Windows 8.1, unable to login.

[Hightower]

Just installed lich on the new laptop. But when I go to login, nothing happens. Stormfront never loads up. Any ideas on what I might be doing wrong here?

~Taverkin

[Allereli]

make sure you are running as administrator

[Hightower]

make sure you are running as administrator

I thought I was? My user account has admin permissions and checking the properties of lich.rbw indicates the owner as administrator. But when I right-click the shortcut and check properties, it says: "This program comes from another computer and might be blocked to help protect this computer." So I select "Unblock" and apply. It doesn't work. When I right click it still gives the same message with a button to "unblock". And it still doesn't allow me to login. Also, when I try to right click a shortcut to lich.rbw and select "advanced", the option to "run as administrator" is greyed out.

This is probably something simple within the settings of Windows 8, but I'm new to it and I haven't figured it out yet.

~Taverkin

[Tenlaar]

Every time I load up the lich launcher I have to click on the install tab and select to run as administrator from there or it does nothing when I try to log in.

I think it's because Tillmen is trying to steal my identity.

[Allereli]

I don't know why my computer seems to be different than everyone else's. It ran first try no problem on Win 8 and after the 8.1 upgrade. I don't have to right click and run as administrator or anything silly like that. Maybe I did something in God Mode last year when setting it up, have you tried God Mode?

http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/win...-in-windows-8/

[Hightower]

I don't know why my computer seems to be different than everyone else's. It ran first try no problem on Win 8 and after the 8.1 upgrade. I don't have to right click and run as administrator or anything silly like that. Maybe I did something in God Mode last year when setting it up, have you tried God Mode?

http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/win...-in-windows-8/

I'll take a look when I have some time. Hopefully I can figure something out. I gather from reading around that this is not an unheard of problem, but the solutions that worked for others haven't worked for me so far. Any help is appreciated!

~Taverkin

[Tillmen]

When I tested Windows 8 in a VM, there was a problem when attempting to start the Simu launcher using the Ruby "system" method. It wouldn't do anything, and wouldn't provide any sort of error message. I added a workaround to use Windows API to start the Simu launcher, which worked for my test machine. You should be able to see if it detected Win8 and used the workaround in the debug file (lich\temp\debug-[number].txt). Since the workaround, I haven't been able to reproduce any of the problems people are having.

My tests were all without running Lich as admin. When you're logged into Windows with an admin account, the programs you start are not running as admin as you might expect, unless you take extra steps to make them run as admin. While running Lich as admin may help, I don't recommend it. It doesn't just give Lich admin rights, it gives admin rights to all those scripts that you download and trust without reading the code.

Admin is most often used to solve the problem of Lich being unable to write to the folder its in. This comes up when Lich is placed in Program Files or a similarly restricted folder. It's recommended that Lich is placed in the Documents folder of the user that's logged in, because that folder is obviously writable by the user.

I've suggested to a couple others with Win8 problems that they use a custom launch command, and it worked for them. If you haven't already found those posts and tried it, you just need to:
open the Lich game entry
click on the "Custom launch command" checkbox
select the one of the preset custom launch commands depending on if you want the WizardFE or Stormfront
enter the path to that frontend
login and stuff

The preset paths to the frontend are relative (../Stormfront) because this feature was created to let you play Gemstone from a usb drive. You can enter a relative or absolute path (C:\Program Files (x86)\Simu\Stormfront or something like that).

This will completely skip the Simu launcher, which seems to be the problem here. That means you won't get automatic updates for WizardFE/Stormfront. Those updates don't happen too often, but it's something to keep in mind.

I have a new guess at what might be going wrong. With Vista and later, programs that aren't running as admin aren't allowed to modify any part of the Windows registry that they want. In an attempt to avoid breaking a ridiculous amount of existing software that relies on editing the wrong sections of the registry (including Simutronics software), Windows creates a fake registry for that software. Changes made to system like areas of the registry by software not running as admin are faked and visible only to that software. This is why Lich puts a button on the install tab requiring you to restart as admin for Vista and later. Without that admin, SGE would never seen the changes Lich makes to the registry.

However, SGE is able to find the Simu launcher's location from the registry, and the Simu launcher is able to find Stormfront's location from the registry. This is because Windows attempts to detect software installers and automatically make them run as admin. My guess this is this has become more restrictive in Windows 8. Maybe having something to do with the installers being launched by a web browser, maybe just Windows randomness.

If this is the problem, it would be fixed by uninstalling your frontend and the Simu launcher, then downloading the Simu launcher installer (selecting save instead of run). Find that installer in your file manager. Right click on it and find a "run as admin" type option. After it's installed, find the installed file (Launcher.exe), right-click on it, go to properties, change tab, find an "always run as admin" type option.

If this works, I hate Windows. You should be using xubuntu. USE IT DAMNIT!

tl;dr

[Hightower]

Thanks, Tillmen! I really appreciate you taking the time to help me out on this one. So here's what happened. I did everything you advised, and nothing happened. Then I hit on the idea of finding the rubyw.exe file and running that as administrator. That didn't do anything. But while I was there, I saw the compatibility mode settings and thought to give it a shot. After setting rubyw.exe to run in Win7 mode, the lich game entry was able to load stormfront. At that point I was logged into the game, but the moment I put in any kind of lich command, the game would hang. You could send commands, but it looked like the game was not receiving them either lich commands or normal game commands. So then I went and set stormfront and the launcher to run in Win7 mode. That seems to have solved the problem.

Of course I have no idea why! I was just messing around trying to figure out anything that would work! Hope it helps resolve the problem for others. Thanks again for the help, Tillmen!

~Taverkin