EVE Launcher Issues | EVE Online

EVE Launcher Issues

2012-03-15 - By CCP Unifex

EVE pilots,

We have had two prominent issues pop up during the release of our new EVE launcher. This blog spells out workarounds for the 2 main problems and to let you know what plans are in place to push out fixes.

These explanations are going to get technical.

Issue 1 - File Permissions

Issue description:

If, during patching, you see something like this error stack which ends with “WindowsError” this may be the issue;

Traceback (most recent call last):
File "lib\update.pyc", line 527, in Update
File "lib\update.pyc", line 576, in _Update
File "lib\update.pyc", line 304, in Run
File "zsync\zsync.pyc", line 1421, in ApplyPatch
File "zsync\zsync.pyc", line 1412, in ApplyPatch
File "zsync\zsync.pyc", line 1497, in DeleteFile
WindowsError

During the course of patching, if a user clicks a link in the Launcher window, a browser process will be created, displaying the webpage in question. This new process inherits the file handles of its parent (the Launcher) and therefore can cause conflicts with the Launcher as it attempts to patch.

Workaround:

If you encounter this error, close any browser window inspired/launched by the Launcher and restart the Launcher, which will resume patching. Failing this, please run the Repair Tool .

Issue 2 - Data corruption

Issue description:

The error looks like this (or something similar) and ends with “data corruption” or “data stream”:

No handlers could be found for logger "zsync"
Exception in thread Thread-3:
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "threading.pyc", line 530, in __bootstrap_inner
File "threading.pyc", line 483, in run
File "zsync\readFromUrl.pyc", line 117, in DownloadPart
File "zsync\readFromUrl.pyc", line 136, in _DownloadPart
File "zsync\zsync.pyc", line 762, in callback
FileSyncError: data corruption

Or this:

No handlers could be found for logger "zsync"
Exception in thread Thread-4:
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "threading.pyc", line 530, in __bootstrap_inner
File "threading.pyc", line 483, in run
File "zsync\readFromUrl.pyc", line 117, in DownloadPart
File "zsync\readFromUrl.pyc", line 136, in _DownloadPart
File "zsync\zsync.pyc", line 522, in callback
TypeError: Error while decompressing: 1 

If you have this issue, you will see irregularities such as the Launcher and the repair tool looping over and retrying steps to download and apply the patch. You can also see long hangs in the launcher updater.

Workaround:

We have found one solution which has been confirmed by players and testing in-house which has to do with ESET Smart Security and ESET NOD32 Antivirus. We have been in contact with ESETs support and given them all the information they need to reproduce this problem in their test environment.

The issue is that a security feature in this software which is called “application protocol content filtering” is blocking the repair tool, the Launcher updater and the Launcher itself from downloading data (EVE files) from our Content Delivery Network.

The workaround is to disable the “application protocol content filtering” while the update is running and then re-enable it. The how-to has been posted in full here: //community.eveonline.com/news.asp?a=single&nid=4930&tid=1

Upcoming Launcher Patch

The launcher team has been pulling long hours investigating these problems and producing fixes. We have a new launcher release out on the Singularity test server (“Sisi”) now. This is release (1.11) and is going out to Tranquility early tomorrow (Friday 16th March) which should alleviate the “File Permissions” issue and we are continuing to investigate 3rd party software conflicts around the “Data Corruption” issue. We have also delayed a minor EVE client patch until next week so that people with problems can have a more stable launcher in place before then.

And now some background. Since the Crucible 1.5 patch on Tuesday we have had more than 220,000 users log in to Tranquility with approximately 6,000 people having launcher issues. This is 6,000 too many and I want to apologise for the inconvenience to those users.

Why a Launcher?

Quite a few people have been asking why we need to have a launcher. The launcher team released a Dev Blog with an explanation but I wanted to list out here what the launcher will give us.

Over the years, the process for CCP to push out a patch has become so onerous that it was becoming as big an effort to deliver a one line code fix for a crash as it was to deliver a major content release. A single code fix would take weeks to deploy rather than hours. The launcher will go a long way to allowing us to react much faster to issues when they arise and to be able to push out smaller amounts of content to you on a more regular basis as well as our big releases.

Another feature is that the launcher gives us much more logging information. We are currently using it a lot and it is helping us find and fix many of the issues being encountered.

We will be monitoring the comments thread for this blog and the rest of the forums in case of more issues.

CCP Unifex
Jonathan Lander
Senior Producer of EVE Online

and

CCP Cascade
Product Owner – EVE Launcher

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