GAME.EXE Crashing Error

[JC Bailey]

So a friend of mine has downloaded Return to Melanat 1.2, and whenever he opens game.exe it immediately crashes and he gets an error message saying "game.exe has stopped working". Now, the game itself is working fine as me and several other people have been able to play it, and I don't think it's the operating system, because me and my friend both have Windows 8.1. Any ideas? We have tried tons of stuff like switching devices, changing resolutions, I even tried making a version without movie files, but nothing. He was able to run version 1.0 and 1.1 just fine, so it has worked before for him. I'm stumped, any ideas?

Here are his specs:

CPU:
INTEL CORE i7-4770K HASWELL 3.5GHz LGA 1150 84W QUAD-CORE DESKTOP PROCESSOR
GRAPHICS CARD:
ASUS NVIDIA GEFORCE GTX 770 GRAPHICS CARD
OPERATING SYSTEM:
MICROSOFT WINDOWS 8.1 PRO - 64-BIT - OEM

[Verdite]

Did you try the suggestions I gave you last week?

[HwitVlf]

Being that the game exe is identical for all versions (other than any changes you may have made), if 1.1 ran for him so should 1.2. My strongest suspicion is that an anti virus or 'execution prevention' system on his PC is blocking the process, or trying to run it in an incompatible sandbox.

A couple ideas:
Have him put the v1.1 exe in the 1.2 folder and try to play the game by running it.

Just to verify that it isn't a map event or such causing a problem, make a new simple start-map with no events an no game intro's at all. ‎  Only add a single warp event that leads to the normal start-map. If it still crashes on startup, the problem is probably in Windows (antivirus etc). If it crashes on warp, the problem is probably in SoM.

[Verdite]

My AV used to give me a BSOD when I tried to run any SoM game or free game that had been developed outside of the safely known zone. It wasnt until I downgraded my AV to an older version that I found what had crashed my PC so many times.

[JC Bailey]

I don't think it is an antivirus problem, as he said he had it disabled when he tried to run it. I did learn recently that he has a 1080x1920 monitor. I wonder, would that cause problems?

For now, I sent him a video that shows how to disable execution prevention to see if that will do anything.

[HwitVlf]

I have a 1920x1080 monitor and it works fine with SoM; I'm actually playing Ben's game at that resolution.

If v1.1 worked, just look for something that changed since then ‎ 

[JC Bailey]

The only thing I can think of is the movies I added, as he said he couldn't play them normally because his media player didn't recognize the compression codec. The thing is, I made a version without movies and sent it to him the other day, yet it was still crashing.

I don't know if we'll ever figure this out, I hate computers.

[HwitVlf]

It's Microsoft's fault. ‎  Their whole business model is based on forcing their products into the middle of every computing process known to man (Directx, X model format, internet explorer, C# programming language etc). Once there, they use their products as leverage to control the market. Even very early games should run flawlessly on a modern PC. Modern processors support the same command-sets that the old CPUs used. The main reason old games have problems is because Microsoft yanked support for some process the game relied on. Just like they yanked support for Direct X Retained Mode, The X model format, and now the Indio AVI codecs. [ending rant... finding happy place ‎  ] ‎ 

MT, are you sure your friend is using all the files from v1.2? I seem to remember that the PROJECT.DAT file contains a sort of checksum for the project. If its data doesn't match the project, the game won't launch.

[JC Bailey]

Actually, project.dat contains hardly anything at all, it just says "<Æ’ ‎  ". It still works for me though, and all other SOM games I have installed have something just as short. I don't know, should I have him change it at all?

[HwitVlf]

If you open project.dat it in a hex editor, it seems to always have a 4 byte long value of some sort. ‎  A long time ago when I was testing Tom's Diadem of Maunstraut, he didn't include project.dat in an update-patch and the game wouldn't start for me until he did. It's probably a checksum for the game's system file or such- a tamper protection.

The only way I can see it being a problem for your friend is if he updated from 1.1 to 1.2 without re-downloading the whole game, thus ending up with the v1.1 project.dat and the v1.2 game files.