GTK Client cannot start local server in WinXP

[Roland the Conquerer]

I've just dived in this marvelous game during my vacation using a netbook with Win7 and really liked to continue playing at home now on my desktop computer - mostly because of the larger screen. The desktop is running WinXP SP3.

On both computers I used the latest GTK2 V.2.4.3 package for Windows as offered on the Freeciv-site. While it was running fine on the netbook I can't start a local game on my WinXP machine: Every time I start up the client and click one of the buttons on the left side nothing happens and the client won't react any more. In the Task Manager I see the freeciv-server process is started and vanishes again in a second. The status bar on the bottom of the client window shows nothing at all. But at the same time I am able to connect to network games through the client.

By starting the freeciv-server.exe through the Explorer in a CMD-window it seems to run normally. Started directly over CMD the server program is stopped with the message: "0: bind failed" - but this is probably because of lacking parameters I suppose. I have no idea how to start a local game over CMD if this is even possible.

All running firewalls were opened for the game respectively deactivated for testing. Antivirus also. No joy.

Looks a bit like the problem in this thread, http://forum.freeciv.org/f/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=152, but there is no solution posted.

Any ideas? Many thanks in advance!

Roland

[cazfi]

Looks a bit like the problem in this thread, http://forum.freeciv.org/f/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=152, but there is no solution posted.

Please test the "run server separately" as told in that thread. Though it's likely that it won't work either, at least you get to see the error message server is giving so we know what we're against.

[Roland the Conquerer]

Thank you for your quick reply, Cazfi!

I started the server by simply doubleclicking it in the installation folder. Then connected to it through the client by establishing a network game on localhost, port 5556. This way I could start and play a standard game, played through about twenty turns and everything works fine. I connected several times to this game without a problem so far. No errors displayed.

Apart from that I still can not start the server by using the client and can not use it to set up games or load the gamesaves from my other computer, which was my primary goal.

[cazfi]

Unfortunately loading saved games to running server is not possible. You need to launch the server from dos-prompt so you can give it commandline parameters to load the savegame

Code: Select all

freeciv-server.exe -f C:\path\to\your\savegame.sav.gz

As for the settings, you can list all the available settings with "show all" on the server console (you can also send it from the client chatline by prefixing it with "/" -> "/show all"). Then you can get information about each setting with "explain <settingname>", and you can set them with "set <settingname> <value>".
You can also save them to a file, either by writing such a file yourself (just a list of set -commands) or by "write mysettings.serv", which you can later recall with "read mysettings.serv".

Try "help" to get started in exploring other things you can do at the server console.

[JTN]

I've raised bug #22549 for this symptom.

By starting the freeciv-server.exe through the Explorer in a CMD-window it seems to run normally. Started directly over CMD the server program is stopped with the message: "0: bind failed" - but this is probably because of lacking parameters I suppose.

A server started with no parameters should not give "bind failed".

Be aware that server behaviour can be history-dependent: if you start a standalone server, quit, and start another, it may fail and then work some time later, after a timeout. (Client should not have such behaviour, but there are clearly lurking bugs here, so when diagnosing this for us, watch out for this with the client-spawned server too.)

[cazfi]

As client tries to spawn server to use port 5557 by default, could you test using that port also with the separately run server, by starting it with "-p 5557" commandline parameter?

[Roland the Conquerer]

A server started with no parameters should not give "bind failed".

Be aware that server behaviour can be history-dependent: if you start a standalone server, quit, and start another, it may fail and then work some time later, after a timeout. (Client should not have such behaviour, but there are clearly lurking bugs here, so when diagnosing this for us, watch out for this with the client-spawned server too.)

Hi JTN!

Thank you for helping! I started the server from the console again today from a freshly booted system and without starting the server in any other way: But again it returns "0: bind failed: Der Vorgang wurde erfolgreich beendet." (german language used) and quits.

I would be glad if I could help in finding bugs! But having two small children here I'm not always able to answer quickly. Thank you for your understanding.

To Cazfi:

Thank you also! But as I cannot start the server from the console I am not able to use commandline parameters to chnange the port or load saved games. It's "bind failed" also. Deactivated firewalls again before.

By the way: In the meantime I had the opportunity to install the gtk2-packet on another WinXP-machine and the client was able to start the server there. So the problem lies propably in my PC allthough I don't understand where - I have no problems with other network applications. I'm even playing other multiplayer games sometimes. On the second PC the server crashes on exiting a game with a "could not read from memory" (see attachment).