Chocolate Hexen crashes almost immediately (including the setup program).

[RedSwirl]

I'm trying to reinstall Chocolate Hexen on another system but the game crashes within a few seconds of starting. I don't remember having this problem on the last system, even though both are running the same version of Windows 10 and both with the commercial IWAD from Steam. The only difference is on the new system I'm not installing the game on the C drive, whereas on the old system I was. Even the Chocolate Hexen setup exe crashes a few seconds after starting.

 

I saw the answers on this subject in the Chocolate Doom FAQ and I know it's not the option menu mouse sensitivity problem because Chocolate Hexen crashes even if I don't access the options menu. It simply crashes within a few seconds of either starting the game or starting the demo movie, so it might be the playback fail problem. However, I don't get any error message.

 

I want to keep using this source port because I'm in the middle of a save file I started in Chocolate Hexen. ZDoom can't read the hxs save files Chocolate Hexen seems to generate, can it?

 

 

[fabian]

Does it help if you move away both of its config files? 

[RedSwirl]

8 hours ago, fabian said:

Does it help if you move away both of its config files? 

No it doesn't. Both Chocolate Hexen and Chocolate Hexen Setup still crash within a few seconds of launching. These are fresh installs.

[fabian]

Hm, which version is this and where did you download it from?

 

Do the other games (i. e. Doom, Heretic, Strife) work for you?

 

[RedSwirl]

Come to think of it I did recently have problems with Chocolate Doom crashing on that system right after booting. I downloaded both from the official page (the Doom WAD was from GOG though). https://www.chocolate-doom.org/wiki/index.php/Downloads

[fabian]

Could you probably load the games from the command line and see if any suspicious output is printed?

[RedSwirl]

14 hours ago, fabian said:

Could you probably load the games from the command line and see if any suspicious output is printed?

How exactly do you do that?

[fabian]

Shift+Right-Click into the folder and select "Open Command Prompt here", then type "chocolate-hexen" and hit Enter.

[RedSwirl]

14 hours ago, fabian said:

Shift+Right-Click into the folder and select "Open Command Prompt here", then type "chocolate-hexen" and hit Enter.

If PowerShell is the same thing, I tried it in that and got the same result.

[drfrag]

On 7/16/2018 at 2:35 PM, fabian said:

Shift+Right-Click into the folder and select "Open Command Prompt here", then type "chocolate-hexen" and hit Enter.

 AFAIK the Chocolate console doesn't work on windows (same for Crispy) and output is redirected to stdout.txt. For RUDE i had to enable it adding -mconsole to the linker flags, that introduced a few problems tough.

[RedSwirl]

 

12 hours ago, drfrag said:

 AFAIK the Chocolate console doesn't work on windows (same for Crispy) and output is redirected to stdout.txt. For RUDE i had to enable it adding -mconsole to the linker flags, that introduced a few problems tough.

What does that mean? I clicked "Open PowerShell Here" because that's all that was there, typed "chocolate-hexen" and hit Enter, and got the same result as before. It opened to the main men and then crashed after a few seconds. No error log or anything, it just went back to the desktop.

 

What's weird is I have this running on another system with the same version of Windows 10 and it works fine. I think I even had Chocolate Doom running fine on this system for a while last year, and then it suddenly started crashing one day. Couldn't figure out why.

[drfrag]

 It must be the same, when i run them from the command prompt (cmd.exe) i get no console output on every windows version. I guess you're not getting any startup messages (i never did since choco 0.1.x if i remember right), you should open stdout.txt and stderr.txt and check their contents.

[Dragonsbrethren]

This sounds suspiciously similar to an issue I'm having with ChocoRenderLimits. Try disabling sound effects or changing to PC speaker effects (does Hexen even have these?) and see if the crash stops.

[fabian]

Have you ever checked your system's RAM with e.g. memtest86?

[RedSwirl]

On 7/18/2018 at 7:33 PM, drfrag said:

 It must be the same, when i run them from the command prompt (cmd.exe) i get no console output on every windows version. I guess you're not getting any startup messages (i never did since choco 0.1.x if i remember right), you should open stdout.txt and stderr.txt and check their contents.

 

I can't find either of those filfes.

 

23 hours ago, Dragonsbrethren said:

This sounds suspiciously similar to an issue I'm having with ChocoRenderLimits. Try disabling sound effects or changing to PC speaker effects (does Hexen even have these?) and see if the crash stops.

 

That didn't seem to change anything. I don't have any PC speakers. The computer I'm having trouble with is hooked up to a TV, and the TV speakers are its only audio output.

[chungy]

6 hours ago, RedSwirl said:

I can't find either of those filfes.

stdout.txt and stderr.txt were SDL1 features to accommodate Windows limitations. Since Chocolate Doom 3.x uses SDL2, which removed that feature, they won't be created.

 

Unfortunately I don't really know any easy way to otherwise inspect stdout/stderr. Debuggers can show it, and alternative terminals like MinTTY (part of Cygwin or MSYS2) show it too, but all of those are rather heavyweight solutions to this issue.

[drfrag]

 True, just checked. But still no console output at startup, perhaps it's time to make a choco-console ala Eternity. I don't know what would happen with SDL2 and -mconsole.

[fabian]

As an experiment, could you download the latest Crispy Doom release and copy all the DLL files in this package over to your Choco installation? The SDL libraries that Crispy ships are newer than the ones from Choco, so maybe this makes a difference.

[RedSwirl]

On 7/23/2018 at 2:30 AM, fabian said:

As an experiment, could you download the latest Crispy Doom release and copy all the DLL files in this package over to your Choco installation? The SDL libraries that Crispy ships are newer than the ones from Choco, so maybe this makes a difference.

 

Just tried it. Same result.