Prison Architect EXE Failures

[lonewolf40000]

Hello all,

On the Steam Forums, we've had three different users coming to us with .exe failures.

All of them have the same symptoms:

Preferences.txt is not created, creating it does not seem to work, game always crashes.

While we haven't been able to do a ton of testing or even replicate it, seeing three users within a short timespan come up with the issue is odd.

http://steamcommunity.com/app/233450/di ... 971375014/

http://steamcommunity.com/app/233450/di ... 938218997/

http://steamcommunity.com/app/233450/di ... 738967385/ <- the most testing I've gotten out of a user


http://forums.introversion.co.uk/prison ... responding <- this thread echoes the issues on the Steam forum

I don't see much else on this, but having it repeat seems to indicate that something (no idea what) is killing PA before it can create a preferences file (but it still runs enough to produce a debug in most cases)

Has anyone else encountered this, resolved this, or have some advice?

[TheLordOfEvil]

Well I've tried a variety of things and I just can't get the game to crash. I've used non-alphanumeric keys (such as ¿ and Cyrillic) in the username to see if that breaks it from finding the file, nothing. I've tried making it set my resolution to a size unsupported but it recognized that and corrected it. I changed security privileges to the file and it also worked find. The one thing I did notice though was that it doesn't even seem to really "care" about preferences.txt. I removed all of the text in it and set it to read only and it was still able to launch correctly, even with preferences remaining blank.

Edit: Blocking the .exe from writing to the disk or accessing /Introversion/Prison Architect seems to lockup the entire system.

Edit Edit: I've managed to get at least a little closer I think. I've managed to reproduce the results at least slightly but it could be for a different reason.

Code: Select all

alpha-11 pc steam compiled 17:23:05, Jun 27 2013
Loading Preferences from C:\Users\TheLordOfEvil\AppData\Local/Introversion/Prison Architect/preferences.txt
Failed to find C:\Users\TheLordOfEvil\AppData\Local/Introversion/Prison Architect/preferences.txt
Suggested resolution : 1680 x 1050


However I'm not entirely sure how I was able to produce this; since this was actually from allowing the .exe to access the /Introversion/Prison Architect when prompted by my firewall yet it still lead to a total system lockup.

[lonewolf40000]

http://steamcommunity.com/app/233450/di ... 176334195/

Most testing we have ever done on this issue here, for posterity. Hopefully this user can help us track the issue down.

[paktsardines]

Personally I think it would be more sensible to direct steam users to the developer forums than the other way around. This Developer forum should be the go to place for help in running the game. Maintaining two similar but different sets of support posts will negatively affect the usefulness of both. Also, we can be sure that readers of the Developer forum have legitimately purchased the game.

[lonewolf40000]

I push them when I can, but its easier to go off an existing thread than to get someone started on a new one (in a new forum).

Directing users to here would be a lot easier if there was at least one sticky with the URL for the forums and an explicit call reminding users that any real support can be found here (rather than repeating it ad nauseum) .

[ChickenHugga]

Hadn't seen this thread up until now. I have the same issue. If anyone can help me, I'll gladly jump through any testing hoops you need me to. Hell, I'll even let a dev remote-desktop to help

[lonewolf40000]

So far every crashing issue we've encountered has ended up being some sort of driver issue.

The last user who did a ton of debugging work had to uninstall his drivers and re-install them before things started working properly.

[ChickenHugga]

I was considering downgrading to win7 anyway as I have issues with Java. If doing that and reinstalling stuff doesn't work, are there any other ideas?

[ardou]

i had this same problem when i installed game from steam.
now i dl and installed newest build from website and it works.