Penumbra: Necrologue [FULL RELEASE]

**Cranky Old Man** · 04-14-2015, 11:10 PM

I'm not able to play this. Sad

The game doesn't start up for me.

I don't have the Steam version, so I figured that AmnesiaTest131111.exe and its bat, would work instead.

I moved them into the Amnesia folder just like the other bat, but it turns out that AmnesiaTest131111.exe requires Simple DirectMedia Layer to be installed, in the form of a Dynamic Link Library file that's called "SDL.dll".

I tried updating Amnesia to the latest version (1.3.1) but that didn't install SDL.

SDL can be downloaded (from the developer) here:
https://www.libsdl.org/download-1.2.php

1. Download and unpack the file.
2. Move it into the C:\Windows\System32 folder.
3. To actually install it, open up the command console (cmd.exe) and run the following command:
regsvr32 SDL.dll

You will now notice that while Windows can FIND the file, it cannot find the starting address for its DllRegisterServer.

You are also beginning to ask yourself, why other games are working just fine without this pretty essential library file to access things like DirectX.

...so you check your Amnesia folder, and find that Amnesia does have its own SDL.dll, sitting in its /redist/ folder, and discover that the reason why you can't install the library in System32, is because it's meant to be used locally by each individual game.

...so now the question goes back to "Why doesn't AmnesiaTest131111.exe find /redist/SDL.dll?".
You find that it's not a version issue, since both the old and the new SDL.dll is version 1.2.14.0. You also discover that the Amnesia version is 17 kB LARGER than the same version, so you conclude that the additional information must be the starting address mentioned above. This means that all SDL libraries have to be customized for its game, and you thank the stars that you didn't delete the old library file, or you wouldn't even be able to play Amnesia.

...so now the question becomes "Where does AmnesiaTest131111.exe search for SDL.dll?". It's clearly not searching in the /redist/ folder, so maybe that's because AmnesiaTest is expecting to itself be in another folder, and can not find the /redist/ folder relative to its own location. This means that the creator of Necrologue must have been unaware that you cannot start AmnesiaTest from the Amnesia folder.

...so, gentlemen: Have you gotten the AmnesiaTest bat to work properly yourselves?

Continued:
It turns out that if you run the bat from the /redist/ folder, it does find a couple of library files (besides SDL.dll), but it does not find the library file glew32.dll, which is clearly present in the /redist/ folder.
...so the conclusion is that AmnesiaTest131111.exe isn't even meant to executed in this folder environment. Maybe this NoSteam tool, is meant to be executed in Steam environments only.
This is when you will table flip.

I found out what was wrong: The installation instructions themselves.

Quote:3. Copy the folder Necrologue_eng to the root folder of Amnesia.

No, don't do that. Instead move that folder into the /redist/ folder, along with the Necrologue_eng.bat file, and run that.