It arrived! HGL: CE 2007! (Setup & Troubleshooting Instructions)

[fearedbliss]

After 3 days delay, it arrived! I'll make another post after I'm done using Alcohol 120% to make backup images of these discs (And to bypass SecuROM and play it without the CD as well) and show what game version this came for both the .exe, and what shows up in game (before I patch it to 1.2).

Spoiler

[fearedbliss]

Alright so.. after I finished dumping the images with Alcohol 120%, I mounted the images and proceeded to install. I was fighting for the installer for more than an hour because it would open up, ask me for my CD key, and start the installation, however, the progress bar would immediately progress to 75-80% and then it would get stuck there forever. The installer asked for admin privileges as well when it begin but even with that it still got stuck. After researching online and trying different permutations, I read that there were many other people that were also getting stuck at the same stage.

I then went into the mounted ISO directory and attempted to play around with the x64 and x86 installers. The x86 installer opened up once but then when I closed it and tried to open it again, it just threw errors consistently. Btw, I also had to reboot my computer every time the installer got stuck because even if I tried to cancel it, it wouldn't completely terminate, preventing a subsequent installation attempt from failing. After doing all of this, I read a post somewhere where they mentioned just extracting all of the files out of the disk and onto a folder somewhere on your drive. Once I copied the files from the mounted ISO directory to a regular folder on my hard drive, I ran the Setup.exe in Admin Mode from the get go (I right clicked it -> Run as Administrator). I proceeded with the installation again, input my cd key, and continued. This time, the installation worked!

Once the install showed that message, I also got a message about installing some missing components (Like .NET 3.5. I have .NET installed but versions over 4.0). I went ahead and installed those missing dependencies as well and that installed successfully.

After that, I attempted to launch the game and got an error message regarding language.dat, I continued on that page and the game opened up fine and I was able to change video settings, and create a new character and start the game. Closing the game and re-opening it no longer displayed the language.dat error and I was able to see the language.dat file in the Data folder as well with the following value:

Code: Select all

Language=English

As for the game version that came on the disk, it seems to be identical to the one @gloamed posted:

Lastly, I also unmounted the Alcohol 120% image from my computer and I was still able to play the game. So it seems you don't need to have the CD mounted to play, you just need the CD to install it.

TLDR: If you are getting stuck installing from the official Hellgate: London 2007 CDs with the 75-80% situation:

1. Create an empty directory on your hard drive that will contain the Hellgate: London Installation Files.
2. Copy all of the files from the Hellgate: London CD to the directory created above.
3. Run the "Setup.exe".
4. When the installer asks for Admin Permissions, go ahead and grant it. You can also run the executable above in Admin Mode from the beginning, either way it will work as long as it gets Admin rights.

NOTE: It's important to install the game via the "Setup.exe" and not via the "HGL_x86.msi" (or the x64 equivalent). If you do so, you won't be able to patch or start the game since the language.dat and maybe some other things will be missing. If you already did so, then you could can uninstall and reinstall with the steps above.

[fearedbliss]

I patched up my game to Patch 1.2 SP. So when analyzing the version, it's better to look at the version for the executables in the SP_x64 directory (let's say). I'm looking at the "hellgate_sp_dx10_x64.exe" file, but the dx9 one is fine. I noticed that before upgrading the version was "1.10.180.3416", which is the same as the Launcher.exe. I also noticed that the "Product version" also said something like "10_Pub" as well. However, after patching to 1.2 SP, the Launcher.exe remained the same version as installed from the disk, but the actual dx9/dx10 files were updated to "1.18074.70.4256", and the "Product version" now says: 18074_Pub2.

Gonna start playing now and see what happens.

[fearedbliss]

I've done a reinstall of HGL on my laptop and gathered the following info (I've also added some more clarifications to the steps in the previous posts regarding troubleshooting).

Summary

On Disk Version Info

Launcher.exe (File Version: 1.10.180.3416, Product Version: 1.0)
SP_x64/hellgate_sp_dx9_x64.exe (File Version: 1.10.180.3416, Product Version: 10_Pub)
SP_x64/hellgate_sp_dx10_x64.exe (File Version: 1.10.180.3416, Product Version: 10_Pub)

After Patch 1.2 SP Applied

Launcher.exe (No changes)
SP_x64/hellgate_sp_dx9_x64.exe (File Version: 1.18074.70.4256, Product Version: 18074_Pub2)
SP_x64/hellgate_sp_dx10_x64.exe (File Version: 1.18074.70.4256, Product Version: 18074_Pub2)