Windows Problems

[Brian the Fist]

As some of you have noted, you may be experiencing problems with the client update under Windows. No this is not a ploy to get everyone to swicth to Linux (although it WOULD make everything so much easier...).

We have 'upgraded' from the MSVC6 compiler we have been using in the past to the new Visual Studio .NET compiler. While all the code tested and worked fine under MSVC6, we foolishly assumed it would work under .NET as well (but we should know better by now ).

Thus as some of the most eager amongst you discovered, the initial Windows update had a problem causing it to crash after the 1st structure (error 0x000000c). Thus we quickly turned the server back off (of course). Looking at the cause of the problem, we found it was something to do with the optimization being done by the compiler. Given a choice between a client that crashes and an unoptimized one, we decided to quickly repackage the updates with optimization off. Thus it runs slower that normal but at least works.

Now we have had a bit more time to look at the error and have found a way around it with optimizations in place, although the reason for the crash itself is still largely unknown and is in a complex portion of the code in a 3rd party library.

Anyone who updated after 11AM EST today should have the fixed, full-speed version. The same applies if you downloaded from the web site after this time. For your convenience we have also made the EXE only available here:

ftp://ftp.mshri.on.ca/pub/distribfol...ldtrajlite.zip

simply unzip it and overwrite the 'bad' EXE (whichever one you have) and it should be fine. Note you can only update this way if you already have yesterday's client on your machine. If your machine has not updated yesterday/today, please update the normal way and you will get the working version now.

Similarly for the screensaver:

ftp://ftp.mshri.on.ca/pub/distribfol...trajlitess.zip

and unzip it over the old screensaver executable (foldtraj.scr) (search for it if unsure where it is, but itll be somewhere in your windows\system directory area)

We apologize for any inconvenience but this was a very unforeseen and strange problem which we didn't expect to arise from a simple upgrade in compilers.

On the bright side, we have fixed many bugs from the previous client. Please let us know of any new ones that should pop up so we can fix them ASAP. As noted in the whatsnew.txt, we have made a lot of (albeit minor) changes with this version so I won't be too surprised if there's one or two new errors we missed.

P.S. No one commented on the surprise funky download progress bar I added?
People only ever notice the bad stuff..