Paradox Launcher Broken

[jesuisbaguette]

Windows 10:

I cannot launch the game at all via Steam and Paradox Launcher. The Launcher opens then the status goes from Running -> Syncing and immediately crashes.

I can launch the game if I launch the Imperator binary directly, but then there's no connection with steam (and no ability to select mods, etc.).

I have already tried reinstalling the game and Steam. No change.

 

[AndrewT]

Paradox Launcher Broken

I cannot launch the game at all via Steam and Paradox Launcher.

I take it your thread title does not correctly reflect your problem, which is that the game will not run from either the Steam or PDX client?

Are there any mods involved, perhaps?

 

[jesuisbaguette]

I take it your thread title does not correctly reflect your problem, which is that the game will not run from either the Steam or PDX client?

Are there any mods involved, perhaps?

Not sure what you mean about the title. The "Paradox Launcher" doesn't launch the game. It appears to be broken in some way. The problem does not appear to be the game itself which I can launch if I navigate to the binary and launch it directly. But doing so launches it without any connection to Steam or achievements as far as I can tell as well as skipping the option to enable mods if I wanted to, so it's not really a solution.

And no, this is with no mods enabled.

The game worked fine until 1.0.3.

 

[AndrewT]

The "Paradox Launcher" doesn't launch the game.

There are two things that might be termed the Paradox Launcher. One is our alternative to Steam (which you get from your Paradox account's Downloads page), which IMO should really be called the Paradox Client, that you use to install the game to your system. Then when you run the game from either that or from Steam, the game's own launcher comes up.

The thing is, the latter one shows up even when you run the game from stellaris.exe, so I guessed you were referring to the former. But then you mention Steam which is not involved in that launch, so a little confusing!

Let's focus on Steam anyway. If the game won't run from the Steam PLAY button but will from the .exe then presumably there's an issue with Steam. Let's do a clean reinstall of it and the game:

- move any valued save games elsewhere, and user_empire_designs.txt from /Documents/Paradox Interactive/Stellaris/ if you have made any custom empires or races.
- "uninstall" in Steam-Stellaris
- exit the Steam app entirely
- manually delete both the Steam/SteamApps/common/Stellaris AND Documents/Paradox/Stellaris folders
- delete everything from the Steam folder EXCEPT steam.exe and the SteamApps folder
- run steam.exe to rebuild all that
- re-install game in Steam, run a Steam Verify when done.
- add stellaris.exe to the exceptions list/whitelist of your antivirus app
- start the game with no mods active and test

Good luck!

 

[jesuisbaguette]

There are two things that might be termed the Paradox Launcher. One is our alternative to Steam (which you get from your Paradox account's Downloads page), which IMO should really be called the Paradox Client, that you use to install the game to your system. Then when you run the game from either that or from Steam, the game's own launcher comes up.

The thing is, the latter one shows up even when you run the game from stellaris.exe, so I guessed you were referring to the former. But then you mention Steam which is not involved in that launch, so a little confusing!

Let's focus on Steam anyway. If the game won't run from the Steam PLAY button but will from the .exe then presumably there's an issue with Steam. Let's do a clean reinstall of it and the game:

- move any valued save games elsewhere, and user_empire_designs.txt from /Documents/Paradox Interactive/Stellaris/ if you have made any custom empires or races.
- "uninstall" in Steam-Stellaris
- exit the Steam app entirely
- manually delete both the Steam/SteamApps/common/Stellaris AND Documents/Paradox/Stellaris folders
- delete everything from the Steam folder EXCEPT steam.exe and the SteamApps folder
- run steam.exe to rebuild all that
- re-install game in Steam, run a Steam Verify when done.
- add stellaris.exe to the exceptions list/whitelist of your antivirus app
- start the game with no mods active and test

Good luck!

Umm, this is about Imperator, not Stellaris. "Paradox Launcher" is the name of the executable that Steam launches for Imperator.

Regardless, followed your instructions, replacing Stellaris with Imperator where appropriate. It's still broken.

 

[jesuisbaguette]

I've determined the cause of the issue after doing running the Paradox launcher from the command line and observing the error logs. The core problem was the value of the COMSPEC environment variable, which I had changed for work related reasons. Because Imperator uses some NodeJS code it relies on the value of COMSPEC for spawning child processes. If COMSPEC is anything other than "C:\Windows\System32\cmd.exe" (I had it set to GIT bash instead) the launcher will crash. This issue appears to be unique to Imperator since other Paradox games do not use NodeJS for spawning child processes.

This is a pretty small edge case for Windows users (very few will ever change that env var), but may give the devs a clue for debugging this issue for the Linux users having the same problem with the launcher not launching the game. I assume the linux version doesn't rely on COMSPEC, but on some other env var that's not set correctly for those users.

 

[AndrewT]

Sorry I pasted in the wrong text - working on too many games at once! The principle is the same for all PDS games though.

I've determined the cause of the issue after doing running the Paradox launcher from the command line and observing the error logs. The core problem was the value of the COMSPEC environment variable, which I had changed for work related reasons. Because Imperator uses some NodeJS code it relies on the value of COMSPEC for spawning child processes. If COMSPEC is anything other than "C:\Windows\System32\cmd.exe" (I had it set to GIT bash instead) the launcher will crash. This issue appears to be unique to Imperator since other Paradox games do not use NodeJS for spawning child processes.

This is a pretty small edge case for Windows users (very few will ever change that env var), but may give the devs a clue for debugging this issue for the Linux users having the same problem with the launcher not launching the game. I assume the linux version doesn't rely on COMSPEC, but on some other env var that's not set correctly for those users.

Well done on diagnosing that, I would never have thought of looking there.

Running the game from Steam runs that Paradox Launcher.exe so this is nothing to do with the "Paradox Launcher" per se. Confusing, aren't we!

I suppose this is a bug or at least a design shortcoming, although an extreme edge case as you say! By all means report your findings in the Bug Report forum if you wish.

All the best!