Game doesn't work with 25th Anniversary assets (works fine with pre-anniversary ones)

[Srandista]

I can play Xash3D on my retro XP rig with pre-anniversary assets without any issues, but recently I wanted to replay Uplink, so I swapped them with 25th Anniversary assets and found, that the game doesn't work at all. You can run the game and poke in the menu, but when you try to run the game or even Hazard course, the game crashes every time.

I run the game with logging, logs are attached (I added the log with old assets just for reference, game works with them as mentioned previously). Also, I was also able to print screen the Sys_crash.

engine-old.log
engine-20th.log

[a1batross]

As far as I remember, you also need updated client.dll and hl.dll to play Uplink that's included in HL25.

I don't know whether whatever included on Steam supports WinXP, but you should be able to grab ones from hlsdk-portable repository. Here are the latest (at the moment of writing) https://github.com/FWGS/hlsdk-portable/actions/runs/11987559313

[Srandista]

Unfortunately, these didn't help. Also I just want to reiterate, that with 25th Anniversary assets, I can't even run base game, nor Hazard course.

[a1batross]

As the stack trace goes into vgui.dll, did you do anything with it?

Keep in mind, you better not store Xash3D FWGS in Half-Life directory, you really only need valve folder from it for now, and nothing else.

[Srandista]

Nope, I haven't touched any dll at all, everything is stock. Also, I use the same setup as you mentioned (and always did), Xash3D in separate directory, just with valve subdirectory copied to xash3d.exe and the rest of dll libraries.

[a1batross]

Oh, I will check on XP vm later then...

[Srandista]

Ok, I just double checked, that the game crashed even with the latest hlsdk. But you have me a hunch, so I tried to copy over some dll's from the older, pre-anniversary build, and I found out, that I only need to use older client.dll, after which the game start to work again (base game, Hazard Course and even Uplink).

[a1batross]

Yeah. Valve's client.dll doesn't even load because it wants UCRT dlls.

[a1batross]

Also, yeah, I reproduced the crash on WinXP VM.

[mittorn]

ucrt should be availiable for xp with vc15-19 redist, but it does not mean client will work (hello static initialization tls)

[mittorn]

https://colinfinck.de/posts/that-time-i-had-to-patch-the-universal-crt/