Online Mode broken?

Ticondrius

I installed everything as directed, reinstalled a few times too just to be sure, but every time I hit the Online play link, it opens a window for a few seconds, then closes. I get no error, no crash. Not even an error log. Just...nothing.

EDIT: Solo/LAN works fine. Spent the last few hours playing with my Son.

Krash

It shouldn't be closing without error -- the game has an exception handler which just happens to handle very few exceptions, so virtually any time the game crashes of its own accord you should see an "Unhandled Exception" window with a reference to a memory address. There aren't many things on initial startup that could cause the game to crash in the first few seconds; it'll typically run through the process of initiating the window/renderer, setting your display resolution, playing the intro videos, running a few scripts, communicating with the web to verify the authentication server address, and starting a ruby interpreter process.

Most of the possible issues regarding rendering have workarounds in this thread (the intros causing issues would be a missing video filter, at the moment I don't recall specifically which, but they're easily skipped through prefs), though in general you'd see the same crashes in LAN mode, as there's no fundamental difference between the two.

What operating system are you running? Are you running any software that may attempt to interfere with or close the process, such as an antivirus suite? Which shortcut are you using, what is it's path, and what arguments was it given?

Krash

Come to think of it, I just realised you must be running the SierraUp.exe launcher, which is just trying to run the proper exe, and is presumably unable to for whatever reason. Something you could do to test this is either create a new shortcut to "Tribes2.exe -online" (you can just copy your offline shortcut to do this quick), or go into your install's GameData directory and run the Classic_online.bat shortcut.

Ticondrius

All the install instructions said to just run the Online shortcut the installation provides, so I have been. I thought the Classic*.bat files were for running a mod of Tribes 1 ported to 2.

Krash

They run classic mod, but the client is identical unless you're hosting a server. The default shortcut added by the standard Tribes 2 installer used a patcher service that has been out of service for years, so we replaced the executable it links to with one that simply passes arguments to Tribes2.exe; this works fine for most people, but depending on your configuration (OS, folder permissions, third-party software, etc) can be prevented from running the game itself.

Typically players will create their own shortcuts after they've been playing for a while, especially if they play different mods.

Blakhart

Make sure your av and firewall passes t2, too.