Runs fine in IDE but crashes normally!

[Hunter2]

Hey, I just made a *working* version of "Theseus and the Minotaur" (the puzzle game, where you have to escape from a maze). It runs perfectly fine when I hit the "execute" button in Microsoft Visual C++ 6.0, but when I try double-clicking the executable (not in VC++), it crashes right away:

Runtime Error!

Program: (...).EXE


abnormal program termination



The caption at the top of the messagebox was "Microsoft Visual C++ Runtime Library".


Does anybody know what's wrong? (or have an idea?) If anybody wants, I can email the exe/code to them (my email: [email protected]).

[Uraldor]

It could be almost anything! Post a link to the code so we can see it.

U.

[novacain]

Try changing the build from debug to release.

Run and when crashes look at the 'call stack' window to see (if lucky) where it crashed.

[Hunter2]

Sounds like a good idea. But... the problem happened not when I hit "execute", but when I went into Internet Explorer and double-clicked the executable.

Oh yes, here's the link to the code It's zipped along with the executable - could someone try the exe out for me?

http://www.geocities.com/hunterguy_2/
(then click on "Click here for Theseus and the Minotaur" - a direct link wouldnt work for some reason).

[Uraldor]

I know what your problem is. When you run the program through the IDE, the working directory of the exe is the same directory that the .dsp file is for the project. This means that is able to find your gamedata.dat file in the current directory.

but when you run it through windows explorer, the working directory is the debug/release directory (depending on the build) and it crashes because the file isn't in the directory.

so 2 things:

1) either copy the gamedata.dat file into the same directory as your exe or
2) put a check in to make sure the file open worked, if it doesn't then display an error saying "unable to open file gamedata.dat"... this will help you with this problem in future.

hope that helped!
U.

[Hunter2]

Oooooooooooooh, I see! Thanks a lot, that would have taken me a while to figure out