CODEWITHSUNDEEP
windowssdl
Jason Rohrer
Jason Rohrer

Reputation: 523

SDL.dll missing on Windows 10 even though it's in the game folder

I've deployed many games over the years on Windows and always shipped the necessary SDL.dll along with the game, in the game's folder.

This has always worked fine, and continues to work for well over 99% of people.

However, I'm starting to see reports of "The code execution cannot continue because SDL.dll was not found" from a few users. They all seem to be on Windows 10. And they confirm that the DLL is indeed in the game folder as it should be, and they're running the game directly from inside the folder, and not through a shortcut that would break the working directory.

I also have reports from other Windows 10 users who are not having this problem.

I did some research and found that this kind of error can be misleading, and may be triggered if the DLL itself loads another system DLL that is not found.

I used DependencyWalker on my EXE and found the SDL.dll depends on:

ADVAPI32.DLL

GDI32.DLL

KERNEL32.DLL

NTDL.DLL

MSVCRT.DLL

USER32.DLL

WINMM.DLL

Those all seem pretty standard. Would they be missing from certain Windows 10 installs for some reason?

Other ideas is that Windows 10 is moving to a signed DLL requirement (just a guess) or that the way Windows 10 handles library load paths has changed.

But again, this is working for other people on Windows 10.

Other details: DLL and EXE are both 32-bit. The systems in question are most likely 64-bit.

Upvotes: 2

Views: 1401

Answers (1)

Jason Rohrer
Jason Rohrer

Reputation: 523

In this case, it turns out to be a really stupid end-user mistake.

I'm answering it here just in case anyone else runs into it.

When a user double-clicks a ZIP file, it LOOKS like they've opened a folder and are viewing the files.

They can even run the game from inside this ZIP browsing view.

But of course, Windows can't find DLLs that are also inside the ZIP file.

Thus, this behavior on Windows is pretty confusing to end users. The solution is to extract the ZIP first before running the game.

Upvotes: 2

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