New version of DR crashing on startup

[demagogue]

The new version of DR is crashing on startup, and an older version (2.8), the one I'm trying to update, still opens fine.

Do you know of any reason why the new version of DR would crash over older versions and a fix that I might try?

Also, I set the initial configuration "mission" slot to a possibly bunk folder, and I wonder if that's contributing to the crash. So I wanted to know how to either reset the initial config window, or anyway where the config file is so I can either delete it or edit it directly.

Edit: Okay, I found the config file in ...\AppData\Roaming\DarkRadiant.

I deleted it, I redid the initial config & left off the mission info, and it did reset. But that didn't stop the crash on start up.  So it must be for some other reason. This laptop uses an Intel graphics card (not a specialized one), so that might be related to the crash too. Anyway if you know how I can stop the crash, let me know, otherwise I'll use the older version. This is a convenient little laptop to build on, even without a graphics card.

[datiswous]

The newest version currently is 3.8.0. You could try previous versions (on Windows): https://www.darkradiant.net/download.html to see at which version you get the crash and to not miss too many features with your prehistorical old version 2.8.

You can download a portable version of each, although the settings are shared, so it's not really portable.

Edited January 6 by datiswous

[demagogue]

Thanks. Anyway even the prehistoric version is crashing a lot, so I'm getting the message that it's not worth building on my little travel laptop and I'll stick to my gaming computer. It's not such a big loss.

I used to build all the time using a really underpowered laptop, and it's nice sometimes, but I guess the game has evolved past that now.

[greebo]

The crash can be caused by anything. Do you have a crash dump? Otherwise it's nearly impossible to say what went wrong.

[demagogue]

Alright, here is the crash dump, and here's my system info.

Hopefully you can let me know if DR is something I can run on this laptop or not.

[datiswous]

On 1/6/2024 at 10:56 PM, demagogue said:

so I'm getting the message that it's not worth building on my little travel laptop

It has Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-8650U CPU with 16gb ram? Should be powerful enough I think..

[greebo]

On 1/7/2024 at 10:24 PM, demagogue said:

Hopefully you can let me know if DR is something I can run on this laptop or not.

Don't see much in the dump, I'm afraid. I can see it's been running into a critical failure, but that's it. Can you have a look at your darkradiant.log file, or maybe send it to me? Maybe it tells me something.

(You already tried to remove your settings XML files from C:\Users\greebo\AppData\Roaming\DarkRadiant\3.8, I take it?

You can back them up if you need them around. Just move the whole contents of the C:\Users\greebo\AppData\Roaming\DarkRadiant\ folder to somewhere else and start DR. In case you didn't try that already.)

[greebo]

On 1/6/2024 at 7:21 AM, datiswous said:

You can download a portable version of each, although the settings are shared, so it's not really portable.

Since a few versions the settings are saved by minor version - so DR 3.7 is storing its settings in a "3.7" subfolder, and DR 3.8.0 is saving them in "3.8". (DR 3.7.1 and 3.7.2 would use the same "3.7" folder.)

Settings are carried forward the first time you start a newer version. So, when DR 3.9 first starts up, it will use the settings of the highest previous version available, then store its settings in the "3.9" subfolder to not overwrite anything from previous versions. (This is similar to what's Blender is doing, at least I think it is.)

What's correct though is that the "portable" version is not differing from the installed one in terms of where it stores it settings. They both behave the same. One could maybe vote for having the portable version to store its settings right next to the executable. But to support this, we'd need a configurable code path or maybe even a separate compilation for the portable edition.