Greetings, sapients!
The launch of Recettear has gone pretty smoothly, all told; reviews are pouring in (all glowing), people are enjoying themselves, the game's
still among the top 5 sellers on Steam and Robin and I haven't drunk ourselves into comas with worry yet!
There's a few small "polish" issues with Recettear which will likely be addressed in a patch soon. However, a few people are reporting larger problems: no music and/or sound, or the game crashes when it tries to play a sound, or similar issues.
This is bad for one reason: neither Carpe Fulgur nor EGS can reproduce these issues.
At all.
Quite simply, if the game had been crashing for us, we wouldn't have released it. We're committed to providing a working game, and we thought we'd tested the game across a reasonably wide spectrum of hardware and OSes (certainly as wide a one as our "budget" will allow). The constant among all of these machines, WinXP, Vista, 7, Intel, AMD, Nvidia, ATI alike is that we are seeing nothing like the crashes some people are describing to us.
As you can imagine, this makes it incredibly difficult for us to even diagnose what the
problem is, let alone figure out how to fix it. And naturally, we don't have thousands of dollars to spend on extra testing hardware (let alone no guarantee that we could reproduce these issues!) which makes things even more vexing.
So what does this mean? Well, first of all it means that fixes for these issues are likely to be non-trivial and not especially fast in coming. EGS is pretty much going to be groping in the dark for the problem and how to fix it and will likely need time to sort it all out.
Secondly, though, it means you can help us out! If you're getting a crash, please post your system specifications, and if you can get it, a crashlog from Windows from when the game crashes on you. This will help EGS a great deal in narrowing down what's wrong and trying to fix it.
Thank you for your help with this, guys, and I'm sorry this is happening. We'll try to get it sorted, but it make take a while.
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"Is there any way to fix it at all", you may ask, though. Well, we do have a few suggestions:
- If you're using an ASUS Xonar sound card, please turn of GS3D in your card's driver options. This seems to cause crashes with Recettear (and a heap of other games, for that matter).
- If you're a Win2008 or Win7 user, try this:
To solve this problem you have to install DirectMusic. Installing newest DirectX won't work because apparently Microsoft deprecated that component and doesn't install it on newest operating systems (though files seem to still be included). Someone put together a nice package to install it on new operating systems here: http://www.win2008r2workstation.com/win2008r2/ms-directmusic-core-services . Installing older DirectX redistributables (~9.0), DirectMusic producer (here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=3f006f00-3900-4e14-85b5-266b75a5935f&displayLang=en) or ripping right files from newest redistributables might also work. Installing from the first link solved problem for me.
Remember to create a system restore point before mucking around with DirectX stuff, though!
