Thanks for the fast reply sir. Appreciated!
Hi - you should be able to run the game from Terminal using the starsector_mac.sh script, inside Starsector.app/Contents/MacOS. That'll get you the console log, and hopefully more info about what's going on.
I had quickly located that script prior to starting this thread, but it's a real mystery - when I click on that, the script displays its contents in a text editor, but does not boot-up the game. I'm at a loss to understand why.
I had no mods enabled. The sole change I had made to the game was to try activating Dev Mode.
Did it run before that change? If it did, then it's most likely a typo somewhere in settings.json - based on your description of the error message, it sounds like it could be complaining about something like that.
yes, the game did run prior to my attempt to set Dev Mode to "true". It was just fine.
i'm beginning to wonder if, as you speculated, my copy of settings.json came with a typo in it, or if the document is partially or wholly somehow not saved in a text format that the game can deal with. Here's why Im leaning that way:
1) I had first opened it, set Dev mode to "true", and saved the file with OSX's TextEdit program.
2) after the game subsequently crashed, I reopened the file with SublimeEdit 2.0.2 ( very solid program; not crapware ) but saw that in some instances, strings within settings.json looked like the leading quotation marks were the normal, straight kind ( " ), but the
closing quotes were slanted quote marks ( “ - Alt+Open Bracket on Mac ). Would that be a problem?
3) I tried replacing the mismatched quote characters that i saw and re-saving the file, but I wonder if that was either ineffective, of if it damaged my faulty settings.json further.
(i'm no expert)