Thanks, got it! I'm getting ready to travel for the Thanksgiving holiday. I'll get back to troubleshooting this issue afterwards.

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Hi Berarma,

Did you ever receive my reply e-mail? Just curious if I can get a look at the Dirk 2 log file in ~/.dirkdashing2/ddlog.txt? There might be a clue to the crash in there... thanks!

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Thanks! Is anyone else having trouble with it?

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Yikes! I think the crash may be related to the sound issue. It sounds like the audio system isn't initializing.

Have you looked at the game's README file? I tried to document all of the audio issues we've found so far, and the workarounds or solutions. I had 2 reports of crashes on Debian Squeeze on AMD64 with PulseAudio installed, and the problem in both cases was with the 32-bit compatibility versions of PulseAudio. Going to /usr/lib32 and either renaming the libpulse* libraries or moving them to another location solved the problem for both of those Debian users. It forced the game to use a different audio driver.

Meanwhile, I'll review the code. I thought I had null pointer checks around all the sound effect calls, but I must have missed one.

EDIT: One other thing I just thought of - try downloading Dirk Dashing 2, and see if that has the same audio issues. Dirk 2 uses a more recent version of my game engine - if it works, maybe all I need to do is rebuild the Rick Rocket code.

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By the way, I'm doing a little experimenting with the price of the game. It's been reduced, so you can now get it at $14.99 USD.

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I would say before you raise the price again, you probably need to address the art. That might sound harsh, and I don't mean it to, but it's the reality of the current game market. It was different a few years ago when $20 was the standard price of a casual/indie game. But nowadays, when you start approaching $10+ for a game, people expect it to look good. Especially since there are so many games available now around the $5 price point that look good.

On the other hand, if you've got decent art and the game isn't finished, I think people find it easier to pre-order. I think when people buy an unfinished game, they want to have some assurance that the quality of the final product is going to be good. The earlier you can start using professional art in the game, the faster you'll alleviate that concern.

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Yeah he's acknowledged the art quality in several blog posts. I think he had hired an artist at one point, but that fell through. I'm sure it will be revised before he's done.

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Just wanted to chime in and say that I happen to know this guy, and he's definitely a supporter and user of Linux. We worked together back in 2005 to figure out how to build distribution-independent binaries, and some of the material in my Linux game development articles were things he happened to learn that he shared with me. He has also helped me test the Linux builds of my games. Gianfranco's a great guy.

He's tinkered around with mini games and participates frequently in Ludum Dare, but he's wanted to make a full-on game for some time now. This is his first big project, and I really like the concept. I'm looking forward to seeing how this evolves over the course of its development.

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Quoting: "Kame, post: 5145, member: 102"That's a bit misleading. Currently METRO STYLE apps can't do opengl. Normal apps, which is probably all valve will ever release considering you have to go through the windows store to sell metro apps, will still be able to do OpenGL.

That's good to know. Last I heard, Windows 8 didn't support OpenGL. But then that was earlier in the year.

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Quoting: "Cheeseness, post: 5124, member: 122"This is pretty interesting stuff, as OpenGL often seems under appreciated on Windows. So far as I'm aware, Windows users aren't given an option to run the game in OpenGL, and it'll be interesting to see if Valve consider providing this to them (and us Wine users) in the future.

Considering Microsoft has announced that Windows 8/Metro will not support OpenGL, I rather suspect that Valve won't bother investing time in that option.

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