another HZ and vista post....

[Romirez]

ok, i tried all the solutions to get HZ working under vista... the DEP one...the UAC one, and the Launcher.OCX file one... none work. all i get is a 0xc00000fd error.... does anyone know what that is? and who can help me?

[Gengel]

I am in a very similiar situation. My tether to Istaria, my laptop that went everywhere with me, has passed along. My new Laptop has been Vista-ized. I am at "Witt's End" with trying to get Horizons to work. Any advice, short of installing XP, would be greatly appreciated.

So, if you see me a bit less, its 'cause I can not craft while doing chores during the day. I should still pop in on late evenings (EST).

~< Gengel >~

[Silenos]

Bought a Vista Ultima laptop. Tried many suggestions that were offered on these posts, even filed a ticket. All I got for a response was that Horizons is only supported by Windows 2000/XP.

[Draygon]

The largest hurdle, with regards to gaming on Vista, seems to be the drivers or general lack thereof. Try checking the website of the builder of your system (Dell, HP, IBM, etc) for any new drivers or updates, particularly updates to chipset, graphics, and audio drivers.

It may also be well worth visiting the site of the manufacturer of the embedded graphics chip or card, with Nvidia, ATI, and Intel being some of the most popular. They may release driver updates well before their partners or affiliates have them.

[Draygon]

I just had a further thought on this. Though my direct experience with Vista is very limited, I have heard that the User Account Control can result in some odd permission issues, even when logged into an account that has admin privileges. The workaround for this appears to be editing the properties of the link/shortcut to the executable, and checking the appropriate "Run as Administrator" box. Not sure if that falls under the "UAC solution" cited above.

[Amorai]

Although everyone appreciates the help, it would be nice that people atleast use the operating system before they offer advice on it. This is not a flame/rant, it's just that in the other half a dozen Vista threads, most of the suggestions are made my people that don't actually use Vista and it's steering people into the wrong direction. I also think this is going to become a major issue as almost all new PCs come with Vista pre-installed.

The original poster mentioned the same things that I have tried already. Although DEP cannot be turned off through the UI, a lot of programs seem to become more stable when you limit DEP to only Windows components and services. When this option is chosen, there is no need to add Horizon's in the exclusion list. Also, you will know when DEP is the culprate as a notification will appear in your task tray stating that DEP has shut down a program.

UAC (as noted by the OP and the above post) is also another road block for a lot of games. It's one of the first things I shut off, not because it's anoying or because of compatibility, but because everytime it pops up a message box it freezes my system for 1/2 a second. I hate that.... heh.

The launcher.ocx manual install is only needed if the patcher itself doesn't come up. This is not limited to Vista. It seems that a lot of different set ups need to have the launcher.ocx manually installed.

.... and this leads us to the current problem.....

After the patcher is done patching, regardless of what you do, how the moons and planets are aligned and regardless if it's your "lucky day".... Horizon's will crash as soon as it starts up after the patcher is done it's work.

... that is .... the release version. The older Beta 2 actually works with Horizon's as well as other older beta versions of Vista. So, something changed in Vista that is making Horizon's not work properly.

Incidentally, this has nothing to do with your drivers. This is most likely because the Horizon's client is using a depricated function of the VC++ runtimes included with Windows. Normally, this isn't an issue, but Vista has made some serious changes to the core of the operating system, which meant that some things may "break".

Microsoft has pushed back on the vendors to create patches, updates and upgrades to allow software to become compatible with Vista. The thought process is.. if it's a live product, the company will release an update. However, I don't see that happening here. Atleast until the game gets sold to another company.

.....

On the flip side, I know it should be possible to get Horizon's to work in the release version of Vista. If someone would be kind enough to run Spy++ (a visual studio tool) on Horizons.exe and find out which libraries it is trying to use, then we could simply copy the appropriate early Vista beta Dlls into the Program folder of Horizon's.

[Amorai]

What is really sad about this... is the fact that it would most likely require a simple recompile and possibly extremely minor code change.

[Wisperer]

Yup, i know what that is..........gerrrr

"The application failed to initialize properly (0xc00000fd). "

Last week i had Horizons running fine on vista then i made the mistake of useing the websight and not the standalone launcher. now after getting the launcher gets its info from the server and checking the files, i get the "Horizons has sucessfully started" message then crash.

How to fix it ...i don't know.

[Ann]

i can get into HZ everyday and even with a reboot or 3 i am on. here is the info that i used and found to work. i know this is an old thread but wanted everyone to have the chance to try it out on their vista machine.....i have found it works for some and not others.

http://community.istaria.com/forum/s...t=16292&page=3

#9 is where i put all the info that i tried and i can get into HZ with only about 3 max reboots and sometimes not that.

[velveeta]

lol as i have endlessly posted, both me and snake have used ann's instructions and we both play horizons easily. snake doesn't even have to reboot! i do, but lately it has been getting easier - last time i got in after only 1 reboot!
i am patiently waiting for the perm fix, but can assure any vista user that i am personally aware of at least 2 computers that run horizons and vista.

[Lillyjo]

Perhaps Microsoft will wise up and fix Vista, not just this game but tons of problems in many applications with the new Vista..big money maker for microsoft big headache for everyone else..they need to not forget all those xp software they sold and be responsible and support it too.
Lillyjo_Chao's on borrowed computer..because new one has Vista Ultima

[Fridlekh]

What is really sad about this... is the fact that it would most likely require a simple recompile and possibly extremely minor code change.

Not that simple, sadly.

It would require recompiling with a later version of Visual Studio. One that knows how to work with the new dlls. This is not a small application. It has thousands of classes and they work together in the most bizzare of ways.

A lot of the core work that is done by the client is done with 3rd party libraries, and those can NOT be recompiled. They could try to get the latest versions of Alchemy, Miles Audio, and Granny 3D, but that in itself would probably cost tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars. Miles and Granny wouldn't be too tough, (though expensive) but as far as I can tell, Alchemy is no longer a commercially licenced product and is used only for internal Activision products.

The bundling and integrated support for dPVS is also probably missing from current versions of Alchemy, as I could find no mention of it in all my scrounging for any info I could find on that topic more than a year ago... so a new dPVS licence would also need to be purchased, and code changed in the client to separate out the culling process into a new iterative function call that isn't built into Alchemy.

Even if money and manpower were not an issue here, the task of updating to the latest versions of the core client parts would be a task on-par with just re-writing the client from scratch with another engine. Getting it to simply compile with the latest Visual Studio would be easier, but would still require editing hundreds (or thousands) of classes, rooting out the deprecated function calls, and fixing imports. And that still doesn't address problems that might come from using these legacy versions of Granny, Miles, Alchemy or dPVS.

Believe me when I say that this is not a small priority thing, and if it were as simple as loading the project into the latest VS, letting it migrate, then recompiling, it would have been done long ago.

[Jessannette]

I have Horizons running on my new Vista home edition consistently. It's a really easy fix, make it all run under compatibility mode for Windows 98/ME.
Then go to the program files, in the horizons folder, and run everything that you can as an administrator. It should work, it does for me. Good luck.

[cauri_order]

Is it working consistenly after repeated system reboots? That's the major issue most of us are running into.

I have not restarted my PC in two weeks

[Bill4747]

Once in a while I can get Horizons to run if I stand on one foot and hop. But it always fails after I reboot. As far as I know, Vista is blocking Horizons from altering files like a malicious program would do. Or not. I just wish I could play the game. I might be buying a laptop soon, and I could go with xp, how good does a laptop have to be to run Horizons well?

[Chasing]

Okay I have a suggestion

I dont know if anyone has tried this already, but I dont have Vista myself so I can't test it.

Has anyone tried turning off the 'super new' abilities in Vista?

The things called SuperFetch, Readyboost and the new Windows Search.

My understanding is that the incompatibility may be caused by the caching of DDL's and memory as Vista tries to preempt what the user is going to do.

The above mentioned items can be deactivated by running MMC, installing the services snap in and then manually stopping each of the services and setting them to disabled. Close MMC, Reboot the system and try horizons. (If you get accessed denied when trying to change the services, you may need to logon to the computer as adminstrator)

I have no idea if this will work for HZ but I think it might be worth a go (then again I could just be barking up the wrong tree).

Can someone please test and see.

Thanks

[Jessannette]

Is it working consistenly after repeated system reboots? That's the major issue most of us are running into.

I have not restarted my PC in two weeks

It was working consistenly after shutting down my computer nightly. Just a week ago I think was the first time in a couple weeks it didn't work. I'm currently working on getting it to work again. I've been at it for a few days now, and I'm close.

[Jessannette]

Okay I have a suggestion

I dont know if anyone has tried this already, but I dont have Vista myself so I can't test it.

Has anyone tried turning off the 'super new' abilities in Vista?

The things called SuperFetch, Readyboost and the new Windows Search.

My understanding is that the incompatibility may be caused by the caching of DDL's and memory as Vista tries to preempt what the user is going to do.

The above mentioned items can be deactivated by running MMC, installing the services snap in and then manually stopping each of the services and setting them to disabled. Close MMC, Reboot the system and try horizons. (If you get accessed denied when trying to change the services, you may need to logon to the computer as adminstrator)

I have no idea if this will work for HZ but I think it might be worth a go (then again I could just be barking up the wrong tree).

Can someone please test and see.

Thanks

I tested this and it worked! I can play Hz now!! Now just to see if it works after a reboot....

[awdz]

someone told me they figured out what the deal was with vista... http://tinyurl.com/28yfmh

;-)

[Garfonso]

Hm... I didn't had big troubles getting HZ to run in vista business 64Bit. I used the launcher to run it, but it didn't work in the first time. Then I just right clicked on the launcher.exe and selected "run as administrator" and then it loaded and everything was fine. I played for some hours.

When I closed HZ it took a very long time and vista two or three times told me that it "restarted my video driver", but I was able to play...

I didn't read many threads about the vista issues, but I thought, I just might share my experiences...

On the plus side: I didn't have any troubles with my soundblaster Xi-Fi. Did they fix that? Or is it just fixed with the vista drivers?