way for horizons to work for vista, in my experience, is to follow the 'consistently working under vista' thread and just be patient with both the reboots and the devs.
i know i sound like a broken record, but both me and snake have bent our minds to this problem and still can only get my vista machine to run horizons.

so really, my recommendation is follow those directions and get used to rebooting....A LOT!

With all the things I've done I am pretty sure I've done what's in that thread, but I will try again, because I really really want to play. Just found out an old local friend of mine picked up the game again.

[Yarsgo]

Well, here is what i did to get vista (home version) to work. there are some drawbacks, though...

1. go to c: program files and find the tulga folder.
2. left click on it, look at the properties. mine said "read only"
3. uncheck it, hit apply, and when it prompts you, make it unread everything (files, subfiles, folders).
4. apply, and let it vista do its thing- takes about 4-5 mins here.
5. when u go to log on the game, uncheck the .net and any other scan checks, including the system check button.
6. click "play horizons" and let the update run. takes anywhere from 10-15 minutes here.

Well, it worked for at least 25 logins, then POOF, "it no workey no more..." I am really learning to dislike Vista... Luckily I have a pair of XP running machines (blows off dust)...Back to chopping Maple!!

Sorry for the trouble this may have caused by anyone trying it. I'll be patient now and just wait for a fix from the dev team...

yarsgo

[CallakDW]

I finally gave up and set up a dual boot Win2000. No more problems.... took me a whole day but no more problems.

[Balthizar]

You guys and others have conviced me not to get Vista

Sorry to hear about your problems

[Tokoz]

Just out of curiosity, has anyone tried to run a virtual vista session with nothing else installed? Easier than a complete reinstall anyway.

Here's the link:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/d...ng=en#filelist

And if anyone has things working smoothly on Vista and can export their registry entries to me, PM for my email. I'm seeing changes to the registry every reboot and it's frightening.

[Juko]

Today i started Horizons again in Vista and surprisingly it worked. Interesting thing is that I have installed new hardware today.
My bet is that horizons depends on some state within the windows environment and fails if this state/flag whatever is false or not set with the correct value...or an outdated value
Vista includes the Superfetch technology which AFAIK is caching and memory management tech to speed up program start/execution by perloading the software into memory and the reason why it *everytime* worked after a major change like changing DEP exceptions for horizons on and off, after installing hardware, etc. is cos i think vista made a new entry there and horizons started properly. 2nd time vista provides cached data and horizons going to crash. And by 2nd time i mean restart, so if you hibernate and turn your PC on again it will (most certainly) start again. - Most certainly because after i started another game (lotro), horizons failed to start even without restart- Also for the people who get it to run every now and then after 20-30 restarts is cos i think vista updates the superfetch data and executes horizons from scratch.

Just a theory however, but since it is completely unrelated to the dll's and vcredist and compatibility settings (appart form starting privileged) ... but then just a theory...gonna deactivate superfetch now

[Coerisar]

All I had to do was fully patch Vista 64-bit up, download the Visual C++ 2005 Redistributable Package for 64-bit. In fact I had to reverse all the stuff I had tried that was suggested in order to get that to work...

[Juko]

Hi,

superfetch didnt change anything on my machine.

I tried something different, not VirtualPC because it didnt even let me install XP64 but in VMware it's definately working. Working as in you can play but it's not looking beautiful. And it takes some time to load ... you see the sky for a while ... and after a bit longer you should see everything else too

There is a 30 day evaluation of the workstation (you need this to create the vm) trial here and when it's created you can use the free player, download is here.

Help on setting up 3d is here.

Configure your machine with at least 512 MB RAM and 128 MB video RAM (134217728) 128MB is maximum supported.

-First download VMWare Workstation evaluation.
-Install it on your PC.
-Create a new Virtual Machine - Only Windows XP and XP 64 are supporting Direct 3D since it's an experimental feature you have to edit the configuration file with an editor.
-Use at least 512 MB and 12GB virtual hard drive (or make a second one for horizons which should be at least 4 GB)
-Install Windows XP in the Virtual Machine
-After Windows is installed and updated, shut down
-Browse to your folder where you created your virtual machine (by default My Documents\Virtual Machines\<name of vm>
-follow these instructions
-boot the vm
-install vmware tools if not already done, Menu VM->Install VMWare tools and restart
-install directx runtime
-install horizons
-enjoy

[CallakDW]

Somthing Vahrokh said in another thread made my ears purk up:

is a new pre-loading feature. Vista "recalls" what you used last time you used the computer and pre-loads it at system startup (I am going to describe it in an awfully simplified way now).

Imagine yesterday you used Word. Today, as you log in, Vista begins loading a "saved memory snapshot" of Word in the background, anticipating you'd want to use Word again and thus shortening the startup time.

If you'd check the memory used, you'd notice a lot is used, but it's not just Vista memory consumption but the sum of it plus the saved memory snapshot of the applications you used before.

This snapshot is discarded as soon as you use another application so the memory was not really used to be kept and "wasted", but "marked" to be used in case you use the software saved in the snapshot.

Is it possible that this feature of Vista is what is causing problems with HZ? Is there a way to test HZ without windows doing this?

[Lillyjo]

dual boot wont work on my Hewett Packard because the hardware doesnt have any drivers for xp..so need to have Horizons support xp somehow
Lillyjo_Chao's server

[Zexoin]

Hi,

superfetch didnt change anything on my machine.

I tried something different, not VirtualPC because it didnt even let me install XP64 but in VMware it's definately working. Working as in you can play but it's not looking beautiful. And it takes some time to load ... you see the sky for a while ... and after a bit longer you should see everything else too

There is a 30 day evaluation of the workstation (you need this to create the vm) trial here and when it's created you can use the free player, download is here.

Help on setting up 3d is here.

Configure your machine with at least 512 MB RAM and 128 MB video RAM (134217728) 128MB is maximum supported.

-First download VMWare Workstation evaluation.
-Install it on your PC.
-Create a new Virtual Machine - Only Windows XP and XP 64 are supporting Direct 3D since it's an experimental feature you have to edit the configuration file with an editor.
-Use at least 512 MB and 12GB virtual hard drive (or make a second one for horizons which should be at least 4 GB)
-Install Windows XP in the Virtual Machine
-After Windows is installed and updated, shut down
-Browse to your folder where you created your virtual machine (by default My Documents\Virtual Machines\<name of vm>
-follow these instructions
-boot the vm
-install vmware tools if not already done, Menu VM->Install VMWare tools and restart
-install directx runtime
-install horizons
-enjoy

My friend has a problem trying to do that.
When he launches the game, the small window with the HZ logo loads, then the game itself tries to load, but onlythe virtual sound works fine, but the game crashes. the sound still works but he has to use Alt + F4 or Ctrl+Alt+Suppr to close it. And the emulator doesn't react, he has to reboot. Then he gets the message : failed to construct OpenGL rendering background, The 3-D features of the display card will be disabled.

What can he do ?

[Juko]

Open GL is not supported. DirectX should work fine.

[Spirit]

Balls...

Horizons did work, before I had patched Vista fully... now I'm home I've patched Vista to include all latest patches... Now it doesn't even start.

So they call that Progress, eh Micro$oft? Does anyone know off hand which patch borks Horizons? I'll kill it.

Rakku

[Spirit]

Problem solved... found a way of installing xp after vista, so now I'm dual booting. I decided on that way after I plugged in my usb mouse, which travels with me practically everywhere if I'm not home, and Vista said it didn't support it. A friggin' standard usb mouse with absolutely no dangley bits!! Then I plugged in my flash drive, not supported, my mp3 player... unsupported unless you download 130mb driver package. Too much hassle. I'll keep Vista on here for when it becomes better, but Xp for now. I'd recommend any Vista users to stick with Xp for their gaming needs... I'll gladly share the pages I used to get Xp installed if anyone wants them. It's only really a hassle (a big hassle) if you have sata hard drives and no floppy drive, as the xp setup needs a sata driver to see your hd. I was *yes* to both so had to create an xp install disk with the right drivers patched into it. Wierdly, Toshiba also split the Vista drive in half, making a convenient blank drive to put xp on.

8 hours later... I'm trying to convince myself it was worth the effort.

Goodnight! (*cough* at 0730!!)

Rakku