Freezing when activating 8.1.0 through TFE-X

Discussion in 'The Temple of Elemental Evil' started by sangiu, Aug 24, 2014.

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  1. sangiu

    sangiu Member

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    Hello fellow rpg enthusiasts and good people of the Circle.

    I'm having some serious difficulties in getting the 8.1.0 NC version to work, while I didn't have any problem with 7.1.0.

    I run Vista Home Premium SP2.

    Here's what I did:

    -Uninstalled the old version of Co8 and the game, started with a clean install in C:/GOG Games/Temple of Elemental Evil.

    -Ran everything as administrator

    -Went as far as to uninstall comodo firewall, which was being uncooperative

    -Re-downloaded the modpack on moddb (sidenote: is it normal that the setup does not have the .exe format? I had to rename it to .exe, after which it worked fine)

    -Installed TFE-X, ran as admin, went to activate 8.1.0, and this is where hell broke loose.

    Every time I try to activate the mod, it burns through the first phases (music and movies unpacking) then it takes an unordinately long amount of time to unpack the extra content (I'm talking half an hour at least), and then if I give it more time, after some HOURS it gets to 60% of the installation (as it indicates) after which my PC irremediably freezes and all I can do is restart it manually because everything but the mouse cursor stops working, that's how bad of a freeze it is.

    Any ideas how to solve this? :)
     
  2. Gaear

    Gaear Bastard Maestro Administrator

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    Never heard of that one before. About all I can say is that something isn't playing nice. With something. ;)

    I'm curious why you uninstalled everything and reinstalled in order to do this. Sorry to state the obvious, but you had a working installation that was set up to switch modules, and now you don't. :( (Unless you're old installation would have just done the same thing with the new mod.)

    There should be a text file called 'TFE-X' in your root directory that will detail the events of your last activation. Can you post the contents here?
     
  3. sangiu

    sangiu Member

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    Thanks for answering.

    I'm attaching the log for you to analyze.

    I had a working installation with 7.1.0, yes, but call me paranoid I opted to reinstall it because i wanted to be sure it couldn't interfere with the new version...obviously I wasn't expecting this.

    I uninstalled and reinstalled numerous times now, trying stuff that didn't work. This log only gets to the content unpacking phase because that's when I had to terminate it the last time I reinstalled.
     

    Attached Files:

  4. Gaear

    Gaear Bastard Maestro Administrator

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    Does your root directory actually have a file in it called 'Circle of Eight Modpack 8.1.0 New Content.tfm?' (With the .tfm extension specifically?)

    This

    has me wondering how your system is dealing with extensions, because the installer is definitely called 'Circle of Eight Modpack 8.1.0 New Content Edition Setup.exe.' So if you added an .exe, you actually renamed it to 'Circle of Eight Modpack 8.1.0 New Content Edition Setup.exe.exe.' Did the installer run and install everything when you ran it? Should have taken a couple minutes to unpack the .tfm archive.
     
  5. sangiu

    sangiu Member

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    Yes, it does. It weighs 1.23 GB.


    I usually don't have any problems with file extensions, which is why it struck me as weird when the file didn't have it. Anyway the installer ran correctly and the problem only comes during the activation.

    I was thinking, could there be one way of using the old working 7.1.0 TFE-x to activate 8.1.0? Dunno if I'm talking nonsense here.
     
  6. Gaear

    Gaear Bastard Maestro Administrator

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    7.1.0 would have been running an old version of TFE-X (the front end). That version ran on net framework, while the modern one runs on Java, so if the issue is somehow with the execution of TFE-X, using the old might work. To try that, you'd have to extract the contents of the old modpack somewhere and manually copy all the TF-X related stuff over to your root directory (and overwrite as appropriate).

    Pertinent files to copy are:

    ICSharpCode.SharpZipLib.dll
    Interop.IWshRuntimeLibrary.dll
    TFE-X.exe
    TFE-X.jpg
    TFE-X-linux
    TFE-X-repair
    TFE-X-repair.txt

    The module format hasn't changed so the old version should be able to activate the 8.1.0 module like any other.

    I wonder why the hang up with the modern front end on your system though. The log says you're running Java 7 - can you verify you actually are? That's required to work properly.
     
  7. sangiu

    sangiu Member

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    I'm going to try just that. Let me see if I got it straight, what I have to do is:

    - Install ToEE and unpack the 8.1.0 modpack in its folder.

    - Not start the new TFE-x, instead, unpack the 7.1.0 setup somewhere else and copy the files you said over to the installation folder.

    - Start tfe-x and activate 8.1.0 like that?


    (About Java, yes I have it updated to 7.64)
     
  8. Gaear

    Gaear Bastard Maestro Administrator

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    ^ That's correct. (And at this point, a reinstallation of the game itself would probably be a good idea because we don't know what state it's been left in after the aborted module activation.)

    edit

    Oh one other question - do you have ToEE installed in your Program Files directory somewhere?
     
  9. sangiu

    sangiu Member

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    Here I am again, I did as you suggested using the NET framework based TFE-x, but had the same exact result, mega-freeze during the activation (and I waited for some hours just to be sure). At this point I'm guessing it doesn't depend by the TFE-x but by something else?

    the installation path is C:\GOG Games\Temple of Elemental Evil (it's the GOG version). I purposefully avoided the program files directory since I had read in your guide that it could cause issues.


    Here's the log, maybe it can be of some use.

    Any other ideas? :(
     

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  10. Gaear

    Gaear Bastard Maestro Administrator

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    What's your antivirus situation atm? Something is stopping TFE-X doing what it wants to do.
     
  11. sangiu

    sangiu Member

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    I have AVAST antivirus but it is not giving any alert, I had COMODO but it's currently uninstalled.
     
  12. Gaear

    Gaear Bastard Maestro Administrator

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    Avast is known to play nice with ToEE (at least it was). I've got nothing else, sorry.

    Assuming you have the regular game installed and operational, you could manually patch it with all the files from the modpack. You'd have to do this:

    1. Run the 8.1.0 installer to extract the necessary files. Point the installer to deploy to some neutral, convenient location. (It doesn't care where it deploys to.)
    2. Open the 'Circle of Eight Modpack 8.1.0 New Content Edition' tfm archive that's extracted in the step above using an archive program - WinRAR or Winzip or Win7 or something like that.
    3. Move all the contents to your ToEE root directory and overwrite all. The tfm archive contents should be -
    • data (folder)
    • modules (folder)
    • temple.dll (single file)
    • toee.exe (single file)

    You'll probably have to run the game directly through the executable rather than the front end. (You'd of course use the executable you copied over above.)
     
  13. sangiu

    sangiu Member

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    I ran more tests and I think I can finally pinpoint the problem.

    It's an unzipping issue that slows my pc down to a crawl whenever I try to unzip, manually or automatically via TFE-x, anything Co8 related.

    I tried using winrar and 7zip to manually unpack the .tfm file you mentioned, and surprisingly enough it slowed down and froze midway just like TFE-x did.

    I tried installing 8.1.0 on my laptop (which has windows 7 on it) and it gave the same result.

    However, when I try to unzip different stuff, even bigger packages than Co8, it works without problem.

    To top it off, even the 7.1.0 version, which worked fine, is manifesting the same issue now. *shrug*

    So to tie it all up, the only thing that comes to mind is if some of you could upload the content of an unzipped 'Circle of Eight Modpack 8.1.0 New Content Edition'.tfm somewhere so I can just copy that into my root folder, but I understand if it's too much of a bother to ask. ;)
     
  14. sangiu

    sangiu Member

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    Well, damn.

    Dress me up and call me Minsc, because I finally booted it!


    The problem was lying in an application I didn't know I had on, Microsoft Security Client. The sneaky little bastard probably identified a false positive in some Co8 files and secretly expanded during their unzipping phase thus occupying all of my memory and slowing my PC down to a halt.

    It's worth noting that it gave no signals at all of what it was trying to do.

    After numerous tries I had the insight of monitoring the PC processes during the installation and saw this process bloating up to take more and more memory every second, probably because it couldn't access the "virus" it was trying to get to. I killed the process and bingo. Works like a charm now.

    Thanks Gaear for your assistance, I wouldn't have thought about it without your help.

    Off to adventure I go!:p
     
  15. Gaear

    Gaear Bastard Maestro Administrator

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