PARPG crashes on exit in Vista 64 bit

[kaydeth_parpg]

PARPG consistently crashes on exit when running on Windows Vista 64 bit OS.

The crash actually occurs in FIFE and the same behavior can be seen with the Rio de Hola demo. FIFE appears to be crashing in the SDL library call "SDL_QuitSubSystem(SDL_INIT_VIDEO);" which is called by the RenderBackend::deinit() method which is called by the Engine::destroy() method.

After building and using a local copy of the SDL.dll file (version 1.2.13) the crash would no longer occur. This ticket serves as a place holder and reminder that we will likely require a bug fix in SDL to resolve this issue.

[barra_parpg]

It's worth investigating if the issue is still present, now that SDL 1.2.14 has been released and ships with the new Win32 devkit (formerly known as the Win32 compile SDK).

For details see:  http://fifengine.de/2009/11/16/new-fife-win32-devkit-available/

[kaydeth_parpg]

Locally built SDL.dll on a Windows Vista 64 bit machine. Using this DLL stopped PARPG from crashing on exit.

[kaydeth_parpg]

PARPG will still crash with the newest compile SDK that includes SDL 1.2.14. Replacing SDL.dll with a locally built version still corrects the problem. The dll has to be copied to the new location for DLLs which is <FIFE>/engine/swigwrappers/python. The DLL I built to work around the problem has been attached in case it can help others for the moment.

[kaydeth_parpg]

Created an SDL forum post for this problem. Hopefully they can help us identify a root cause.

 http://forums.libsdl.org/viewtopic.php?t=5277

[kaydeth_parpg]

Some good news. If PARPG is packaged from a 32 bit XP system it can be successfully installed on a my Vista 64-bit machine and will NOT suffer from this crashing problem.

[barra_parpg]

That's good news indeed; thanks for testing kaydeth. So we should simply package mingw compiled FIFE binaries with the Windows PARPG packages and things should work fine. If anyone wants to have a native 64bit version of FIFE, he has to build from source. I guess 99% of the users won't care about using a 32bit version of FIFE on their 64bit system.

[kaydeth_parpg]

Also I've discovered that the mingw build now works with the new FIFE dev kit. And on top of that the mingw build does not suffer from crashes even when using the original SDL.dll file.

So to summarized. At this point the crash is only seen when I use a FIFE library built with MSVC 2008 and the SDL.dll distributed by the SDL website.