Sharing: "The specified module could not be found"

[Stanca]

I created a Ren'Py game, and am now trying to share it with friends.
Two friends have the same problem. When they click on the game.exe, they get messages saying:

"The specified module could not be found"
"LoadLibrary(pythondll) failed."

For myself and another friend, it's working fine.
All three are running windows.
Is there something I should change with my game, or advice I can give them?

All help is greatly appreciated!

[Aleema]

Does this thread help at all? http://lemmasoft.renai.us/forums/viewto ... =13&t=1641

[Stanca]

Does this thread help at all? http://lemmasoft.renai.us/forums/viewto ... =13&t=1641

Super helpful. This is exactly the problem I am having.
I'll try this out and see what happens.
Thank you! : D

[Stanca]

It was the same situation and error messages, but the solution did not work. There was no clicking and dragging of files involved, so I can't tell them to not click and drag.
Any other ideas?

[herenvardo]

Did your friends just double-click the .exe from within the zip archive?
For things to work, they should extract the whole contents of the archive to a directory, and then run the .exe from that directory.

If this is the case, tell your friends to look for an "Unpack", "Unpack all", "Extract all" or similar command / button / menu entry (the exact wording, appearance, and location may vary depending on what software they are using to open the archive).

[Stanca]

Did your friends just double-click the .exe from within the zip archive?
For things to work, they should extract the whole contents of the archive to a directory, and then run the .exe from that directory.

If this is the case, tell your friends to look for an "Unpack", "Unpack all", "Extract all" or similar command / button / menu entry (the exact wording, appearance, and location may vary depending on what software they are using to open the archive).

Yes, they did unpack it.
Here's a picture of the unpacked file list taken from her screen:
http://oi41.tinypic.com/i422s1.jpg

We tried clicking on the icon Tal Test, instead of Tal Test.exe.
That didn't work either.

[DragoonHP]

I am pretty sure there is supposed to be a lib and renpy folder too...

[TrickWithAKnife]

I was having this problem too.

After a bit of testing, I realised it was a directory name problem.
Originally I was running the game out of a directory on the desktop called "日本語 game". Once I changed it to "Japanese game" it worked perfectly.

Hope this helps.

[nyaatrap]

haha, that'll be right. I never use 2 bytes characters on folder/file names because they gave me tremendous errors in the past. Even the "desktop" directory failed to run some programs sometime on the Japanese windows XP.

[AxemRed]

Technically, all characters are 2 bytes for Windows/NTFS.

If you want filenames to work on any system:

• Use only ASCII characters -- preferably only [A-Za-z0-9._-]
• Don't use spaces
• Don't count on case-insensitivity

[nyaatrap]

Then the problem must be ASCII not the 2 bytes. Thanks I got learned now

[PyTom]

There's a lot of weirdness with non-ASCII filenames. For example, the zip format doesn't define an encoding for filenames. If you zip up a file like 日本語.txt, and unpack it on a system with (say) a Dutch encoding, you'll get something completely different.

Ren'Py requires ASCII files for this reason. It _should_ work in all cases if you place it in a directory like:

c:\日本語\mygame-1.0\

at least with the new Ren'Py. It's a bug if it doesn't.

[PyTom]

There's a lot of weirdness with non-ASCII filenames. For example, the zip format doesn't define an encoding for filenames. If you zip up a file like 日本語.txt, and unpack it on a system with (say) a Dutch encoding, you'll get something completely different.

Ren'Py requires ASCII files for this reason. It _should_ work in all cases if you place it in a directory like:

c:\日本語\mygame-1.0\

at least with the new Ren'Py. It's a bug if it doesn't.