Verbiage: Horizons, OCX, and running it without IE (2)

Journal Chacham's Journal: Verbiage: Horizons, OCX, and running it without IE (2) 1

Journal by Chacham on Thursday February 12, 2004 @11:27AM

Last night, i decided to play some Horizons before making the program to run it. Well, i got a DirectX error. During the install it told me it found the correct version. I even downloaded it awain. Same thing, a debug window open (DOS window) and a Windows message telling me the error. Well, i wanted to go the their support site. That requires IE as well. That was the final straw. I promptly deleted it forom my computer.

All in all, i wasted a bunch of time on this. Looking at it again, it's like i asked for it. I'm still wondering why other's put up with it.

1) The trial requires a download from File Planet. File Planet requires a username. That is for the free (wait in line) servers. Otherwise it costs money to download. So, i set up an account, went the free route, and waited over a half-hour to be able to download the file.

2) The download itself, being nearly a gig (IIRC, 942MB), took over three hours to download. I let it run through the night.

3) The install. The installation file is a fileplanet wrapper telling the user to go to their site to get a registration code, and to extract the (already compressed) install file. The extraction took quite a while, probably a half-hour.

4) When the extraction was done, the install started. The install must have taken over an hour. I did some surfing, then left for a while. When i cam back, it was still installing. This is a 1 Ghz processor, so it shouldn't take that long.

5) After the install was done, the webpage needed to run the program. Starting the game runs the default browser, which here is Mozilla. However, being it downloads and runs an ActiveX, i needed to start IE and go to their page. This then "verified" my files, it what must have taken an hour. I walked away to go do some reading and it just kept going and going.

6) Finally, i got the error. It opened a DOS window entitled Debug, yet it was blank. There was a Windows message telling me an error occured about initializing the device, that it was DirectX, and where the source code was and the line number.

On top of that, their HTML is pretty horrid. (Though their JavaScript is clean.)

I should have walked away after step 1. So, i think i asked for it. Perhaps, maybe, i'll be wiser the next time around.

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