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Mark,

I've discovered that the events leading up to the problem are somewhat confused and may not be exactly as reported.  We've managed to side-step the problem and continue the game by temporarily running the game on the old machine and using a different machine's email.

I'm going to try and duplicate the events that led up to our problem (so far it seems to have been an email problem and does not appear to be a hardware problem as it seemed at first) and will re-email you games if we manage to duplicate the problem.

Gary

Game saves were emailed...

RE: Could the broken...

Yes, there's nothing special about the game.

My only concern is that we've done something dumb...  we're going to try exporting the account on the second/broken machine (which has been resurrected into a crippled state) and importing it onto the new machine -- results from that attempt should be available by COB tomorrow.  But my my last question is probably still pertinent.  If the second machine had completely died, what should we have done to get things going again or is a backup mandatory in this case (or was this supposed to have worked?)?

If we haven't wandered off of the reservation, haven't forgotten some step and aren't trying to do something dumb - I have the save game files for what was described above as P1 T214 (first machine sends to second - no problem at this point), and also the response from the new, second machine to the first (P2 T215) which won't load on the first machine and gives the error.  Both are approx 380KB each.  Would you also need player account names & passwords?

Which (or both) do you need/want (assuming that you still think this might be a bug).

Thanks,

Gary

Hi all!

I have a four-player (two computer players) play by mail game in progress which has been switched back and forth from network play to PBM several times - this all works great and is somewhat amazing!

The problem we're having is that one of the machines died.  The machine was replaced and Empire Combined was reloaded on the new machine (second player's new machine, same version of Empire).  When the saved PBM game (Linux machine, P2 turn 214) is sent from the first player to the new machine/second player (WIndows machine) it loads with questions about the "new" user (even though the account name added on the new machine is supposedly the same) and asks for a password before starting up.  From this point the turn plays normally on the new machine and the PBM saved game (now @ P1 turn 215) is sent back to the other player (the player that started the game).  When the first player tries to load the game (P1 turn 215) back on the first machine the message

is displayed.

We're going to try copying the game data directory from the old hard disk to the new hard disk -- I expect this may "fix" the problem, but the question of how to handle something like this remains if the hard disk was actually the thing that died.

Other than editing of accounts, the manual doesn't seem to address this... but the account name on the new machine is (believed to be) the same as on the old machine so the "key" being complained about is (probably) not the problem.

Does the name of the new account on the new machine need to be different?

If "archive" is the answer, then it would have to be archived by the first player in a state where it wasn't ready for the second player.  How do things get into sync again?

How does one handle picking up an in progress PBM game on a new installation?

Thanks,

Gary

Mark,

Thanks for your help with this!  I read the back-end part of the manual (only about the third time now) and have a much better feel for things.

Copying the entire KBSW/EmpireDeluxe directory from my desktop (Ubuntu) to the  laptop (Win10) worked great!  I now have the same settings in both places, including the account and keyboard settings.

Thanks again,

Gary

Mark,

> This tells me you created a unit db on the linux box in the game on the linux box.

I'm not sure what you mean when you say "in the game on the linux box".  I went to "Unit Modification", started with the enhanced set, made changes to the air transport and then saved it as "Enhanced Air Transport".  I select that unit set when I start a new game there.  On the laptop (*I THINK*) I did the same thing, but it's saved as "Enhanced Set Copy".  So, yes, they would be two independent DB entries.  While looking for this I noticed that there doesn't seem to be any way of determining what unit set is in play once a game has been started... I don't know if anyone would care given you can name things anyway you want, but it might be nice to know if you're playing multiple games with different sets.

> need to be copied, and moved to the same udb dir on the Linux box

I'm assuming that doing the opposite (Linux udb => Windows udb) would also work...  but not for this specific game - just to avoid problems in the future.

What other sorts of things should be copied to avoid future problems?  Is it possible to just copy the whole EmpireDeluxe directory from KBSW? ... or are there system specifics in there?

Making the assumption that I really don't care about the settings on the Windows laptop other than I'd like it to "feel" the same as the Linux box (probably all settings - especially the keyboard shortcuts I've defined) - and be able to move games started on the Windows Laptop and then move them over to the Linux box - what *should* be copied?  Is there some menu-driven way of accomplishing this?  Is this something that's inherently difficult or fraught with error(s)?  Would moving an "account" do this?  Is this enough questions?  :-)

I will often start a game on the laptop when I'm not at home & bored stiff, and then want to finish it on the linux desktop because it's much easier to use the keyboard & mouse on the desktop instead of the pseudo keyboard & trackpad on the laptop.

I'm happy to be a guinea pig if you want one.

Thanks,

Gary

> I take it there is nothing different about the Unbuntu set up on  such as a modified unit set

Hmmm...   yes - I've changed the air transport on both independently loaded machines to distance 3 for 8 moves which is pretty much standard for me now.  I'm virtually positive that I did NOT name the unit sets the same... if I changed the name at all.

> Do you have a mirrored player account on that machine...

Not sure what you mean by this.  I've created an account named "Gary" on both machines.  Never imported or exported any accounts.

> If you run it again to get the error.Send me the the data in the log dir

I can send the whole file, but I looked at the most recent one and it has trouble at the end with (surprise!) the air transport:

AIService: Adding MM:EDIE complete 1 entries
AIService: Adding AI:Expand
AIService: Adding MM:Expand complete 2 entries
AIService: Adding AI:EnhancedStandardAI
AIService: Adding MM:EnhancedStandardAI complete 3 entries
FrontGUIManager: DebugLog_.txt
GameLoader: UDB Key: 3_Move_Air_Transport
GameLoader:  Exception: System.NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object
  at com.kbs.empire.newengine.data.data.APGHPJGLGIJ..ctor (com.kbs.empire.game.id.MJMBAOIDJHH FDOBCGHAGDK, LMHNANPEPGE EAMOKIGKCIA, LMHNANPEPGE NLJBJGBKCBJ, com.kbs.empire.game.unit.FGAMHEJMFML HPJNMOFFNDL, com.kbs.empire.newengine.data.terrain.JABMMJLCGHP AAEMJDBPDOP, EJKPFBLIHNC ONCGPNNBLDC) [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0
  at com.kbs.empire.newengine.engine.ODCCHHMODIL..ctor (com.kbs.empire.newengine.engine.PIGMHDLFDPJ GEPBGBLKKOC, com.kbs.empire.game.unit.FGAMHEJMFML HPJNMOFFNDL, com.kbs.empire.newengine.data.terrain.JABMMJLCGHP AAEMJDBPDOP, com.kbs.empire.newengine.setup.HAOEECGPAAN BIENDGNKKCJ) [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0
  at com.kbs.empire.newengine.start.EDOCHIGJAIB.run () [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0
  at com.kbs.empire.newengine.data.data.APGHPJGLGIJ..ctor (com.kbs.empire.game.id.MJMBAOIDJHH FDOBCGHAGDK, LMHNANPEPGE EAMOKIGKCIA, LMHNANPEPGE NLJBJGBKCBJ, com.kbs.empire.game.unit.FGAMHEJMFML HPJNMOFFNDL, com.kbs.empire.newengine.data.terrain.JABMMJLCGHP AAEMJDBPDOP, EJKPFBLIHNC ONCGPNNBLDC) [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0
  at com.kbs.empire.newengine.engine.ODCCHHMODIL..ctor (com.kbs.empire.newengine.engine.PIGMHDLFDPJ GEPBGBLKKOC, com.kbs.empire.game.unit.FGAMHEJMFML HPJNMOFFNDL, com.kbs.empire.newengine.data.terrain.JABMMJLCGHP AAEMJDBPDOP, com.kbs.empire.newengine.setup.HAOEECGPAAN BIENDGNKKCJ) [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0
  at com.kbs.empire.newengine.start.EDOCHIGJAIB.run () [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0
FrontGUIManager: DebugLog_.txt
Closing Log

So, I guess the question is, do you really need the whole thing given the above?  The archive files themselves are not that big (2.5 MB).  I'd just started the game and hadn't played very far.  If I lose the game I won't fall into a fit of despair or anything.  I might have a 2nd glass of wine though...  :-)

Let me know how/if you want to proceed...

Thanks!

Gary

I went back to the laptop and re-archived the game...  then played a bit more (IE, past the end-of-move condition) and the re-archived (different archive name).  Played a bit more and then re-archived (again with a different name).  The archive files were copied over the windows network to the Ubuntu machine and then moved to the ~/.config/... directory.  I tried loading each of the archives - each time starting the game from the desktop - and it failed with the "object not found" message each time.  I also tried deleting the game from the "Load game" list that comes up before restoring the archive and got the same result.  I also did a binary compare between the windows network shared version (which was created via a copy/paste in Explorer from the Win10 laptop) and the copy over in Ubuntu ~/.config and the files are identical so there was no translation or failure in the copy (unless windows screwed up the copy/paste from the laptop local drive to the network location).

In short the following were all tried:

1. Re-archive & load from the "turn is finished - wait" condition
2. Re-archive & load from the start of the next move.
3. Re-archive & load from several turns & moves later.
4. Went back to the laptop, removed the game from the 'load list' & restored the archived game to the laptop (replacing what was there) - this worked fine - game loaded without problem.

The first two and fourth were loaded both before & after removing the previous restore from the "load list".  All attempts to load were the first thing done after the game was started from the desktop.

I'm guessing I'm not making some brain-dead error in the process because the laptop loads the archive just fine & I'm doing the same thing over on the Ubuntu system.  This is only the second time I've tried to move a game -- the first time it worked great -- although that old laptop died and this is a different Dell.

Not sure where to go from here... 

Gary

Attempted to follow your directions again for a second game and came up with the above.  Any ideas?

The only thing that I can think of that was different (other than this was a new laptop and the game was the first game played) was that the game would come up at end of turn and I would say "wait" before proceeding and then did the game archive.

I haven't fiddled with anything else so if you need any other info please let me know.

Sincerely,

Gary

PS: No, I don't go looking for these things...   Game archived on Win10, loaded on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS - both the latest version.

Ah... I noticed that the "ends" of roads are a tad strange, but that's still bizarre.  The terrain underneath the various pieces is/was as follows:

    ~~~~~          ~~~~~~~            ~~~~~~

    forest        river+resource         city

     clear             ~~~~~~~           ~~~~~~

So what you're saying is that an army that can normally  move over anything but a peak, cannot enter a road/resource from a forest even though it would normally be able to move from a forest to a river if the road/resource wasn't there.

This bears out as I ended up building an air base on the clear terrain - something that has an 'implied road.  After that the army could move from the forest to the air base and then into the resource.  This raises the question of why a transition from forest => air base (implied road) is different than the transition from forest => resource (implied road).  First one is OK, second one isn't.

As an experiment I disbanded the air base and attempted to move from the clear into the river+resource... and still couldn't... so, (having disbanded the air base that used to be on the clear, I built a road segment there... and then the units could move into the river+resource without problem.  I have to consider this strange behaviour because I've never had trouble leaving or entering a road somewhere in the middle of it -- although I learned that you have to start/end a road on terrain that the unit is actually capable of moving on... but in this case, road or no road, hidden or not, the units should have been able to move on that terrain.

One could become EXTREMELY frustrated with this sort of hidden behaviour.

Is this road or resource beginning/ending behaviour documented anywhere?  I've read the manual more than once (but don't have it memorized!  :-)

Thank you, very much for this explanation!

Sincerely,

Gary

PS: Interestingly enough I found a very similar situation at another place in the game where an army that I'd directed to go from A to B (about a distance of 15 - mostly clear terrain - was still trying to get through a choke point that was blocked by a developed resource.  It would continually oscillate back and forth trying to get through.  I discovered it some 100 moves later after wondering why it hadn't reached it's destination yet.

Ok, I'm confused...  given the following map & unit set up (standard enhanced unit set - default everything except that air transports move 3 instead of 2):

I find that an army that comes from the city side (116 production) can move right to left, "through" or "over" the producing resource... BUT,  an army on the left of the resource (or either of the engineers in the picture above) cannot move from left to right and get into the city.
In the picture above the army (which was produced in and came from the city) cannot move back into the city.  The game "bonk"s.

To get around this I had the engineers build an airbase and just flew things around the resource (because I could find no way to deactivate/abandon/delete a developed resource), but it was really strange and seems totally bizarre...  I would expect identical behaviour in either direction. 

Am I missing something here?  As best I can tell there are no "hidden" units anywhere.

Please let me know if any other info is needed and/or appropriate.... or if there really *is* a way to abandon/delete a producing resource.

Thanks,
Gary

  running on Ubuntu 16.04LTS.

I generally play a "solitaire" sort of game against 5 or 6 computer opponents - both the older AI and the expanding AI and I see this sort of thing almost every game, if not every game.  Haven't ever tried the capital kill end-of-game.  It "sort of" seems that this occurs when one of the computer AI's kills off another of the computer AI's... but I'm not 100% sure.

I've recently encountered a strangeness with auto-routing -- that it to say the situation where you click on a destination location and the game figures out a reasonable(?) route to get there from the unit's current position.

Given the situation:

This is a one wide, shallow sea lane between two land masses that had an oil resource in the shallow lane.  I subsequently developed the resource and build a road between the two land masses.

If the transport is at the top and I click at the water below the oil resource, the ship will approach and "bounce off" either the road or the resource.  If, however, I click just above the road, let it approach and request additional orders I can (using the arrow keys) get it to sail through/over the road and resource and into the sea below.  This seems inconsistent unless I'm misunderstanding something.

Also, has anyone else experienced the situation where you happen upon a collection of three or four computer enemy transports, with varying numbers of infantry, all congregated in some strange spot just dodging back and forth between two locations?  This doesn't seem right, but may be a product of the AI logic somehow... or maybe things get stuck in routing because they run into each other?

Gary

Yes, it was strange to let destroyers travel faster than an plane... but then this is a game and common sense does not really apply.

I changed the speed to be 3 as you suggested and modified the turn count to 8 so the total range was still 24, played a half dozen games (vs 6 varied computer opponents) with these settings, and found that it make for more interesting game play (at least for my style of play).  It better balances the trade-offs and utility of the air transport against the utility of a troop/ship transport... but I think the cost to produce might want to be increased very slightly... or not.  Hard to say as I haven't tried any games with an increased production cost yet, but the idea of changing the speed seems to be a good one.

Gary

Thanks for the info on this...  my first reaction was to just copy files.  I never associated an archive with the way to move a game from one place to another - just concentrated on the 'save'.

The game restored fine -- and played w/o changes, but the background color on the command buttons and the info bar at the top changed from the standard black to what appears to be one of the colors I picked for my pieces...  (?)  Not disabling, but strange.

Thanks, again...

Gary

Hello All!

How does one move a saved game from one machine to another...   for instance, I start a game on my laptop while travelling (Windows) and want to finish it on my desktop (Linux).  I'm assuming that there is some way to do this.  It's fairly easy to find the 'saves' folder on both Windows and Linux (Administration => Directories), but there seems to be a suite of three directories under 'saves'.  Do I just do a "parallel copy" of the directories and simply add the files from one machine to the files from the other?  Is there something else that needs to be done?  Has anyone tried this?

I'm assuming that this is possible...  without heinous consequences.

Thanks for any info,

Gary

Same here... never noticed before.

Ok, watching the goings-on using planes on patrol I've observed an enemy transport simply disappear... so I'm assuming that it was sunk.  I guess I was just having a no good very bad unlucky day with mines and transports around the city, but if a mine acts like an infantry against a transport the odds of what happened to me had to be near 1,000 to 1.  The battle report never showed anything.

On another note, a mine is supposed to have 2 "charges"...  how do you know if/when a mine has been discharged?  How do you check for something like this?  I'm assuming that if/when a mine exhausts it's two charges it simply disappears... without notice.

I've always(?) used an armed satellite against another satellite... and I know that I've taken out an enemy satellite over one of *their* cities.

Check the battle report and see what it says about who attacked what and what the results were.  If you click on the battle result it will show you all the random "rounds" that took place, the probability of the combatants, who won which round, and what the final result was.

Suggestion:  If, during turn, an enemy unit is discovered by some unit, pretend that that unit was also discovered by all units within range of the discovered unit.  Many times, with both ships and aircraft on patrol an enemy unit is discovered by an aircraft only to immediately have a naval unit "patrol" out of range to do anything about it.  It appears that selecting the naval unit and directing it in the direction of the discovered unit does *NOT* cancel the patrol order... and it wanders off with a mind of it's own, ignoring the request (selecting the unit and clicking elsewhere) to move closer to the opposing unit.

Suggestion:  One receives messages saying player "Xyz is dead, yeah it's been nice" (or some such)... which is great, except that I'm not going to remember that player Xyz is color 'slightly bluer than puce' and was an expanding AI, so how am I to know who just got killed?  It would be good to place one of the colored icons into the message somewhere to visually indicate who just got wiped out (and what color units can safely be ignored when they are later happed upon).

[ Yes, I save this stuff up and post it all at once.  :-) ]

Thanks,

Gary

I see dead bombers and ships and such out in the middle of the ocean that never move and contribute nothing, but to get in the way of further play...  and damage you if you accidentally run into them.  Stagnate ships are one thing, but aircraft?

Is this supposed to happen? 

Thanks,
Gary

I've got a setup with several expanding AIs (which are brutal early in the game) and have tried several times to quickly build a Seabee and surround a city with mines...  except that one of the expanding AI's transports just sails right through and takes the city.  I've tried with two rows of mines... same result, multiple times in different games - and the message report shows absolutely nothing except that the enemy transport took the city.  HuH?  If I drive one of *my* cruisers into a mine I see a battle report... so the question is:  Are transports immune to mines?  If so, a note in the manual is probably warranted.

Thanks,
Gary

PS: This is on v5.0.17 under Ubuntu Linux 16.04LTS

Mark, themensch,

Thanks for your help with this!

I upgraded VMware workstation to 12.5.8 (latest in the 12.5 Pro series) and also upgraded to the latest nVideo drivers... and this made no difference whatsoever.  The problem still existed (as it seems to with v14 also based on comments elsewhere).

I then tried Tynam's/themensch's command line option of -force-opengl and:  PROBLEM SOLVED...   or at least avoided.

Thanks again to all for the help!

Gary

Mark,
Disabling the 3D acceleration did the trick... the game comes up and displays correctly (or as correctly as I can determine from looking at the initial splash screen/menu :-).

Crap. Now I have to figure out what I'm going to do because I can't run with 3D acceleration disabled on a continuing basis.

I have an upgrade to 12.5.8 to install for VMware and I'll make sure that my nVidia drivers are up to date and report back any resolution (or non-resolution).

Thanks for your help with this!
Gary

Mark,

I'm running Workstation Pro 12.5.7, soon to be 12.5.8.  Didn't know that 14 was out (from the other thread) - haven't received any upgrade notices.

I'll try disabling the 3D hardware acceleration on the display, but I don't have quite the same symptoms as reported in the other thread... I don't get any play at ALL.  Just the shell prompt back after "Importing game controller configs".

Is the May 18th date on the executable correct?  This seems very strange since the dates on the directories in the archive (and all the data files in the *Data directory) are November 28th.

I'll try disabling the 3D acceleration and let you know.

Thanks,

Gary

Hi,

I downloaded and unarchived the Linux 32/64 bit version into a a directory, set the execute bit and tried to run it (there didn't seem to be any other instructions other than 'set the exec' bit) ...  no success.

From the terminal I get the following output:

        gary@homeUbuntu /opt/Apps/EmpireCombined/linux
       $ Empire*64
       Set current directory to /opt/Apps/EmpireCombined/linux
       Found path: /opt/Apps/EmpireCombined/linux/EmpireCombined.x86_64
       Mono path[0] = '/opt/Apps/EmpireCombined/linux/EmpireCombined_Data/Managed'
       Mono path[1] = '/opt/Apps/EmpireCombined/linux/EmpireCombined_Data/Mono'
       Mono config path = '/opt/Apps/EmpireCombined/linux/EmpireCombined_Data/Mono/etc'
       displaymanager : xrandr version warning. 1.5
       client has 8 screens
       displaymanager screen (0)(Virtual1): 1920 x 1200
       Using libudev for joystick management

       Importing game controller configs

       gary@homeUbuntu /opt/Apps/EmpireCombined/linux

        $

... and that's it.  Also tried running it with the *_Data directory as the CWD when starting, but still no luck.  Tried it with "sudo -H" and the restuls were the same.

I noticed that there's an 'install' subdirectory in the *_Data directory.  Are there any particular install instructions that are hidden somewhere?

Info that might be pertinent:

      gary@homeUbuntu /opt/Apps/EmpireCombined/linux
      $ uname -a
      Linux homeUbuntu 4.4.0-101-generic #124-Ubuntu SMP Fri Nov 10 18:29:59 UTC 2017 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

      gary@homeUbuntu /opt/Apps/EmpireCombined/linux

      $ ls -l
      total 50000
      drwxrwxr-x 9 gary gary     4096 Nov 28 12:55 EmpireCombined_Data
      -rw-rw-r-- 1 gary gary 25457968 May 18  2017 EmpireCombined.x86
      -rwxrwxr-x 1 gary gary 25731952 May 18  2017 EmpireCombined.x86_64

This is a VM running under VMware workstation.  There is no joystick, only mouse & keyboard.  Very "vanilla" machine.  I don't run any software other than VMware workstation on the host machine. (Windows 7)

Ubuntu is an up-to-date edition of 16.04 LTS.

It kind of bothers me that the date of the executable is "May 18" of this year...

Any help getting this going would be appreciated.

Thanks,

Gary