Game reverts to desktop

[lakibuk]

A customer emailed me about this problem:

I downloaded and installed it onto my computer. Icons for both games appeared on the desktop but when I click on them to open they don't work. It appears the game is attempting to open, music starts, but then the screen reverts to the desktop with the music still playing and the task bar at the bottom of the screen shows the game is open. Clicking on the taskbar only results in the same thing happening.
Does anyone know what could be the reason for this behaviour? I am rather clueless.

[Dan MacDonald]

Perhaps it can't initalize the requested display mode? You probably initalize your sound system before you try to set the display and the display is failing.

[Dan MacDonald]

I closed this thread because I was grumpy, but it really wasn't warrented. My feeling was if you developed a game arn't you the best one to debug it? Without more information how can anyone here help you with the problem?

Although in retrospect I probably should have asked for more information. So here's your chance!

[lakibuk]

Thanks for my last chance :-)
Seems the problem solved itself. The customer didn't email again and did not refund.

[Dan MacDonald]

Glad to hear it worked out Karl :)

[Devman]

One other tip:

When a program just "vanishes", often it is caused by an unhandled exception being thrown (and not caught). You can try to discover this by wrapping your main loop or main function or whatever in a big

int main()
{

try {
while (1) {
game_main();
}
}
catch (...)
{
// spit out big message here saying game unexpectedly terminated.
}
}

This does not help a whole lot but will let you know at least if a customer hits this case, then you can add more error-checking.

Good luck!