Error message when trying to launch game

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parttimestorier
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Error message when trying to launch game

#1 Post by parttimestorier »

Someone commented on the itch.io page for one of my RenPy games (Take A Hike!) saying they were unable to play it at all because they get an error message when they try to launch it. They sent me a screenshot of the error message, which just says:
C:\\Users\\DAVID\\Desktop\\??\\take a hike!\\TakeAHike-1.0_win\\lib\\windows-i686\\TakeAHike.exe: Could not open C:\Users\DAVID\Desktop\??\take a hike!\TakeAHike-1.0_win\TakeAHike.py
They also said they're using Windows 10. I tested the game on Windows 10 myself, as did several of my beta testers, and I never had an issue like this. Does anyone have any idea what the problem might be? I wonder if it could have something to do with the name of the folder they've put the game in, since the "??" in the file path seems strange, but I don't know.
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emz911
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Re: Error message when trying to launch game

#2 Post by emz911 »

Is the ??? path a part of your game or is it a folder on the user's desktop? If it's the latter, it might be that they have given it a non-alphabetical name, maybe suggest them rename the folder or drag it out of there? Just a random guess.

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Re: Error message when trying to launch game

#3 Post by Imperf3kt »

Very likely the folder the game is in contains unsupported characters. Windows will change unsupported characters to "?" if the correct language pack is unavailable and renpy won't work if the language isn't compatible.

https://www.renpy.org/doc/html/problems ... g-problems
Last edited by Imperf3kt on Mon Jun 14, 2021 9:48 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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parttimestorier
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Re: Error message when trying to launch game

#4 Post by parttimestorier »

That did turn out to be the issue! I thought it would be something more complicated. Thanks for the help!
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