Fix For MountAppFilesystem() failed

#5 make it open source

 

wait...what map?
you working on a map?

 

So, what would be the eta on the port? Back then we had some active coding going on and it still took what felt like ages. I have no idea how much work it would be.

 

Empires Tournament 2014.

5 fps with i7 and 2 titans.

 

I suggest that if the devs are going threw the trouble of another port???
That Empires should also get a face lift.
1.New maps
2.New models (mainly NF)
3.Have viper use a better map rotation.
4.******
5. Profit

 

D.D.D. Destroyer has it right:

To Flasche, keep in mind that porting to Source 2013 is little more than updating some code files. And actually, I'm pretty certain that's all there is to it. Now that's an understatement of how much code needs to be updated, but it's still far less than if we were to try and port to a different engine. Moving to a different engine entails changing all the code files to work with the calls the engine gives us, having to deal with the new quirks that pop up due to differences between engines, remaking all the maps to deal with a new engine, recompiling all the models and possibly making new ones. There's a lot of things that a port to a different engine involves that simply porting to a newer version of the current engine doesn't.

To 101010, there are things for which we have people that can do them, and things for which we have no one. Interestingly enough, instead of having mappers and textures and modelers and no coders as we've had before, it's completely flipped. Right now, there are two people that can work on code and nothing else. So if it isn't code related, there's not much we can do.

To Z100000M, all I can say that is going from Source 2007 to Source 2013 will be far easier than going to Source 2007 was. That's part of the reasoning we're going ahead with it.

 

What kind of weak reasoning is that? There is a bug that prevents some people from installing Empires and yes that has terrible consequences for current player count. But what makes you guys think that porting it to Source 2013 is easier than finding and fixing the install bugs?

Porting Empires to the latest gen of Source means two years of hard development work without any visible progress for the community. No tangible progress means no updates, no fixes, no player feedback, nothing that will attract new players or keep the old players. And that also means nothing that keeps the coders motivated and going.

I remember the times when Mootant did the Orange Box update. He worked his ass off, but for the general public it seemed as if Empires development had completely stopped and that had a terrible effect over time on player numbers and the community.

It was the Orange box port that nearly killed the community of and not for lack of Mootant's effort or the balance problems of Empires 2.2, but a long waiting period combined with a new release that had very little to show for the average player.

 

Because we've tested every option, gone through every forum, looked at every document and reached several conclusions.

1) Source 2007 mods are dead. Soon, they're going to be more or less entirely unsupported by Valve.

2) There's no easy way to fix the install issues. To put it simply, Source 2007 and SteamPipe don't work well together in the least, and it's only going to get worse, not better, if we don't do something about that, and we can't do anything with the SteamPipe side of things, so we have to fix it on our side.

3) The easiest way to think of Source 2013 as compared to Source 2007 is addition of new features and bug fixes. Whereas porting to Source 2007 was adding new things, removing old things, fixing bugs and fundamentally changing certain aspects of the game.

So our choices come down to letting Empires slowly die because people can't play it, or giving it another chance at life by porting it over. And I damn well ain't about to give up on this god damn game and it's fuckin' community, because I love both of them far to much, even if I am only the latest in a long string of developers.

 

Wouldn't porting to Gmod be easier ?
Since Gmod can mount the vpks for 2007.
Empire would just need to be converted to a Gmod game mode.
Down side is then you have too worry about source update + Garry's updates breaking the game.

 

Or instead of porting over, remake the game on a different engine, like Factions. Factions is still there guys, it just has absolutely no one developing it despite being the most promising Empires remake out of all the other ones. I'm pretty sure that's the fault Empires' development has, every time there's a surge in development someone else in the community wants to remake empires (Cold Trap, Dies Irae, Factions) and what ends up happening is there's a split in the manpower, and that leads to a split in decision making, meaning a split in ideals, meaning the dev team falls apart again.

Imagine for one moment if every single person who could contribute to the mod at one time went and worked on the same thing, we wouldn't have such dilemma.

 

Ok, i just tried to do a fresh install of Empires on my laptop and it failed to start like for everyone else.

Details:
- Fresh install of Windows 8.1, fresh install of Steam
- Download link: http://store.steampowered.com/app/17740/?snr=1_7_7_151_150_1
- Interestingly it says required HD space 6018 MB for Empires but then downloads only 1.4 GB
- First launch attempt runs the .NET 3.5 installer - no surprise here
- second launch attempt prompts the SDK Base 2007 install (3909 MB required, actual download 2.2 GB)
- third launch attempt brings us to the MountAppFileSystem() error
- total size of everything installed is 6.6 GB (=amount of growth of the Steam folder)


I really had no clue this error is so widespread and persistent.

 

That's the major problem with the game right now. Fresh installs from scratch do not work, period. From what we can gather, it's been like this for almost a year now and has been getting progressively worse, but we didn't notice because we weren't doing fresh installs, just updating old installs, and when we heard about people having issues, the solutions generally worked until Valve converted Source 2007 to use VPKs, but we still thought it was a problem with Empires GCFs and were content with what the workaround was.

The worst part is when you consider that we only heard about the cases of people who were interested enough to bother installing Empires, realize it was broken, made an account on the forums and say something about it. I fear to consider the possible number of players that didn't say anything, installed it and then uninstalled once they realized it was broken.

 

Pretty much.
I only did the above because I played empires a long time ago and enjoyed it.
and even then, I very nearly didn't. (create an forum account etc.)

In other news, I was able to launch empires from SDK Base 2007 as per the other thread, however I couldn't see any servers at all.