Attempt to handle unexpected (old or weird) OSes that may not support our directory detection

[Cervator]

What you were trying to do

A user attempted to run the game on a Windows XP system. Yes, WinXP still exists. No, it isn't likely to run the game well even if it didn't instantly crash :-)

It made me think though that there might be other current (or future) OSes we might encounter and maybe we can harden the process for a second chance at being able to run the game.

What actually happened

Exception in thread "main" java.lang.UnsatisfiedLinkError: Error looking up function 'SHGetKnownFolderPath': The specified procedure could not be found. - apparently XP can't handle the Windows specific call trying to get a default directory to store game data.

How to reproduce

• Run the game on Windows XP. If you can find something with XP on it

Possible improvement

I've come up with two brief ideas that might be able to get around this issue, which is namely using native/OS specific code trying to get a game data dir to call default.

• If path detection fails fall back on showing the user a popup asking for a valid path to use (similar to what the game launcher does) - so wrap exception detection around the problematic call then attempt a fallback
• If the user supplies -homedir then skip that whole part of the code. Update the docs to say if you hit an issue like that try to supply -homedir yourself

[sladyn98]

@Cervator Looks like a good beginner issue to work on. Can I start working on this

[Adrijaned]

Hi @sladyn98, feel free to start working on this, as as far as I know noone else is yet.

[sladyn98]

Terasology/facades/PC/src/main/java/org/terasology/engine/Terasology.java

Line 365 in 4e95d49

reportException(e);

My plan was to add a FileChooser to the above point and instead of catching an IO Exception would catch a general Exception, thereby catching the OS error.This would give the user a chance to select the file path and thus proceed normally.
JFileChooser jfc = new JFileChooser(FileSystemView.getFileSystemView().getHomeDirectory());

[DarkWeird]

@sladyn98 its will be problem in headless server

[sladyn98]

@DarkWeird So in that case we could use the fallback path that has been defined for the operating system. And according to the flow the default paths are tried first.

if (homePath != null) {
                PathManager.getInstance().useOverrideHomePath(homePath);
            } else {
                PathManager.getInstance().useDefaultHomePath();
            }

After this we prompt the user for the path, in a headless server since we cannot interact we can fallback to the using the currentDir or the default home for the OS.

[DarkWeird]

@sladyn98
I don't think what use homedir - pretty idea.
Looks like game files directly in homedir.
I think problem must be resolved in PathManager (looks like problem with detect default OS directory)

[sladyn98]

I think problem must be resolved in PathManager (looks like problem with detect default OS directory)

Oh okay so could we add a try block around that code and in the catch block we prompt the user to enter the file path using FileChooser, for headless servers we just use the current directory.