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Hi. Well I've been working on a game for a while now and decided that it was time to give it a full alpha test, so I put it together as a stand alone executable for me to test on different machines. Naturally the development version had been working fine. I was able to run the stand alone exe file on my development machine. However I then tried to run it on my netbook and, after dealing with some dll trouble, I ran into a generic error message. It is the one I'm sure you'll have all seen before which is like "RADAR.exe has encountered a problem and needs to close. We are sorry for the inconvenience." (RADAR.exe is my game).

My question is, does anyone have any suggestions as to how I can go about debugging this? With so little information being given away, it could be nearly anything that's causing the trouble.

In case it helps, here is the info on the netbook's configuration. I'm running the game on Windows XP SP3 but this is virtualised using VirtualBox on top of Ubuntu Netbook Edition. However I don't see this being a problem as I've used VirtualBox quite a lot and never had any trouble with it before. I have the correct version of DirectX installed (9.c). The error itself occurs immediately on startup. The application never appears after launching the program. I've tried various things such as uninstalling Avast which I know can cause problems and changing the hardware acceleration options which I know has had issues with DirectX. However as I say, I'm not really sure where to go from here. Any tips would be greatly appreciated.

Yeah these are fun.

Make a small "hello world" program and try that. If that works, try adding calls to any plugins you are using, one at a time, and see if one trips up on it.

Since it may not even be getting off the ground it is possible your code is not being hit, just the preamble EXE stuff (setting up dlls, dx9 stuff, etc.) which means you are missing something that is needed. But to confirm this you could write to a log file as the first line of your code. If you hit that then just trace through adding more logging until you find the line that is bad. But it is probably not even getting to your code.

I haven't seen this error since I loaded up DarkGameStudio on my new Win7 machine (brand new install), and tried compiling my projects right away (most demos worked). I had to upgrade to 7.5 in order to get things to work.

Ty for the tip. I've done a quick test and suprise suprise it would seem that it's my own dll that's causing the problem ...

When I have a hello world program which just calls that plugin, it gives me a proper error message saying that the dll cannot be found but I'm assuming that it's the same thing and the big program just isn't giving me the error message.

Oh and you were right that none of the code in the main program ever runs with the crash. I tried the log file thing and it was never even created.

Is your dll included in the EXE or just in the directory? Make sure you make a proper Hello World project and stick the DLL in the exe path if it is external.

And if it's your own dll then at least you can put trapping in that. Good luck.

OK well I've had a play around with various things and I think I've figured the problem. I'll post what I've found here in case it helps anyone in future.

The generic crash (RADAR.exe has encountered a problem and needs to close. We are sorry for the inconvenience.) was caused by a problem with my dll plugin. When the plugin was used on its own in a test exe, it gave me a more specific error saying that the dll could not be found. The issue seems to have been that I needed to put the release rather than the debug version of the dll in the plugins-user file before compilation. This is slightly strange as searches on this forum suggested that some people needed to do the opposite (use debug rather than release version) but there you go.

Having done this, all DBP programs ran the "runtime error 1512 - display is not supported by available hardware at line 0" error. This, it would seem, is a problem with VirtualBox and its attempts to emulate the graphics drivers or some such. Thus, it seems that it is not possible to run any DBP games which use commands which call DirectX on an OS virtualised using VirtualBox. Google searches suggest that this is also the case for VMWare virtualisation but I can't say I've tested it.

However having fixed the dll issues, I've asked people to test RADAR on their machines and it does now seem capable of running on other computers. Thanks for the help with dealing with this.