well I did a shit ton of searching and some dude has been working on a tool to create GCF's for a while with no public results as of yet. We could at least throw together a tool to extract all the vpks into empires resources and create null GCF's.
The problem is being worked on. Every time someone posts information about it, we note it down and use it to try and get us closer to fixing the issue. We'll be contacting Valve with our findings pretty soon. Once the game actually boots properly for everyone, there's nothing really stopping us releasing another patch. Everything else is done.
This fix hasn't worked for me, and I've been unable to use any fresh installs of empires as a result. Seems like it worked on an install I did earlier this year, but just setting up a few new systems this month and it hasn't worked on any of them. Any other solutions?
Game's broken. Fix doesn't work. Just changes the error to be about 206, which is "source materials.gcf", which is apparently a bit of a hassle to download these days. WAIT WAIT WTF I told it I was deleting it, and now it wants to convert to a new format. The hell is going on here?
Could the appmanifest_17740 have anything with this to do? (Just throwing ideas out here) Code: "AppState" { "appID" "17740" "Universe" "1" "StateFlags" "4" "installdir" "Empires" "LastUpdated" "1368832948" "UpdateResult" "0" "SizeOnDisk" "3051641128" "buildid" "54364" "LastOwner" "0" "BytesToDownload" "1554013536" "BytesDownloaded" "1554013536" "AutoUpdateBehavior" "0" "AllowOtherDownloadsWhileRunning" "0" "UserConfig" { "name" "Empires" "gameid" "17740" "language" "english" } "MountedDepots" { "17743" "7108579005034993603" "17742" "2143264163940381527" "17741" "3549396527581036078" } }
And now every time I try to launch it, it complains that Source SDK Base 2007 isn't installed. When it is. Validated Source SDK Base 2007, re-downloaded 4 files, "not installed" problem persists. After it re-installed itself after the "convert to new format" thing, it installed to the wrong Steam library (I had originally installed Empires to the Steam library on my D: Drive) Oh, and LordDZ, my files match yours, so that's probably not it.
So, after "converting" everything, it still didn't seem to work, so I dumped everything back into the Steam Library on my C: drive, poked at it some more, and gave up. I am disappoint. ASCII snail is sad. @_'-' Do you see it? Do you see the sads it has?
That's a *snail*? I always wondered what it was supposed to be, looked like a crazy guy with one of his eyes punched to me.
I'm also having this problem, and the OPs suggestion didn't fix. looks like what chrono posted is pretty much the same as what I got.
It looks like we're going to be contacting Valve pretty shortly. We've gathered every scrap of information we can now and it just doesn't seem to be doing what we ask of it, so we're about out of options. We're going to take one last look at the build process for the game, and after that we're basically out of options.
Is it really all that hard to update the Empires to use vpk's? The code for HLLib.dll is open source. Copy paste some of that crap in empires and and there you go. The above is a bit of an oversimplification but, it should be doable.
It'll mean a complete port to Source 2013, which is what we're starting to have to think about if we really want to fix this problem.
Trickster, be honest, do you really belive this game can survive another port? Im not saying im against it, Ive no experience with the stuff but its probably pretty labor intensive stuff. That and the fact that last time we switched over it resulted in a shitty game untill 2.24 came out, greatly worries me.
i'd love to see a guy who only played 2.12 to come back to empires and play source 2009 empires i can imagine the vehicle handling now
We've reached a consensus that if we don't port it over, Empires is dead. Player counts are lower than ever, people can't launch the game, and both of those automatically make any other development more or less pointless. So we have three choices. Kludge our way through trying to fix Empires, which has no guarantees of working and could actually end up making the problem. Let Empires finally die, but despite how much people say "Empires is dead and we should let it die", I doubt anyone here actually wants that to happen. Or we can do an engine port. It's our best shot, and it's our only shot.