Closed Possible Fix to "Launcher does not launch at all"

Hello folks,

The problem in question:

• Clicking "Play" in steam does absolutely nothing (no error, no error sound, no log, no process in the task manager, steam changes the user status to In-Game Starbound for 2 seconds until it returns to Online).
• Starting launcher.exe manually does absolutely nothing (see above)
• Starting starbound.exe manually does absolutely nothing (see above)
• starbound_server.exe did work.

Things that did NOT fix my issue:

• moving .dlls around that apparently fixed it for some other people (libeay32.dll, etc.)
• installing openSSL (which may or may not be related to libeay32.dll, worked for someone in another thread)
• setting anything to various combinations of admin and/or compatibility mode
• killing all kinds of other processes currently running in the background

The solution that DID work for me (on win8.1 64bit):

1. make a .bat in the starbound win32/launcher folder, with contents "..\starbound.exe", name of the .bat is irrelevant
2. set starbound.exe in the win32 folder to admin rights (otherwise i got an access violation error)
3. launch the .bat (directly or from a shortcut somewhere)

Notes:

• converting the .bat to an .exe and replacing the original launcher.exe with it did NOT work.
• moving the .bat outside of the launcher folder (and of course adjusting the .bat contents to still point to starbound.exe) results in a steam error about a missing executable.
• as mentioned above, not setting starbound.exe to admin results in access violation error.

I hope this helps someone, or at least helps the devs shed some light on why exactly the game completely fails to respond on some systems.

EDIT: i forgot to mention that todays patch (~760MB ) had no apparent effect on the issue

 

Thank you very much for posting this. I am somewhat handy with pcs and can generally figure these things out but this exact error has been bothering me quite a bit. I tried your suggestion and got excited when I launched the batch file and it prompted me to update Starbound. Unfortunately after the patch installed the game will still not launch. Any other suggestions? Also what exactly should be in the batch file. I have the following.
start /d "C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\SteamApps\common\Starbound\win32" starbound.exe
This isn't probably exactly right but it does launch steam and runs the game very briefly. I have aloso changed the exe to run as administrator.

Thanks!

Paz.

 

it might have seemed to simple to be exact, but the contents of my batch file are in fact literally

Code:

..\starbound.exe

and nothing more

When you say it launches steam, what do you mean? I usually have steam running anyways, when i start the .bat it instantly starts starbound. The update should be done via steam the usual way. The .bat is just a replacement for launcher.exe, since that does not work (for me). Since the "Play" button in steam points to launcher.exe, you have to run the .bat manually.

Do you have the .bat inside the "Steam/steamapps/common/Starbound/win32/launcher/" folder? it has to be inside the same folder as launcher.exe, else it doesn't work. you can make a shortcut to the .bat though and place that anywhere you want (mine is on the desktop).

 

For the linux folks - command line goes like this
.steam/steam/SteamApps/common/Starbound/linux64
.steam/steam/SteamApps/common/Starbound/linux32

in the correct folder for your OS Arch
either run
sh launch_starbound.sh
or
./starbound

 

I did exactly what you said and game doesn't start. (starbount_server.exe works, starbound.exe set default as admin, bat inside laouncher dir, and only that one line inside)
Here is thread that I described my problem http://community.playstarbound.com/index.php?threads/game-doesnt-run.51039/

 

did you try the other things i mentioned that did not work for me, like moving the .dll around? for other people they worked.
i collected a few of them in this post:
http://community.playstarbound.com/...oure-having-issues.35207/page-19#post-1505163
maybe one of the others works for you.

Unfortunately the issue seems to be pretty hard to pin down, i also had to unsuccessfully go through half a dozen "fixes" that did nothing for me, until i accidentally stumbled upon the one that worked for me

 

Thank again. This fix did not work for me unfortunately. Yes I do have the bat file there. What did work was the solution in the link about 3d analyze. However that seems to not play sound according to my son and crashes on save and exit.

Update: told son to turn headset on and sound works now!