Problem with installing ZooTycoon (demo version)

Hi,

I've been trying to get the installation of ZooTycoon (demo downloadable
from M$) to work. The installation stops at about 25% during the copying
of files, right at the time a new background picture should be shown.

I have some questions now (with some accompanying text):

ZooTycoon creates a lot of windows that are all owned by the main thread
(0x0009 in my case).

Several messages are posted to several windows in several threads. Because
the messages are send to a hwnd and all windows are owned by 0x0009, all
messages end up in the message queue of the main thread.

If a GetMessage or PeekMessage is done in the main thread everything is fine.

When however a GetMessage or PeekMessage is done with a hwnd=0 (NULL) it
all depends in which thread the Get or PeekMessage is done, if one (or
more) message is retrieved. In my case all Get or PeekMessages done in all
other threads but the main one (0x0009) end up with nothing (always
PENDING status)

It appears that on Windows the behaviour is different, in the ZooTycoon
case, all GetMessages are done from the main thread (as seen by strace on
Win2KProf). Maybe there is some logic that checks which thread own windows
?

Can somebody confirm my findings for the WINE part ? And of course can
somebody confirm my findings for the WINDOWS part ?

It looks like I found the cause of my problem, now the fix !

If more info is needed, please let me know.

cheers,

Paul Vriens.

[Alexandre Julliard]

[e-mail] writes:
> When however a GetMessage or PeekMessage is done with a hwnd=0 (NULL) it
> all depends in which thread the Get or PeekMessage is done, if one (or
> more) message is retrieved. In my case all Get or PeekMessages done in all
> other threads but the main one (0x0009) end up with nothing (always
> PENDING status)

That's the way it's supposed to work; message queues are per-thread,
and a thread will never retrieve messages sent to another
thread. Looks like there's some other problem here that causes the
main thread to not run its message loop.

Hi,
> That's the way it's supposed to work; message queues are per-thread,
> and a thread will never retrieve messages sent to another
> thread. Looks like there's some other problem here that causes the
> main thread to not run its message loop.
>
> --
> Alexandre Julliard
> [e-mail]

The strange thing is that we DO try to retrieve the messages but in a
different thread than windows appears to do ?

Investigation continues, but that probably boils down to investigating the
windows installation and figure out why 'they' do the retrieving in the
main thread.

Several (demo)games from M$ seem to have the same problem/issue BTW
according to bugzilla. The application database shows that ZooTycoon was
working somewhere in 2001 (with wineX that is). Luckily not so much
changed during the last years ;-)

Cheers,

Paul.