Official forums for BZFlag.org

Hi,

I've played BZFlag for years. Yesterday, I logged off and when I logged back on all I can see is the "All Chat Server Misc" menu on a black screen. Then, I get a Windows popup that says BZFlag failed. I uninstalled the program and reinstalled it, same thing. I fixed for registry issues, still no help. Any ideas?

Thanks

Could you check the contents of your configuration file by using a text editor (such as Notepad on Windows)? If it contains a bunch of readable text, could you remove the password line and send me a copy via a private message? Otherwise, if it's just blank or otherwise unreadable, could you also send me that via a private message? This is an issue we've seen over the years, but have never been able to figure out what causes it.

The location of the configuration file:
Windows: C:\Users\[user]\AppData\Local\BZFlag\2.4\config.cfg
macOS: ~/Library/Application Support/BZFlag/2.4/config.cfg
Linux: ~/.bzf/2.4/config.cfg
Where ~ is your home directory on macOS and Linux and [user] is your username on Windows. Note that the AppData directory on Windows is hidden by default, but there is a shortcut in the BZFlag start menu group that should take you to the configuration directory.

Thanks for the prompt response! I found the file, it appears to be empty. I'll send it to you via PM.

I think I was able to fix things. I uninstalled the program and then manually deleted all of the AppData files, including the empty config.cfg file. I reinstalled and actually remembered my old password (from 15 years ago?) and got logged back on.

Weird, it seems to be a 7334 byte file that contains just null bytes (so, not empty, but unprintable characters). Just deleting the config file was enough to fix it.

Was there anything about the last time you played that might have been different than normal? A crash? Running multiple clients at once? Trying to get a hint about what triggers the bug.

I guess my other questions would be:
What operating system are you using?
Which version of BZFlag are you running?

Yes - there was an issue when I closed BZFlag right before this. In a hurry, I hit the keys wrong and it sort of glitched as I exited. I'm running version 2.4.24 now, but I had the previous version running when this happened.

Could you explain a bit more about how it glitched out? Did you have to forcefully close the game?