- I ran the "Install to Registry" link, but the program isn't working when I run it.
If you use this method, you don't ever have to execute Lich manually (infact it won't work properly if you do run it yourself). After you've run the "Install to Registry" shortcut, all you have to do is login with SGE or through the website using any web browser other than Microsoft's Internet Explorer.
- The program runs and I can login, but Lich never announces itself and its commands don't seem to work.
On some systems, Lich is able to inform security software that it doesn't need to accept any connections from the outside world and only needs to accept a connection from the local computer itself -- if this is the case for you, Lich doesn't need any special permissions in your firewall. Otherwise, Lich requires "server rights" in firewall software; what firewall programs call it varies, but it needs permission to accept incoming connections (it's pretending to be the game server, and it can't very well act like a server if it can't accept your front-end's connection). I give you my word that your front-end is the only connection Lich accepts, and that it's safe as can be; whether my word is good enough for you or not is your call. A router or any external hardware won't interfere, but firewall software like ZoneAlarm or McAffee will stop Lich from working unless you tell it to let Lich do its thing. If you're sure that it has permission to accept connections, then it must be a different problem: if you're trying to use it with a Simutronics MUD -- GemStone IV, DragonRealms, etc. -- consider using the "Install to Registry" method. If that isn't an option or you don't want to do it that way, read on.
First you should make sure you don't have "stormfront-mode.txt", "wizard-mode.txt", "game.txt", or any of the other configuration files in Lich's program directory. If you didn't create them, then you shouldn't have any, since their purpose is to manually override Lich's auto-detection and it doesn't create any of them itself. If you're sure none of those config files are interfering, you may have to figure out what port number and IP address your front-end is trying to connect to and put them in the "game.txt" file. To figure that out, a good place to start is going to the Start menu, clicking "Run Program..." and then typing "cmd" (or on older versions of Windows type "command"). Now login to the game like you usually do. Once you're connected, type in the DOS-Prompt "netstat -a" (w/o quotes), and look for your game's connection (if you're in Linux, use that same command from a shell prompt). It should be listed with a remote port number and remote IP address -- you don't want the local port number, you want the remote server's port number. Put those in "game.txt" in Lich's directory (IP address on line 1, port number on line 2), and then try again. Optionally, you can make the third line of the "game.txt" file one of "WIZARD", "STORMFRONT", or "BARE" to inform Lich what format it should expect the data stream to be in.
- Nothing happens when I run the program.
Either use the "Install to Registry" method if you're playing a Simutronics game, or see the second paragraph in problem 2 above.
- I ran the program once, and now I can't login (even without it)...!
Run the uninstall shortcut from the Start menu. Whether you actually finish the uninstall doesn't really matter: running that link tells Lich that it's about to get deleted and it better make sure everything is the way Lich found it when you first installed it. So either finish the uninstall and delete Lich, or just cancel out of the uninstallation program when it pops up; either way the problem should be fixed.
- I did what you said in #4, but nothing happened (or I still can't login even though something did)!
This should be literally impossible, but just incase some poor fellow out there is still having trouble, here's how to manually restore your computer to the way it was before you ever ran Lich; first find your hosts file. The exact directory is system-dependent: in Win95/98/ME, it's "C:\windows\etc\hosts"; in Win2K/XP-Home, it's "C:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts"; in WinNT/XP-Pro, it's "c:\winnt\system32\drivers\etc\hosts". Basically the "etc" directory is wherever your Windows system folder is. In Linux, the hosts file is (of course) in "/etc". Delete that file, and look for a file named "hosts-bak". Rename that file to "hosts". If you don't have "hosts-bak" then something has gone catastrophically wrong, but don't sweat it: just open up your hosts file in notepad, delete any lines that are in there listed as "127.0.0.1" EXCEPT the line saying "127.0.0.1 localhost" and save the file. If you have no other "127.0.0.1" lines, then Lich isn't the problem (adding a line like that when it's run and deleting it once it's finished connecting is the only thing Lich does).
- I need help writing scripts.
See the links page for good tutorials, and the tutorials that came with the Lich package (in your Lich program directory, probably "C:\Program Files\Lich").
- Do you take suggestions/requests?
Of course; drop me a line here with your suggestion and/or request (please though, do not ask me to debug your scripts; I get asked a lot and I just don't have the time to do it).
- In Linux, it keeps saying "Permission denied: /etc/hosts" ???
Lich requires superuser (root) privileges when it starts up so that it can modify the hosts file temporarily. Once it's finished with that, it drops its superuser privileges and changes its real & effective user & group IDs to be the same as the user who ran it. You can either run it with the sudo program, change it to be setuid root (the install.sh should have done that for you) by typing (as root) "chown -v root:root lich && chmod -v 4755 lich", or you can just `su' to root and run it that way (the su method isn't recommended, since it's an unnecessary security risk for Lich to be running scripts and to still have superuser privileges).
- In Linux, the program keeps babbling about "SIGSEGV" and quitting before it does anything?
SIGSEGV is the error signal for a segmentation fault (don't worry, Lich doesn't cause any harm when this happens, it just aborts execution). If you're running a 64-bit version of the Linux kernel, asking google about the problem of a 32-bit binary image segfaulting in a 64-bit environment will be of much more help than I can be.
If this is happening as soon as you start it, either try the development release or the stable release if you're already using the development version; if it happens sometimes but not always, and you see the problem with other programs (especially if it happens sometimes when you compile a program), then your problem may well be either a severe hardware conflict or failing hardware.
Or, if you're using a really old version, it could be a missing file. The install.sh should have taken care of this for you, but you're probably missing the file ".lich.cfg" -- this file needs to be in your home directory so that Lich can read it and find out where it's supposed to keep all of its configuration files. Just create the file and put the path to wherever you're keeping Lich in it; for example, you could type this to do that: "echo $HOME/lich > $HOME/.lich.cfg" (that will write "/home/(username)/lich" to the file "/home/(username)/.lich.cfg").
- The LichConfig.exe program is complaining about some missing library or some such nonsense!
The graphical configuration utility requires the GTK+2 shared library files in Windows, and since it's a sizeable download and the program doesn't do anything except automate creating the text files for you, Lich's install doesn't include the GTK+2 library. If you have them, "LichConfig.exe" will work, if you don't then don't sweat it. If you wanna muck around with it anyway, you can download the files necessary from the links page.
- In Windows, the program sometimes crashes at seemingly random times for random reasons?
If this is happening to you with the latest bleeding edge release, then I probably don't know about it and you should email me all the info you can here. If it's happening with the latest stable release, definitely email me about it -- it's not good for the stable release to be unstable, heh.
- In Windows, I'm getting an error that says "Invalid argument" ???
This isn't actually a Lich bug; it's either the MinGW compiler or Windows itself. Whatever the case may be, the cause of this is Lich not receiving notification that a socket has been closed, and since to the program it looks like the connection is still open it continues to attempt to read and write data to/from its end of the socket (which Windows starts telling the program just plain doesn't exist -- hence, "Invalid argument"). This seems to only happen when the remote end of a socket drops the connection without warning (such as if your connection times out, the game crashes, or the link is unexpectedly severed for any number of other reasons).
From all the information I've been able to find, there just doesn't seem to be a whole lot I can do to fix this error; however, since it's almost guaranteed that the cause of the error is that you lost your connection anyway, it's ultimately an aesthetic problem that I may or may not figure out how to fix someday.
