Help with Dominions error

[Lazy_Perfectionist]

Really wild-*** guess... Unicode/UTF. Special character 65533.

Any regional settings change recently? Problem with any directory name? Reset your internet connection.

also, check the ownership of all the files.

I can't guarantee these are nothing more than wild geese chases. Don't worry if these ramblings don't make much sense, but they should be relatively safe and easy things to check.

[chrispedersen]

I get similar errors when I cannot connect to the server.
The 65535 number looks like the maximum for a byte.

Did you turn on -ddddd? Silly I know to ask you ... but it does say where/what the errors are oft.

Did you open the port on the firewall? did you choose a valid port?

[llamabeast]

Thanks very much for all the thoughts guys, I will definitely try all those things tonight.

The � was just the way the accented "a" in Nagot gick fel came out on the forum. I didn't notice it had done that.

And Lazy! Good to see you again!

[llamabeast]

Ooh! I believe I have just become a General. Muwahaha!

[Rathar]

/salute!

[lch]

Huh. Suddenly, llamabeast posts! Dozens of them!

First, it's hard to help you without knowing the specific settings that you use to set up the game. You have to tell about maps, mods etc. if one were to duplicate your efforts.

Second, you should try reinstalling the game from scratch and then updating to the latest patch. It seems that some people's game installation was broken in a way after patching that required a full reinstallation. There was a second patch just for the Linux version, too. Have you tried creating the game with both the original and the new patch?

[llamabeast]

Yeah, I know my posts were a bit vague. The trouble was I was trying to narrow down the problem and failing dramatically. Different map - still broken. Different pretenders - still broken. Suddenly I could only create single player games and no network games at all without getting the same bug. Then they stopped working too! Seriously, it was freaky.

I am going to reinstall and patch from scratch, as suggested. Hopefully then I will at least be able to narrow down the problem. Also it hadn't occurred to me to turn debugging on. I will do that, and that should also help to pinpoint the problem.

[Xietor]

When all is fails, blame Dr. P!

[llamabeast]

Okay, so the problem in the end was that all the pretender files had somehow become corrupted in such a way that Dominions still recognized them, but would crash if it tried to open them. Even having one of these files in newlords (which I did later on in the evening) would cause the game to crash as soon as an age was chosen (so it wasn't that my copy of Dominions had become corrupted after all). Utterly bizarre.

Eventually I just re-downloaded the pretender files from my server and it all worked swimmingly.

[NTJedi]

Sounds like those pretenders were all fighting for godhood and the windows directory was damaged in the process.