Big Fish Games Manager Forum

Here's the deal as recited to me by one of the BFG techsupp folks,
who went and asked one of the devs "why is it so?"....the situation
of bfggameservices.exe running idle in the background, is primarily
intended to for a faster startup (of a game title) and/or of bfgclient.exe
(which will invariably be called anyhow). Looking at things with the
wireshark running, there seems to be absolutely nothing happening for
the time-out period otherwise...it's just lurking, like a daemon...

My flimsy argument for BFG changing the way things happen here goes
something like this -- when we install the BFG Manager, we routinely
would not enable the 'quick launch' option - my guess is most of
the Windows users wouldn't touch this switch and install it anyhow.
If bfggameservices.exe could notice that 'quick launch' hasn't been
asked for, and go away quickly rather than hang around for 5 minutes,
I think that'd be enough to help -us- out and not inconvenience any
Windows users either.....we can only hope and pray here...

Is this why the BFG manager fails to quit?

Hi David,

Welcome to the nightmare! 

It is caused by the behavior of bfggameservices.exe ; this is the issue I alluded to in the adv.forum about crosstie installing BFG titles being... well ... partially useful. The executable that is the program bfggameservices.exe, is a service (like a daemon in linux), and it persists for some 4 to 5 minutes after you exit the Big Fish Games Manager (bfgclient.exe)....

...the problem is, if you escape bfgclient.exe or bfggameservices.exe in your install profile, the CX installation process will exit, and you won't have any menus setup ; if you don't escape one of these processes (using WINE_WAIT_CHILD_PIPE_IGNORE in <installer_environment> ), things will hang as you've noticed. If you let it sit there for 4-5mins, you should see it eventually complete unaided. At this point, cancelling that step of the install process (in the cxinstaller pane, not* the button at the bottom that will cancel the -entire- install process), it should scan the directory and give you the menus as it completes. Even when you do this though, bfggameservices.exe will be still running in the background (even if you/user isn't aware of it), and this can be a headache in OSX...

..what I've been toying with is http://www.codeweavers.com/compatibility/browse/name/?app_id=8477 ; the idea is to pull this in as a postdependency, wait for user to kill bfgclient.exe, and then kill bfggameservices.exe on the way out and rescan the menus at the same time. I'm not totally convinced
that it will work, and, even if it does it won't appear until Monday when someone turns the profile on...

..if it doesn't work, the only thing I can think of is somehow getting the users to manually rescan menus....which is a pain. Another option, would to be include a 'rescan big fish games manager bottle' menu item, which is reinventing the wheel and bit and still a manual pain, but at least (in the linux case) you don't need cxsetup started to do that (rescan menus)....

If this made any sense, let me know -- it means I'll have to see my doctor ;)

At this stage it may be well likely that some user intervention is required ; the installer profile here, does include a 'shutdown big fish game services' menu item, again a kludge, which will clear (kill) the bfggameservices.exe process ... but it's not ideal - I'll see just how close we can get here but no promises -- it's a fickle case =)

...more later....

Cheers!