New Launcher Coming

[Theolaerynn]

I write mission and life critical control software for corporations, production lines and even small companies. It's low level enough to span from serial / low level TCP / IP Siemens / Omron PLC control software to the WEB site for querying the customers orders and do CRM.
All it takes is not to suck and / or be cheap.

And your software ran on Vista without incident and without having to port it? And I would guess you didn't use the MSI installer, since that was broken at launch.

Horizons is the single software I used out of thousands that has this kind of issues.
I can imagine some old production line low level control program might have issues, but those issues were here since those ancient DOS programs had to be adapted to run in a multitask / GUI OS.

Adobe CS3, Bit Defender, Zone Alarm, Norton... And those are just off of the top of my head. I believe they have all been updated and work now, although I think SP1 re-broke a few of them. I personally only use CS3, and prefer NOD32 and other tools to Norton's suite, but it remains that a number of popular products broke on launch of Vista.

It could be said that buying the new Vista versions of the software would fix the problem, but again, why pay all of that money just to maintain the same level of performance? I can always find better things to do with my money than throw it down a hole.

Vista without that crap runs almost as well as XP but is more usable and comfortable, running since March 2007 on 3 computers here, without a single BSOD or anything.

And that would be the personal preference part. I have never had a single issue with XP, so Vista is nothing more to me than a very expensive complication I do not need. Too much of my dev software has Vista issues, including some of MS's own tools (although I would assume the MS ones have been fixed by now).

Companies have to spend resources to update their software to Vista, and they have to pass those costs on to the consumer if they wish to stay profitable, or even just to break even. So the consumer is once again spending money for no tangible benefit.

It just seems like very easy math to me, Vista is a money pit. You keep throwing money into it and getting nothing in return.

I really wish Horizons devs didn't have to even bother themselves with Vista, because if none of our players were having issues due to switching to Vista then the devs could spend their valuable resources on other priorities.

Fewer resources being spent on OS compatibility would mean more that might be spent building a custom launcher.

[Oakleif]

Fewer resources being spent on OS compatibility would mean more that might be spent building a custom launcher.

Let me preface this by saying that I have no inside Emissary-empowered information on this topic, and that I am running XP so I have no first hand knowledge of where Vista issues occur.

My understanding from keeping an eye on the Vista threads is that users of Vista, should they be able to load the game, run it with no problems. The issue seems to be with getting the game to load completely.

That seems to indicate that the client itself is Vista compatible, and that the custom launcher may be all that's needed to make Istaria Vista compatible.

Of course, its also possible that the devs may get the new launcher working with Vista only to find there are some issues in some section of the client that's normally accessed only during the initial loading of the game. I don't know.

[Zexoin]

That seems to indicate that the client itself is Vista compatible, and that the custom launcher may be all that's needed to make Istaria Vista compatible.

No it's not. otherwise horizons.exe would run fine when launched by a batch file, or directly by double-clicking

[Oakleif]

But then the client would fail because it hasn't done any of the necessary handshaking with the game servers, right? Isn't that what the launcher does for the game? Handle all the who are you, what port am I talking to you through, etc.?

[Zexoin]

I can't say it for sure. What's weird is it's completely random :/

[Shur]

But then the client would fail because it hasn't done any of the necessary handshaking with the game servers, right? Isn't that what the launcher does for the game? Handle all the who are you, what port am I talking to you through, etc.?

the client can be launched without the launcher, you just have to supply the information manually by editing the appropriate .def files.

http://www.bristugo.com/node/113

[Oakleif]

Ok... I can assume the answer is yes, but has anyone tried doing this with Vista?

[Vahrokh]

Preamble: I don't work for Microsoft, I hate their greedy and monopolistic attitude, I totally hate their "let's lock everything free and impose paid everything" philosophy.
I also have 1 or more Vista, XP, Win 2000, Win 98, Win NT 4.0 Linux boxes all perfectly running and not eliciting my "biased" preference of one over another. In the past (before changing job) I also enjoyed Solaris 8+, Novell 2.0 / 3.11 and beyond, Aix in the datacenter I was working for.
Preamble 2: before nitpicking what I wrote below, recall I simplified it a tenfold since this is not a geek nerds forum).

And your software ran on Vista without incident and without having to port it? And I would guess you didn't use the MSI installer, since that was broken at launch.

Only a minimal part of that stuff is not custom installed, the rest I never had any issue at having it installed.

I also never had any issue with MSI, I have not used it extensively enough to "prove" it's well working or not, but it looks like you are seeking for straw arguments against a component out since some years and that prolly had issues with a new OS release, which is not a "Vista only" feature.

Adobe CS3, Bit Defender, Zone Alarm, Norton... And those are just off of the top of my head

Horizons is the single software ===> I <=== used out of thousands.
It would be presumptuous at best to pretend I extensively used every software out there, I am not a MS compatibility labs chap paid for that.

Adobe CS3, Bit Defender, Zone Alarm, Norton... And those are just off of the top of my head

Just checked

http://kb.adobe.com/selfservice/view...nalId=kb400624

about CS3 and it reports very general advice, including trying disabling conflicting anti-virus software.

This turned up a lightbulb about the fact you also mention Norton.

That piece of *BEEP* is what I am condemned to have at work, since years, and managed to screw up and over against Siemens software, Windows 2000 and XP installations and generally eat as much memory as possible, whilst remaining a mediocre piece of payware software at best.

I can't blame Vista for not running well with something that does not run reliably by itself as it's intrinsically a crappy and memory hogging product, exactly like Horizons won't run (won't start, to be precise, if it starts then it runs very well) because of having *ITS* issues that Vista just exposed.

but it remains that a number of popular products broke on launch of Vista

Likewise you present issue products like they are Horizons: stuck on a release. They are not.
Tons of fantastic software broke when Win 95 got released (and earlier: I still recall Ventura Professional for DOS as one of the cutest products ever).
Almost every DOS extender software broke as well, expecially those based on Phar Lap and Borland's.

Unlike Horizons (for now), those products were upgraded to work with the newer and newer OS releases.

You are exploding out like Vista is the first OS ever to break older software, while Vista is the first Microsoft OS ever to often refuse to work with bug ridden and open to hacker exploits software.

It just seems like very easy math to me, Vista is a money pit. You keep throwing money into it and getting nothing in return.

What did exactly XP bring that Win 2000 could not have done, maybe with a service pack integrating the very few missing bits?

I run Win 2000 on a prehistorical notebook with the identical (vertical applications, off Siemens and others) software of my newer XP based notebook and the XP notebook blows in performance.
The curious bit is that the release before could run on Win NT, and would run magnificently off another PC that is an early P3.


The truth is that both for Windows and Office, the real workhorse and defining changes are over (for now) and all we see is a new release after new release where "fluff" is the real difference.

I am surprised you, so attentive to optimal efficiency, upgraded from Win 2000.

Maybe your stuff only comes with XP drivers so you could not run it on Win 2000 or Win NT 4?
Then it's the same thing of having to use vista because your stuff only comes with drivers for that.


I mean, I don't blame you or others for flaming about Vista, but because you were nowhere when they did the same for the previous OSes, including breaking past applications and peripherals compatibility.

That seems to indicate that the client itself is Vista compatible, and that the custom launcher may be all that's needed to make Istaria Vista compatible.

No it's not. otherwise horizons.exe would run fine when launched by a batch file, or directly by double-clicking

This is because people confuse "launcher" with "startup code".

The launcher is a small application that will crash under Vista, due to it's startup code bugs.
Horizons.exe is the big application that will crash under Vista, due to it's startup code bugs.

The startup code is an "hat" that every software has in its beginning, that loads up libraries and other gory technical details.

Outdated and unreliable runtime library "OBJs" linked in the executable by the very development tools the game devs purchased, cause this kind of issues since a decade (despite the Vista beat up attitude makes it look like everything was perfect before).
Even more often, wrong approaches by the developers lead to the same effect.
I.e. a game supporting only "old short file names" could miss a check for names length and a newer O.S. could force it using a long name (i.e. for a DLL), partially overwriting random pieces of its data. A newer O.S. could check for this buggy behavior and halt the software (like it happens for Horizons) since the above bug (and thousands others) is exploited by hackers to break into other people's computers.

Later on, piss-annoyed users will blame the newer O.S. for "breaking their software", despite all the O.S. does is to prevent potential security holes (basically: whine for years about Windows being "unsafe" against hackers, then whine for years after Windows begins a path to be less unsafe).

But then the client would fail because it hasn't done any of the necessary handshaking with the game servers, right? Isn't that what the launcher does for the game? Handle all the who are you, what port am I talking to you through, etc.?

No. The "launcher" performs several housekeeping activities a totally patient person could do manually (taking weeks ;P ), then it runs the client with a "calculated" number of options you could enter by hand yourself.
The game, once started, performs "handshaking", authentication (again, else everyone would forge WEB sites to play the game for free) and more.

Ok... I can assume the answer is yes, but has anyone tried doing this with Vista?

Yes, and all you achieve is to skip the first "cockblock" (the buggy startup code in the game launcher) and end up in the second (the buggy startup code in the game client).

[Landowyn]

I think this topic has veered seriously off topic and am seeing little with regard to the gamer's choice of launcher. It has become an argument over the value and compatibilty of Microsoft Vista, which should best to left to people who care and in another venue. If the developers have all they want from the poll, I suggest it be closed or the Vista topic be dropped, post haste.

Just my 2 cents. I voted for 3.

[Nisse]

d'oh. I saw .net first and clicked that. But I'd prefer something with minimal dependencies more.

.net was a bridge, let's cross it!

[Malendryn]

While I'd prefer option 3, I voted for 2, a Java client.

Here's the thing, how long will it take to rewrite in the three platforms, at a best guess? Weigh that against whatever comes after Vista and when it's due to arrive.

I dont think you want to go through the trouble of rewriting the launcher only to find out the next release of windows will just break it again, and their's certainly no guarantee any of the 3 options won't do that, but at least Java is a high enough level language to be fairly easy to refactor quickly enough if it does.

Its also more system agnostic than .Net is, and with all the mistake's MS has made in the past years and their continuing track record heading down hill, more and more people are looking for options like stepping back to XP, even 2000, and linux/wine.

For my own part the only reason this PC is still running XP is because of games. Everything else I do is already on linux. I won't touch Vista because every experience I've ever had with it was bad and I already know it's not compatible with my hardware.

The day I'm inescapably forced to go to Vista is the day I stop playing Windows-based games.

[Fratricide]

I couldn't begin to fathom where the issues with vista and Istaria begin, but it seems to me that folks can sometime get Istaria to work if they reboot their vista machine enough times. So.. perhaps it is a problem with something in vista that doesn't load that allows for them to play, or perhaps that one time it works, something in vista does load properly. The solution thus far has been to reboot vista until vista lets the loader to work.

I don't know but it sounds like one of those two things are happening. I would be curious as to which one it is.

1) vista loads perfect 90%+ of the time so Istaria wont play.
2) vista loads Jacked up 90%+ of the time so Istaria wont play.

Which one is it, and what needs to load or not load to make Istaria capable of playing so we can either try to force the thread to start or terminate it so they can play.

Personally, I haven't decided to play with vista because all the computer work I do for the Army doesn't currently require me to know Vista as the Military will not fully upgrade to it until most of their software is compatable with it, which will require some recoding I am sure. In fact all of the new computers we have been getting in, have been formatted and XP installed.

I have had to fix a few issues with Vista in the past week or so, and most of them are because of all the default extra crap that runs were causing issues. If they would just force you to custom install Vista from the get go, you might just be able to eliminate some of the issues with Vista that many people face.

[Zexoin]

1) vista loads perfect 90%+ of the time so Istaria wont play.
2) vista loads Jacked up 90%+ of the time so Istaria wont play.

Option 2 most likely

[Vahrokh]

Option 2 most likely

Neither of the two.

Hz, once reduced the OS protections enough to let it run, will function perfectly till the first reboot.

For what I have observed, Vista automagically sorts Horizons into its internal list of "known games" (A nice number of registry entries are created in the process) and slaps it into its cache for a quicker restart at next reboot.

Then something happens. I think it might be related to that first operation (creating reg entries) that try and "optimize" runtime DLLs used by Istaria.

It might also be caused by the extra-long DLL names that used to be 8 + 3 in the past. And some dangling pointers thrown in the mix to make everything more random.

[Theolaerynn]

I think this topic has veered seriously off topic and am seeing little with regard to the gamer's choice of launcher. It has become an argument over the value and compatibilty of Microsoft Vista, which should best to left to people who care and in another venue. If the developers have all they want from the poll, I suggest it be closed or the Vista topic be dropped, post haste.

Just my 2 cents. I voted for 3.

I thought they were related to the options, but fair enough, and my apologies. I will take the OS conversation to PM :-)

[Fratricide]

I thought OS, patcher, and launcher issues were all realated. Hence why I voted for Java, because of its seeming ease of portability between platforms and OS's. Perhaps we should make more references, when discussing the OS problems, to the launcher as to tie the issues more closely so that we can get away with partially veering off topic.

[Vahrokh]

I thought OS, patcher, and launcher issues were all realated. Hence why I voted for Java, because of its seeming ease of portability between platforms and OS's. Perhaps we should make more references, when discussing the OS problems, to the launcher as to tie the issues more closely so that we can get away with partially veering off topic.

I cannot understand the need to create a Java patcher and launcher when

http://horizons.oceth.net/

is a perfect, fully featured and updated (I tested a week ago) Java patcher and launcher that works.

I mean, just ask the author permission to use it then.

[Fratricide]

I cannot understand the need to create a Java patcher and launcher when

http://horizons.oceth.net/

is a perfect, fully featured and updated (I tested a week ago) Java patcher and launcher that works.

I mean, just ask the author permission to use it then.

Well Heck.. Im sure the creator wouldn't mind. Most folks in this community are more then happy to allow their creations to be included as a permanent game feature. Just so long as they have their name stamped on it someplace. Like something pasted across the bottom of the patcher window like...

This Java launcher was brought to you by "so and so" and permissions given to VI to use and upgrage as needed to provide the best game experience possible.

[Theolaerynn]

I believe this is pertinent to the conversation, because it details the longevity of XP and shows MS understands that most will never upgrade to Vista. It also reminds users of their ability to get a free downgrade to XP:

http://www.informationweek.com/share...leID=208800494

[Vahrokh]

I believe this is pertinent to the conversation, because it details the longevity of XP and shows MS understands that most will never upgrade to Vista. It also reminds users of their ability to get a free downgrade to XP:

http://www.informationweek.com/share...leID=208800494

The same Microsoft representative confirms that Windows 7 WILL be based on Vista and not on XP, opposite of what someone posted eariler when belittling me about how Microsoft works and illuding themselves they'll shelve Vista:

http://www.networkworld.com/news/200...ate.html?t51hb

"You've also let us know you don't want to face the kinds of incompatibility challenges with the next version of Windows you might have experienced early with Windows Vista. As a result, our approach with Windows 7 is to build off the same core architecture as Windows Vista so the investments you and our partners have made in Windows Vista will continue to pay off with Windows 7.