I use ZoneAlarm and generally have Game Mode set to Deny when installing and playing games. Lately I've noticed several games from GOG refuse to run unless I allow both "Access Trusted" and "Access Internet".

Ashes Of The Singularity
Memory error on start when blocked.

Rebel Galaxy
Stopped working error on start when blocked.

Rise of the Triad
After the walking animation where it says press any key to continue, the game crashes on the "Did you know" screen when blocked.

Sins Of A Solar Empire: Rebellion Ultimate
Version 1.83 did not have this problem. The just released 1.84 and 1.85 hang in the background with no CPU activity and create a 0 KB dump file when blocked.

I'm not using any online features in these games yet they still want internet access just to load the menu screen. What's going on?

Have only played ROTT frm that list, and not had any issues. I do note that a lot of them now try to connect to the web - for things like news and such like. Afraid that is progress for you. Block it, and if it doesn't work then, go back to support and ask them (and post any response here so we can see as well).

That's the sign of really competent programmers. An online news function that can crash the game. Jolly good show.


SpaceChem might have that feature as well. I that the game crashes if the http assemby for mono is not available. Not sure what happens if there is no internet connection.

I also used Zone Alarm and never had such problems, I would only get freezes or crashes if no rules had been defined in advance. Admittedly I never tried game mode.

Anyway, I'm pretty sure it's not that the games fail to work because they were unable to connect, I think they crash or freeze or whatever because ZoneAlarm entirely blocks some crucial operations during initialisation (read: games not only can't connect, they fail to even check if a connection exists).

If you want to confirm this, temporarily disable Zone Alarm and kill your internet connection completely and see if the games can launch (I'm pretty sure they will).

I think it is to do with the problem found in this thread;
http://www.gog.com/forum/general/crashes_in_games_with_galaxydll_or_galaxy64dll/page1

Not sure you'll get a resolution from the thread but it may help explain what's going on.

Edited for clarity (I hope :) )

Out of curiosity I fired up Rise of the Triad and finally installed ZoneAlarm again on that occasion (it was automatically removed when my system was forcefully upgraded to Windows 10). I blocked both the ROTT launcher and the game itself via the pop ups that automatically appeared and everything worked fine.

As I said, I never tried ZoneAlarm's game mode but now I'm under the impression that that one's the problem. I have no idea how it works but I guess applications get blocked somewhat differently then than when blacklisting them normally.

Edit: Okay, I'm not entirely sure if it was actually fully blocked. The launcher definitely was but apparently my firewall settings have survived the Windows 10 upgrade and even though I denied the game to connect in the popup there were some permissions for it in ZoneAlarm's settings. Will have to retry tomorrow.

I've also noticed that it behaves differently when automated as opposed to seeing the alert. My guess is that when Game Mode is set to Deny or when the program controls are marked with an X the attempt to connect is stopped right away. Yet when the alert is shown the attempt might time out on its own before you click on Deny. The latter lets the game run, the former causes the game to crash.

Though letting the alert come up and selecting Deny isn't always a valid approach either. I've seen games crash because the focus had been taken by the alert at a bad time. Which is what I hope to avoid by using Game Mode.

Poor programming of the games pretty much. I had the same problem with Rise of the Triad, it attempts to phone home for news etc. on startup and if there is an active default-deny firewall on the host or router or any other device in the middle blocking it from phoning home, it will freeze. If the firewall instead does a REJECT instead of DROP, it might in theory not hang like that, but it does hang if packets are dropped on the floor if I remember my experience correctly.

Probably worth noting that this wont happen to everyone who runs the game, but only to those who have firewalls either on their PC or their router which are configured highly securely to drop all OUTBOUND traffic by default. Most people do not do this, most people have their INBOUND firewall block all traffic by default but allow all OUTBOUND traffic, in which case the game phoning home will NOT be blocked. The security conscious among us however, myself included, explicitly and purposefully do not allow any outbound traffic by default and will thus end up blocking applications like this on purpose and end up experiencing this problem.

So due to the bad programming in that game and presumably other ones listed, requires one to either:

1) Create firewall rules on the host and/or router that use REJECT possibly with ICMP tcp-reset instead of DROP/DENY by default, which will cause the application to get an error back which might change its behaviour to cancel the connection request theoretically.

2) Create outbound firewall rules on the host and/or router to permit traffic to the IP address/port(s) necessary for the program's network traffic to successfully connect to the remote server it is trying to reach.

3) Contact the developers via email and tell them how stupid they are for writing shitty code that doesn't work on computers/networks that are configured to take security seriously.

4) Don't play that game.

Not the best options, but thar they be. :)

That's just an assumption on your part, and likely to be wrong.

I'm not aware of any game that is DRM-free and does that, it's probably some sort of security or privacy feature of Zone Alarm rather than directly related to internet.