Hi everybody,

So, after two weeks of investigations we had found the issue. It was reported by one of our customers and was reproduced at Zone Alarm support as well.

The problem actually that Zone Alarm support is NOT going to do anything to fix the bug and most of customers probably connect the issue with our software instead of addressing issue to Zone Alarm.

If your games are working in DirectX full screen, uses ShellExecute() to call your order page and you are worried about potential loses of orders made from Windows XP PC with broadband connection you can use steps below to check if your games met the issue as well.

1. Install Zone Alarm at Windows XP.
2. Start your game.
3. Open your Register Dialog and try to call you order page.

Here our games are shutting down together with whole system. Zone Alarm support suspects that their dialog window is “hidden somewhere behind DirectX full screen”.

Please let us know about results. I suppose this could be very serious issue for us and for everybody if it will count really big statistics. Zone Alarm states that 20 millions of their software is installed at customers PC.

Thanks,

I have Zone Alarm with Windows 2000 (which is basically the same thing) and I don't have that problem. I don't see why it would happen since you're opening a browser (another app) which is the one that then tries to access the internet. But I know what you're talking about though as far as Zone Alarm goes.. There was a game I tried to run once that tries to connect to the internet, and of course Zone Alarm intercepted it but the game already had access to the screen (and the Zone Alarm message box couldn't be seen or accessed). So I ended up having to restart the computer.. I'll have a friend with XP try this though (if I can get any of them to install Zone Alarm, heh).

I wasn't able to reproduce the issue on my Windows 2000 as well.

I'm not sure what specificaly Zone Alarm do at XP but that only the system where the bug appears.

Why don't you just have your game go back to windowed mode before opening the page? That's what I do.

I agree with Mike. Switch the game to windowed mode, then make the connection. For extra points, put up an in-game dialog that will easily allow the player to switch back to fullscreen when they return to the game.

Of course, I've seen a lot of indie games that don't have any support for windowed mode at all, so for them the issue is more complex, but coding in windowed support really isn't all that difficult and giving the player choice is always a good thing, especially if you have the sort of game they might play at, uh work, or such.

Also, I'm not really sure Zone Alarm *can* do anything on their side to fix this issue. One simple thing that you might try, if you are using a DirectX version less than 8 is make sure you call FlipToGDISurface on your DirectDraw object before you do the ShellExecute and then don't do any standard rendering flips until your window regains the focus. I'm not 100% sure this would solve your problem, but it is worth a try if you haven't already.

This is an issue in fullscreen programs that use an internet connection of any kind. In most games Zone Alarm dialogue does show through well enough to be able to give it a yes or no answer, but others it crashes. Under Windows 98, it can lock the entire system. After the first application run and crash, you can go into ZA and it'll have the app listed and then you can tell it to allow Internet for that program and it will shut up on subsequent runs of the program. Unfortunately this is not a solution you can expect most of your users to use. You have two options really:

1) Establish Internet connection on program start, before switching to fullscreen, so the ZA nastiness can be gotten out of the way immediately. If your program performs any server functions, make sure to "Act like a server" as well, as ZA gives a second dialogue related to that.

2) Switch to windowed mode before calling your order function.

Solution 1 is best I think for situations where the product is deeply reliant on an Internet connection to function (a game like UT for example, or MMORPG). For something like your situation, solution 2 is probably the best idea since your app has no good reason for establishing an Internet connection right away, and consequently many people might disallow that attempt and screw over their chance of purchasing the game.

As I mentioned before Yes we have in-game Register Dialog.
It wouldn't be too easy to switch onto windowed mode whole game. But yes, probably we could try to blink few more times by screen and switch to some windowed thing on the time of order call.

One question really stays alive:
Why it appears in Windows XP with broadband connection in our case?
I mean we had checked not less than 12 different configurations in Holidays and weren't able to reproduce it on any another system. :confused:

Thanks for your feedback,

PS Anyone was able to reproduce the bug by the way?..

This happens to me all the time; I have to alt-tab so I can see the zonealarm dialogue and then a give the program permission. It's pretty annoying. And I agree, the only solution is to establish your internet connection while the user still has the desktop (or return them to the desktop).

Definitely something to watch out for; I've seen it happen with many, many shareware games.

It gets real bad with some programs that absolutely insist on being the 'topmost' window. I've had that happen to me quite a few times (with commercial games too, indies aren't the only ones to blame here).

At least in XP you can usually still bring up the task manager and kill off the game so you can get to the dialog, back in the 98 days you'd often need to reboot. This used to happen to me all the time when I'd be playing a full-screen game and an instant message would pop up a new window; the IM window would officially have the 'focus', but the game window would remain on top of it and it was often difficult or impossible to get to the dialog.

Still get angry thinking about....

Extra bonus anger for games that attempt to trap and ignore alt-tab as a quick and dirty hack so they don't have to do proper surface restoration. Some day, I'll find the people responsible...some day...

So, by another words after all your feedback I assume it is OK if we'll write to our customers at our FAQ section something like "If you are using some bugy software like Zone Alarm..." :)

Just few additional notes:
1. Yes we are closing our window before we call our registration page.
2. And everything is working OK in our case on all another systems including 98. Backward we are blocked at all on XP only!
3. I'm not sure, but following report of our customer and feedback from their (Zone Alarm) support looks like this issue appears even when that Zone Alarm is supposed as switched off. So, looks like they simply forget to return something in the normal condition.

:mad:

PS Today, we'll meet with our Lead Programer and may be I'll add more specific info about our concrete call. I really hope on your help.

Thanks a lot for your feedback,