I cannot launch the game at all (a problem most likely related to Unity)

[Solar Beam]

Hi,

So, I’ve just purchased the game, and I unfortunately can’t run it at all. When I click the “Play” button in Steam, Steam shows the game as started (the button changes to “Stop”), but the game doesn’t actually start. This is going to be hard to debug because no window appears, no error message, nothing. There is no error either in the Windows events log, and I can’t find any log in the game’s folder either 😕 The only thing I can do then is force-quit the game in the Windows Task Manager (“Details” tab, as it doesn’t appear in the “Processes” tab).

I think that the problem is probably related to Unity, as recently, I got another game, called Will Glow the Wisp, that is also made with Unity and that gave me exactly the same trouble, and I couldn’t found a solution. However, now that I suspect it’s something on my system that interferes with some Unity games, I tried searching with Google and found other people with Unity games that wouldn’t run, but none of the solutions I found helped or seemed to apply to me. Any other game I’ve been playing on this PC works fine.

I am now on Windows 10 2004 (when I tried playing Will Glow the Wisp, I was on 1909 but I don’t think that’s relevant anyway).

Computer specs, although they probably don’t really matter for this issue : ASRock X370 Taichi, Ryzen 7 1700X, 32 GB of RAM, Zotac GeForce GTX 1070, Corsair RM650x PSU, and a Seagate 2 TB HDD

I tried disabling my antivirus and running the game in Admin mode without success either.

I’d be grateful for any idea that I could try !
Thanks

[curtis1122]

Hi Onox,

Hmm, yes this is a tricky one. It sounds like you've gone through a lot of different troubleshooting steps already. Have you tried the stuff from this thread? It's for a different version of Windows* but it may still be applicable.

https://steamcommunity.com/discussions/forum/1/1480982971174752598/

[Solar Beam]

Hi, thanks for your answer ! (You posted while I was typing :) ) Yes, I’ve seen the thread you linked, and it’s not that. But I found this :

“There is a known error with Unity Player related to usernames that can cause games to crash immediately. […]

If the username you have set up on your computer includes a special character (see list below), then you may need to change your local username to play Unity Player games. […]

Special Characters can include:

$ @ : ; - _ + = # % ^ & ~ < > [ ] { } ( ) * and characters such as umlauts and accents.” Link[kartridge.zendesk.com]

I’m not sure what Unity Player is ; does Newfound Courage use it ? My username folder in C:\Users does contain an accented character (í)…

It’s easy to change your user account name, but that doesn’t rename the user folder itself, and doing so is not trivial (among other things, you have to edit the registry, and after that, you may have a lot of entries that still reference the old path). I can try to do it, but I’d like to know your opinion beforehand : do you think that’s what preventing me from running the game ? Thank you

[curtis1122]

Oh wow! What a crazy problem, I'm so impressed that someone figured this out haha.

So Newfound Courage uses your LocalLow to store save files, it'll be under this folder, and as you can see it will include your username. So maybe it's that file name you need to change?

C:\Users\[USERNAME]\AppData\LocalLow\Curtis Campion

[curtis1122]

There was also the suggestion of creating a new user account without the special character, that's for sure your safest bet, at the very least to see if it resolves the problem.

[Solar Beam]

curtis の投稿を引用：

Oh wow! What a crazy problem, I'm so impressed that someone figured this out haha.

So Newfound Courage uses your LocalLow to store save files, it'll be under this folder, and as you can see it will include your username. So maybe it's that file name you need to change?

C:\Users\[USERNAME]\AppData\LocalLow\Curtis Campion

Well, I was able to change [USERNAME] to something without any non-ASCII character (I updated everything in the registry (or almost – a couple of values couldn’t be changed) + made a junction point with the old folder name to the new one, just in case). This seems to have worked well, as I didn’t have any error so far. But… I reinstalled the game and it still doesn’t work 🙁 It’s probably a different issue, then

I actually don’t have your folder in AppData\LocalLow ; I assume that the game crashes before it can even create that folder. The only thing that happens when I open the game is that I see Windows’ blue ring pointer icon for a couple of seconds (as before the username change)

I’ll keep looking for a solution for a while, but I may have to wait until I upgrade/change my computer and reinstall Windows, or I could try playing the game on Linux (I have a dual boot on this computer)

[Solar Beam]

Hi again, Curtis 🙂

I have tried a couple of other things, but apart from reinstalling Windows completely and try playing with a minimal installation, I’m out of ideas about what I could do only on my end. (I used Windows’ System File Checker[support.microsoft.com], too.)

However, I do think that the problem is occurring only with some versions of Unity, as I have tried playing or playing again several other games made with Unity, and those work just fine.

I see that the two games that crash for me have UnityPlayer.dll directly in the base folder, and their version is similar :

Newfound Courage : 2018.2.18. …
Will Glow the Wisp : 2018.2.10. …

The other Unity games I have tried either don’t use UnityPlayer.dll and have other Unity engine files in a subfolder instead, or use older versions of UnityPlayer.dll. I found this thread[forum.unity.com] on Unity forums, which mentions a bug that was supposedly fixed in 2018.2.17f1, so it looks like that the version used by Newfound Courage includes that fix (?), but other people in that thread reported still having crashes even after that. (When I searched the web, I also found a lot of people having errors like “UnityPlayer.dll caused an Access Violation.” for different games, but it’s not always related to this particular problem I’m facing.). In that thread, Citrix is also mentioned as causing crashes for Unity games (something which I had already found out before I wrote my initial post here), but I have never had Citrix or any similar software installed, and I’ve also read elsewhere that this has been fixed in more recent versions of Citrix.

Since I don’t even see an error displayed, it might not be the same problem, but so far I’ve only had this issue of games not starting with Unity 2018.2.something. I’d also like to check with 2019.x Unity games, but I’m not sure whether I have one yet.

Another possibility was suggested in “Windows build crashing, only on some machines[forum.unity.com]” :

“One thing you really need is to get these crash logs with debug symbols, it will show you where it is crashing.
No need to add custom logs for that, just a development build.
If you have anyone that has this crashes happen consistently, just send them a dev build. If you're using steam you can use a hidden branch for that.
It will get you a long way to pinpoint the issue.”

Would you want to try that with me ? I can come chat on Discord. As my system works fine otherwise and I don’t believe that my computer setup is very special, it wouldn’t surprise me that other people run into the same problem with your game at some point. It would be a good thing to figure out why it crashes !

[curtis1122]

Yep happy to try this. I’ll produce a dev build Monday Australian time.

[Solar Beam]

curtis の投稿を引用：

Yep happy to try this. I’ll produce a dev build Monday Australian time.

Cool ! I sent you a PM on Discord in case you’d like to chat about it there

[Solar Beam]

In case anyone else encounters the same problem, I finally found a workaround : delete the file UnityCrashHandler32.exe from the game folder ! I got this idea from
a topic on Reddit about the same issue, but on Windows 7…

As we still don’t know what the root cause of this problem is and whether there is a “proper” solution, I’m thinking of reporting it on Unity forums (I couldn’t find any discussion about it there). It unfortunately doesn’t seem possible to directly contact Unity support unless you have a subscription with them.

I also found another user who reported this problem for another game here on Steam : link (with a difference : I don’t see the crash handler as a suspended process)

Thank you again for the dev builds and for our conversation on Steam, Curtis 🙂