Got a little more info. When I run in EQW 2.2 (which is REALLY slow, btw), I get the following pop-up message:
Unable to load World
EverQuest cannot load the zone file "test.s3d" in the directory that you are currently running EverQuest from. The file is present but it may be corrupt.
Please either reinstall or delete and re-patch this file.
For assistance with this problem, please call (85
-537-0898, or visit our website at
http://www.everquest.com
When I click Ok, the client closes. It's interesting that this pop-up is only visible under EQW; before I was running eqgame patchme, and the pop-up wouldn't show up, but after I pressed enter the client would close. Presumably the popup was there but hidden by the game itself. There's QA for ya...
When I go to the eq folder, there are two new files there: test.chk and test_obj.chk. Maybe the game has a list of checksums or somesuch?
WC
Edit: I've been looking at the dbg.txt dump in the eq folder, and it says it was looking for test.wld. I used eqinside to rename tox.wld to test.wld, but it still didn't work. I then used eqinside to update the crc on that file, and still no-go...dbg.txt says that the client can't find test.wld, but I've verified that it's there. It looks like the client is complaining on all of the .wld files, but only the main wld file with the zone geometry is causing it to abort. This is potentially good news, since it implies that we can distribute files with only zone geometry and it might work (i.e. no chr, obj, etc. files), but we have to get the zone geometry files working first.
Edit: Another thing that's intetresting. In the character select screen, the zone shows up as "Unknown Zone". I've verified that there is an entry in the database for zone "test", and that there is a zone.cfg file in the cfg folder. So why doesn't the zone name show up? I suspect this is a related problem.