Game Submission Rejected?

Just buying TA shouldn't affect anything. Have you reinstalled the game since your last posting?

Or did you update DA while the game was in progress? I found that updating often messed up my submissions.

I haven't reinstalled the game but I did uninstall SDC, I'm now thinking that this might be the cause.

I had once posted a LastSubmittedGame.xml file at the Core and I remember that you had to edit out the serial number out of that post because at the time I didn't realize that the serial number was even in this file.

Anyway I checked the LastSubmittedGame.xml generated by my attempted submission and noticed that was no
< SerialNumber > or < OriginalSerialNumber > keys in it. This could either be the cause of the problem or perhaps it is merely a result of the initial problem itself. Any ideas?

I'm currently at work so won't be able to try these out until later but there are a number of things that I can try that I'd like to get your opinion on. Also I see this as two separate problems. The first problem, which is my primary focus, is to get the game that I spent so much time on submitted by the easiest and quickest means possible. The second is to fix this so it doesn't happen in the future.

First off I do keep a backup Norton Ghost image of my hard drive from various key points in time but the downside is that they are complete disk images and restoring one loses everything that happened on the drive since that backup. However I could first backup the current state of my drive, put the endgame.sav file from the game in question on a thumb drive then restore the drive to a previous state before I uninstalled SDC, load the endgame.sav file and end the game and attempt the metaverse submission this way. Your thoughts on the potential sucess of this method.

Another way may be perhaps to simply reinstall SDC and then load the endgame.sav and then try and resubmit the game.

One concern that I do have is that I don't seem to be able to find the original CD case from my original DL CD's. I do have the original box, discs and even sales receipt from my purchase of DL, I just can't find the CD jewel case. I also have my DA CD but there was no serial number with that although I think I did receive an email with a serial number for DA that I still probably have. Finally as I said I did purchase TA with CD as well although that's still in the future.

In any case the only obvious source of Serial Numbers I have are the ones listed in the registered products section under the My Account information listed here on this site. I do have 4 things listed there; GalCivII, GalCivII DA CD, GalCivII TA CD and SDC, although they all point to sdcentral_setup.exe and the listed serial number for the three different products changes every time I look at my registrations page.

So given this information what do you think the best way to proceed is?

Don't currently have DA installed on my machine. Still running DL v1.4x from the standalone installer.

That might be it then. It'd seem to indicate that your serial isn't stored locally in the registry (probably got nuked along with SDC). I'm not sure if it can be retroactively fixed, that'd be a question for Cari.

It might add the registry entry back in just by re-registering the game in SDC. If you've still got it uninstalled, the key is at

HKLM/Software/Stardock/ComponentManager/Drengin.net/gc2

It's a String value named "Serial No".

You can also use Ghost Explorer to extract individual files/folders from your ghost image. If it is just a registry key system restore may work.

That's what I was thinking as well.


Hold off on asking her until I try some stuff tonight and see what I can do. I am loath to try anything that I might not be able to recover from so my first choice is to save state, restore my disk to the state it was prior to the uninstallation of SDC and then try submitting the game from there. While in that state I can also check the registry key that you mentioned. The simplest thing may be to restore this key and it's previous value to the registry in my current disk image.

In any case the key thing is to submit a game that I spent a month on, lost sleep over and had to listen to my wife nag me about spending so much time on while neglecting her. Once that is accomplished, I was getting pretty close to wanting to move onto DA anyway and there are a number of ways to accomplish that.

I do have a couple of questions in the case I have to reinstall either the game and/or SDC to resolve this. Given I don't have the CD jewel case then I would have to use the serial number information from My Account/Registrations. If I do this, will this give me the same results as if I did have the number from the CD jewel case? That is will a game started under the old conditions still submit under the new installation (DL v1.5 vs DL 1.4x)?

Also what's up with the serial numbers changing each time you goto My Account/Registrations?

I don't have Ghost Explorer. I only use the Norton Ghost version that's booted from a floppy to take a disk image. AFAIK it's an "all or nothing" type of backup/restore. Basically I distrust anything that operates from within the OS and therefore requires the OS to be alive at the time of the "backup". By booting to a floppy with the hard drive inert I can gaurantee myself that I get the totally identical thing when I restore. If the OS is "alive" then typically certain files cannot be accessed and therefore cannot be accurately restored. If I trusted Norton Ghost sufficiently to do incremental backups and restores then I may as well trust the System Restore functionality from within XP itself which I don't.

To impress upon you my paranoia about such things, not only do I have System Restore disabled from within My Computer/System Properties I also have gone into Control Panel/Administrative Tools/Services and explicitly disabled the System Restore service along with many others like Task Scheduler, Indexing, Automatic Updates, Remote Desktop, Remote Registry, SSDP Discovery Service, Telnet and the list goes on and on.

It should in theory. The system regenerates serials from the seed each time you request them, so they vary but should be effectively the same. *Why* it's that way is beyond me, though.

If you do that and still run into trouble, let me know. I might have a way to pull up the identical code you used before.

Thanks.

I think my backup disk image has a decent shot at working though. And then I can recover the registry key and that has a good shot at working as well all with no new installations.

I still prefer to wait for the TA CD to then do my DA CD install followed by TA on top of that but as long as I can submit this game I will even consider installing the latest DA/DL through SDC although I still would probably want to uninstall SDC once complete which possibly puts me back to square one unless the registry key thing works.

If only I didn't think that I used to know how PC's worked then I would probably be less concerned with all this behind the scene stuff that you really can't do much about anyway. But that's the cross I must bear, oh well.

If you create an image with ghost then Explorer - the same version or newer - can be used to extract files. Just run ghostexp.exe from Windows (no install required) and point it to your image.gho file. It will let you extract individual files and/or folders from the image.

It's a little more complicated than that. First off I think I have version 10 of Norton Ghost but version 9 came with it and it's only version 9 that has the floppy bootable version of ghost.exe and does not include ghostexp.exe. I don't even have the Version 10 stuff on my machine. I also might not be remembering the versions correctly they could be 11 and 10 but in any case you get the idea.

Secondly I keep all my ghost images (*.gho and *.ghs) in a hidden partition that's on my hard drive. The only access I have to this partition which is FAT32 is via the gdisk utility (an extension of fdisk) that comes with version 9 (I think) and only operates under DOS boot conditions. The whole purpose of my madness is to keep the images unknown and unaccessable to the OS.

What I do is DOS boot to floppy, run gdisk to make the partition visable (actually the hidden partition is a locked and hidden logical partition that is under a hidden extended partition, the extended partition contains two hidden and locked logical partitions each of which are the 64GB maximum that can be formated under FAT32). I then load ghost.exe (still running under DOS) and save or restore my image then run gdisk again to lock it all back up again.

I could conceivably load the Norton Ghost version 10 (or is it 11) stuff onto my hard drive, boot to floppy and unlock my hidden storage areas to expose them to the OS so that I could do as you say but that basically defeats the purpose of having images that are untouched by the OS. I suppose if it becomes a matter of life and death to get an individual piece of a particular image than I could try it but I'm not totally sure that the images are compatible between version 9 and 10. Also I did originally take a look at the version 10 stuff but was very underwhelmed by it. Like I said I'm distrustful of any kind of backup ability that supposedly works from within the OS it is ostensibly trying to backup. I'm much more likely to do the entire restore and copy the piece I want onto a usb drive then restore my current image and then copy the piece I wanted from the usb drive. I *know* that this will work with no corruption of my drive or other side effects. I *suspect* that the same would probably be true of ghost explorer extracted files while the OS is live. But I'm really more suspicious of the other direction that claims to be a true disk image while the OS as well as the ghost executables are "live" on the very disk that you're trying to image.

I do believe that given a place to stand and a lever long enough that you could move the world. What I find doubtful is that you can move the world *only* with a suitable lever but still standing on that very same world. In any case it would require me to "trust" Microsoft and Norton far more than I do in order for me to accept such an image as "identical".

OK, I do have some results to report. I ran through a number of different scenarios and sent Kryo a PM detailing these results to which he responded with some additional opinion.

To cut to the chase, the problem is that if you uninstall SDC then your Serial Number is deleted from the Registry as part of the uninstall process. This leaves a “time bomb” in your game setup since nothing obviously bad happens until you play completely through a game, start to finish, and then try to submit it to the metaverse. Only then will you discover that you will never be able to submit that game. Of course how much wasted effort was put into discovering this is dependent on how large of a game you play. In my case I effectively lost a month of free time along with the loss of some sleep as well as taking a fair amount of grief from my wife for spending more time playing a game than I do paying attention to her, but that is par for the course. While being able to submit a game to the metaverse is not the *only* reason I play the game it is a substantial part of why I play the game as much as I do. I had thought I was done with playing as the Korx on the path to my racial medal, but apparently it was not to be.

In any case I want to warn others of the issue so that they don’t get caught by the same problem. Also hopefully the SDC uninstall process could be fixed so that it doesn’t delete the Serial Number that was present in your Registry prior to the installation of SDC. This is precisely the reason I usually take a disk image before I install or uninstall any software. This problem is endemic throughout the software industry and is very understandable. The install process is generally very well tested since if that messes up there is usually the immediate consequence that the installed software does not work properly. Without trying to be judgmental, uninstalling software is virtually never equivalent to having never installed the software in the first place. There are always “footprints” left all over your machine the consequences of which are never very well known. In the best case it results in no problem or at least something that is obviously broken that can be addressed immediately, in the worst case you end up with a “time bomb” that is only discovered after much lost effort.

Anyway here are a few details about what I did to come to the above conclusion. I first saved a disk image of the current state of my machine. This gave me three separate disk images with which to compare results. The first image was prior to ever installing SDC, the second image was after installing SDC but prior to uninstalling SDC and the third was my current state which is after both installing and then uninstalling SDC.

The failure syndrome of my current state is that both the < SerialNumber > and the < OriginalSerialNumber > keys are missing from the LastSubmittedGame.xml file. The lack of the < SerialNumber > key is what caused the reported error “(11) Your game submission was rejected because the application serial number does not match the serial number on the Metaverse server.”

I then took my endgame.sav file and attempted to submit the game from both other disk images, one prior to the installation of SDC and the other after SDC was installed but before SDC was uninstalled. In both these cases I got a new failure syndrome. In both these cases only the < OriginalSerialNumber > key was missing and the < SerialNumber > key was present in the LastSubmittedGame.xml file. In this case the reported error changed to “(16) The results of this game could not be posted to the metaverse.” This is a pretty generic description that really gives no reason as to *why* the game can’t be posted but there is no doubt in my mind that the cause is the missing < OriginalSerialNumber > key.

I then compared the Registry from all three images and found the following differences in the HKLM/Software/Stardock/ComponentManager section. In the first image prior to installing SDC, my DL serial number was under the HKLM/Software/Stardock/ComponentManager/Drengin.net/gc2 key. In the second image, which was after installing but before uninstalling SDC, I had the same DL serial number key and another key for a DA serial number had been added to the HKLM/Software/Stardock/ComponentManager section. In the third image, which was after SDC had been installed and then uninstalled, the entire HKLM/Software/Stardock/ComponentManager section had been deleted.

So anyway, I exported the HKLM/Software/Stardock/ComponentManager section from the first disk image (prior to SDC installation) and merged it into my Registry in my current state. I believe that this has now restored all functionality and that I will be fine for games going forward. I will be testing this on a Tiny map for my Metaverse League game and even if it fails I can at least submit this game to the League via screenshot. However, once I did this I still cannot submit the endgame.sav from my gigantic game because it still has the issue of the missing < OriginalSerialNumber > key from the LastSubmittedGame.xml file.

So here is where I'm making some assumptions from information that Kryo mentioned, although I don’t think that even Kryo is exactly sure about what is going on here.

My best guess is that the < OriginalSerialNumber > key that gets placed into the LastSubmittedGame.xml file comes from the state of the Registry serial number at the time the game is started as a metaverse game. This serial number is then probably encrypted, hashed and distributed somewhere throughout the sav game and is part of the overall protection against cheating. In this case since I actually started the game *after* SDC was uninstalled and my serial number had been deleted from the registry there was no serial number to get placed in the sav file to begin with. This is vaguely interesting since it implies that if I had started the game with SDC still installed and had merely uninstalled SDC during the middle of the game then restoring the serial number to my registry would have most likely allowed me to submit the game.

In any case if my assumptions are correct then this is really as far as I can go. I really don’t want to get involved in trying to circumvent or even in merely knowing details related to the cheat protections incorporated into sav files. So the bottom line is that there is probably nothing I can do to submit my game. However, this is based on vague assumptions on my part so I will make a final PM appeal to Cari to see if there is any possibility that my game could somehow be submitted. I am writing this response for two reasons, one of course is to let others know of my experience so that they don’t get caught by the same thing and the other is to provide written documentation that I can refer to so that my PM request to Cari to look into this isn’t overbearingly long.

For those of you that bothered to read this in its entirety, I thank you for your patience.

The SerialNumber field is the one from your registry.  The OriginalSerialNumber is the one that was in your registry when you started the game.  If you don't have the OriginalSerialNumber field, there's nothing that you can do to get the game to submit.

I've added code to Dread Lords, Dark Avatar, and Twilight of the Arnor that will notify you if it can't find a serial number before you start a metaverse game, but I don't know when we'll be updating Dark Avatar or Dread Lords, and I'm hysterically busy right now so I don't even have time to QA the DA and DL updates. 

I don't know why SDC would remove your GC2 serial number.  That sounds to me like a bug with SDC.  I'm sorry that it happened, and I'm sorry that there's nothing that I can do to fix your metaverse game. 

Actually it was the uninstall of SDC that removed my GC2 serial number, although still a bug I would think.

Thanks. That's sufficient to avoid this issue in the future.

C'est la vie. Once Kryo mentioned that he thought the OriginalSerialNumber came from the registry value present when the game was started, I realized that the likelihood of being able to fix this was close to nil, but I did have to at least make the request. Thanks for taking the time to read the issue.

Oh well, back to those darn Korx!