0.8.1 not working under OS 10.4!

It's broken in 10.5 too, with the console message "Could not find base data directory."

So here is an update of what i found out ...

Stuffit Expander expanded all the needed files to my desktop but i couldn't "see" the compiled version of FreeCol which i just have to double click to start the game.

I used the java version of the game: I installed everything . Then i used the "uninstall everything" component to uninstall FreeCol. After that even 0.8.0 did not work. I got the very same message in the console: "could not find base data dierectory"

So i downloaded the package of 0.8.1 again and unstiffed it to my desktop and voila, there it was. FreeCol 0.8.1 as a stand alone program which worked fine.

I don't know if there has been a change to some the base data or not, but after deleting all of the base data an unstuffing the 0.8.1 download again it worked ...

It was caused by the command line argument "--freecol-data FreeCol.app/Contents/Resources/" which is present in the info.plist
If you expand the compressed file to the same directory as your existing "FreeCol.app" it is automatically renamed, or if you rename it yourself as I did to "FreeCol 0.8.1", then the argument won't work.

So I was right. I have endeed renamed the application to FreeCol 0.8.1 and after that I tried to start the app. So that means renaming your application under Mac OS X causes the game to crash before even having started ..... whhhhhhhooooooooooooooa!

Okay, let's hear this in plain English now. Is it a [1] a FreeCol bug, [2] a bug of the FreeCol installer, or [3] a MacOS bug/feature/whatever?

I guess it's a MacOS bug. Referring to the Mac OS X package "freecol-0.8.1-mac.tar.bz2".

Sorry for the inconvenience.

There is no freecol installer, just the bzip2 and gnutar packages, which execute when the .tar.bz2 file is double-clicked. These can rename a file or directory to stop it clashing with an existing one (i.e. the 0.8.0 install) as they decompress.

The problem is that the FreeCol package shipped for Mac ships with a default argument containing a relative path from the ./ directory where the user double-clicked (which is what pwd / getcwd() would return) and the /data/ directory:
--freecol-data FreeCol.app/Contents/Resources/
Because this contains "FreeCol.app" (the double-clickable directory-that-looks-like-a-file) the app cannot be named anything else. If you've any experience with RISC OS, they are the same as that platform's !Application folders.

Code can be added to FreeCol to remove the need to ship with the argument pre-defined.

What do you mean when you say there is no installer? At any rate, if you can send us patches to improve OSX support, that would be very welcome.

Does not work either after a fresh install on my 10.5 box :
com.apple.launchd[161] ([0x0-0x501501].FreeCol[38630]) Exited with exit code: 1
[0x0-0x504504].FreeCol[38654] [JavaAppLauncher Error] CFBundleCopyResourceURL() failed loading MRJApp.properties file
[0x0-0x504504].FreeCol[38654] [JavaAppLauncher Error] CFBundleCopyResourceURL() failed while getting Resource/Java directory
[0x0-0x504504].FreeCol[38654] [LaunchRunner Error] No main class specified
[0x0-0x504504].FreeCol[38654] [JavaAppLauncher Error] CallStaticVoidMethod() threw an exception
[0x0-0x504504].FreeCol[38654] Exception in thread "main" java.lang.NullPointerException
[0x0-0x504504].FreeCol[38654] at apple.launcher.LaunchRunner.run(LaunchRunner.java:112)
[0x0-0x504504].FreeCol[38654] at apple.launcher.LaunchRunner.callMain(LaunchRunner.java:50)
[0x0-0x504504].FreeCol[38654] at apple.launcher.JavaApplicationLauncher.main(JavaApplicationLauncher.java:61)
com.apple.launchd[161] ([0x0-0x504504].FreeCol[38654]) Exited with exit code: 1

The comand line is not better :
Work:Java ludo$ java -Xmx256M -jar FreeCol.jar --freecol-data /Users/xxx/Downloads/FreeCol.app/Contents/Resources/base/
Could not find base data directory.

will running with --log-level=LOGLEVEL help or is it just for debugging the Game's algorithm ?

Duplicate of bug #2546268 "does not work (game not starting on Mac OS)",fixed

https://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=2546268&group_id=43225&atid=435578