Creeper World 1 Hang

[knucracker]

Turns out that CW1 will not start on Oct 10, 2014.  It will hang at "Calibrating Fractal Scanners ..."  If you experience this problem then you can wait till Oct 11, 2014 at which point the game will have managed to fight off the Creeper attack.  Or you can download the patch that corrects this issue:
http://knucklecracker.com/creeperworld/patches.php

What is special about Oct 10, 2014 you may ask?  I wondered the same thing. 

Perhaps today is a pivotal day in the arc of the Creeper story and maybe it was necessary that Creeper defenses be taken offline on today and only today. 

Or perhaps it was because the chronom map for today causes an infinite loop in the map generation algorithm.  I'll go with the prior explanations...

[Anonymeus]

W00t! (I thought I'd b0rked it by having over 2000 custom maps loaded... and came to the support forum because I was trying to figure out how to reinstall while maintaining player settings...  ;D)

Thanks for the patch!

[samboni]

Out of curiosity, what is the reason that the infinite loop happens? It just seems weird that it would happen on this day specifically.

[knucracker]

Today is an "island day".  The routine creates random islands and then tries to place them so they don't touch.  Unfortunately, there was a case I missed where the islands can't always be placed in accordance with their constraints and the code just keept on trying and trying different random combinations.  It is sheer luck that today triggered the case.

[Anonymeus]

Creeper creeper creeper. And nothing but creeper.
If only an inch of land! An inch of no-matter-what land!
To set one foot on! If only!

We begged the gods for that! All of them!
Water gods, land gods, southern gods, northern gods,
For an inch, a strip, a scrap of any kind of land!
No more than just to support one claw of one foot!
And nothing. Only creeper. Nothing except creeper.
Creeper creeper creeper.
If only a speck of land!
There is no salvation.

(after Aleksander Wat (1900-1967) "A Flamingo's Dream"

Spoiler

read "water" for "creeper" to get the original

[close]

)

[Anonymeus]

Said patch has reset all my settings (I'll have to play the story again to regain double down (don't mind about the story - it's the conquest missions that are a drag))... and it's reset my username so I'm now posting as Anonymous rather than my famous Anonymeus...  (mine's the 2nd score on BABA's latest...)

[knucracker]

The patch doesn't touch any of your settings.  Those are stored here:
c:\Users\YOUR_USER\AppData\Roaming\CreeperWorld

If you changed the user you were logged in as under Windows, that would make your settings change.  The patch just updates the game exe...

Take a look here c:\Users\YOUR_USER\AppData\Roaming\ and find the CreeperWorld dir.  THen look under other user accounts (if you have any) and see if you find other CreeperWorld dires.

[Karsten75]

Said patch has reset all my settings (I'll have to play the story again to regain double down (don't mind about the story - it's the conquest missions that are a drag))... and it's reset my username so I'm now posting as Anonymous rather than my famous Anonymeus...  (mine's the 2nd score on BABA's latest...)

I can confirm that I applied the patch and had none of my settings changed. Submitted several scores on that fateful Oct 10th map. :)

[Jacobkolstad]

Do some other dates have the same case?

[knucracker]

None that I'm aware of, but it could be possible.  The patch should fix any of them, though.

[Jacobkolstad]

2000 years later:
"God damn it, why won't it start?"

[Grayzzur]

2000 years later:
"God damn it, why won't it start?"

Adobe stopped supporting the last version of AIR (15250.12.0.3) 73 years ago. Nobody has made a processor capable of even running that archaic crap in 33 years! Upgrade your computer and buy a new game!

8)