A test to see if your client is okay

[madborg]

This is probably an FAQ candidate.

Two common client failures are:
1. eqw 2.1 client crashes without message
2. eqw 2.2 CreateSurface(Primary) failed

One way to get this failure is to dismiss a program crash. As I mentioned, before Windows' crashes can corrupt and affect other programs -- especially graphics programs. The only correction, is to reboot your machine.

The other way to get this failure is to have something setup incorrectly on the client side. This means that you will get the crash over and over until the client side is corrected.

test for basic health
If you want to test your eqw for this type of problem, shutdown everything on the server side and just run eqw. It can go as far as the login screen without needing anything running on the server side.

[you don't actually need to shutdown things, but it makes the point clearer if you do]

You can even go as far as to do this:
click on connect
enter station name and password
click on connect

the message you should see (assuming you are not really connecting to a server) is:
Error 1001: Could not connect to the Everquest server! Please try again shortly.

This is good. If things are good on the client -side, then you can get this far without worry about "loginserver, world, zone, mysql, etc".


second test
If you client passes the first test, then you can connect to a server. If it's local, just start up minlogin etc. Or connect to gotfrags. If your client fails when you do that, then something in the server (s) is putting your client in a bad state.