HOW TO FIX - Unhandled Exception: Object reference not set to an instance of an object.

Eugee

E
I wake up this morning, open Oculus, and launch Elite: Dangerous in Desktop Mode to do a little mat gathering while I'm at work. There's been a patch, apparently. Am I a magic wizard who can just sense these things? Nope. I just get a clue from the launcher:

5f8fb0fb20.png

I'm lucky today. Sometimes it won't even let me launch.

Now if you look this up with FDEV they'll tell you to uninstall .NET and reinstall it. Reinstall the game. It's something on your end. It's not. It's just a single mistake in their config file, that has not been fixed for YEARS. Years.

Go to your install directory (in Oculus click the ... and choose Details, and you can copy the install directory to clipboard) and find the file "EDLaunch.exe.config" and open it with Notepad/Notepad++ and look for the highlighted lines:

058c564d6f.png


Just move the line with "v2.0.xxx" below the line with "v.4.0"" and save it. Your game will launch fine now.

Until the next time FDEV patches, at which point the config will go back to the above, and you'll need to fix it again.

Years.
 

VR CMDR Novindus

VR CMDR Novindus
Eugee said:
I wake up this morning, open Oculus, and launch Elite: Dangerous in Desktop Mode to do a little mat gathering while I'm at work. There's been a patch, apparently. Am I a magic wizard who can just sense these things? Nope. I just get a clue from the launcher:

5f8fb0fb20.png

I'm lucky today. Sometimes it won't even let me launch.

Now if you look this up with FDEV they'll tell you to uninstall .NET and reinstall it. Reinstall the game. It's something on your end. It's not. It's just a single mistake in their config file, that has not been fixed for YEARS. Years.

Go to your install directory (in Oculus click the ... and choose Details, and you can copy the install directory to clipboard) and find the file "EDLaunch.exe.config" and open it with Notepad/Notepad++ and look for the highlighted lines:

058c564d6f.png


Just move the line with "v2.0.xxx" below the line with "v.4.0"" and save it. Your game will launch fine now.

Until the next time FDEV patches, at which point the config will go back to the above, and you'll need to fix it again.

Years.
Click to expand...

Nice catch! Kudos and Karma for sharing.

Looks like the .NET runtime versions are taken from the config file as being in order of preference. I’d wager you could probably remove 2.0xxx altogether and not see any issues as a result. Might test it out some time.
 

Marklar_

Marklar_
[VR] CMDR Novindus said:
Looks like the .NET runtime versions are taken from the config file as being in order of preference.
Click to expand...

No, the last one is the one that takes effect. That means that doing this targets framework 2 instead of 4, and that could cause problems down the line. But this is just for the launcher not the game, so you aren't likely to do a lot of damage by messing with it.

I used to get the same errors every time I launched through Oculus, but the game always launched fine anyway. So it's not a new thing. It stopped spamming the errors recently, not sure why, may have been due to an Oculus Home update.
 

scadh

scadh
Happens to me all the time launching for Quest 2, but does not generally prevent the game from launching.

Also, this is the line of the day: "... do a little mat gathering while I'm at work." :)
 

Akbar The Gray

A
Eugee said:
Until the next time FDEV patches, at which point the config will go back to the above, and you'll need to fix it again.

Years.
Click to expand...

I have been ignoring this error for (yes,) years because it is usually fine with steam autolaunch. I went to play this morning and my game was broken, but I spent more time debugging VR junk than I needed to because with this error you can't just click play. Last time I looked around, there was a lot of shrugging and hand wringing about how this is just the way it is. This post hit me hard enough when I found it today that I created a forum account just to thank you for saying this. So thank you!

For posterity, I reinstalled Elite through Steam and that didn't fix it, I enabled all of the .NET packages that were not enabled already through Windows features and that didn't fix my issue.

Resetting everything in IE fixed my problem (which is annoying, because I don't use IE, but I recognize that .NET components do)

Also, as a side note for others, these errors only ever occur for me when I'm running in VR (Oculus). If I run the launcher for a non-VR session, there are no errors. Now, thanks to the OP, I see no errors launching for VR either!
 

PcbFlare

P
@OP You are a miracle worker. The fact, that Frontier didn't catch this, or wasn't able to fix this makes me soooo maaad. I went through the usual searching the whole freakin' net, doing all the generic bull including reinstalling from scratch (several times) contacting support (no help whatsoever), only to get stuck at the same place. Only this thing helped. I'm really losing it. I had a love/hate relationship with Elite for a looong time, played only in binges after each update, only to find out that the devs are (usually) getting further and further away from their playerbase. It's soooo sad to have core of an amazing game yet completely misunderstand what the players want from you... :-( Thank you again. Now i can try to play yet again, get frustrated and mad yet again, and stop playing. Yet again. It's like being in an abusive relationship. You're being mauled half to death, yet you come back for more. We obviously need counseling, lol.
 
Last edited:

rayz007

R
@OP Have dealt with this for over a year. I had to disable .net 3.5 in Windows Features to launch ED, and then enable it for other software. Really annoying. Thanks for taking the time to give this to the community.
 

CMDR Evolution

CMDR Evolution
Eugee said:
I wake up this morning, open Oculus, and launch Elite: Dangerous in Desktop Mode to do a little mat gathering while I'm at work. There's been a patch, apparently. Am I a magic wizard who can just sense these things? Nope. I just get a clue from the launcher:

5f8fb0fb20.png

I'm lucky today. Sometimes it won't even let me launch.

Now if you look this up with FDEV they'll tell you to uninstall .NET and reinstall it. Reinstall the game. It's something on your end. It's not. It's just a single mistake in their config file, that has not been fixed for YEARS. Years.

Go to your install directory (in Oculus click the ... and choose Details, and you can copy the install directory to clipboard) and find the file "EDLaunch.exe.config" and open it with Notepad/Notepad++ and look for the highlighted lines:

058c564d6f.png


Just move the line with "v2.0.xxx" below the line with "v.4.0"" and save it. Your game will launch fine now.

Until the next time FDEV patches, at which point the config will go back to the above, and you'll need to fix it again.

Years.
Click to expand...
Just randomly started getting this error. Thanks to your help, it was a super easy fix. Thanks and fly safe o7
 

CMDR X

CMDR X
I just can't believe dot.net and Internet Explorer were even a thing with game developers.
WTH were they thinking? Glad the launcher doesn't require Java or some other garbage.
Launchers are evil. Get with the times FDev.
 

robbyp

robbyp
Huh? .net is the standard to write windows programs against for about 10 years or more. What do you want them to write it in? BBC Basic?
 

CMDR X

CMDR X
robbyp said:
Huh? .net is the standard to write windows programs against for about 10 years or more. What do you want them to write it in? BBC Basic?
Click to expand...
Assembly dammit! Like real men did! Ten years or not DotNet is still a steaming pile of 🐴💩.
Buggy garbage not worthy of a simple text editor let alone a AAA game title. Sowwy..
 

Caydran

Caydran
Looking at my "EDLaunch.exe.config", it has this line.

<configuration>
<configSections>
<sectionGroup name="userSettings" type="System.Configuration.UserSettingsGroup, System, Version=2.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=xxxxxxxxxxxxxx">
<section name="CobraBay.Properties.Settings" type="System.Configuration.ClientSettingsSection, System, Version=2.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=xxxxxxxxxxxx" allowExeDefinition="MachineToLocalUser" requirePermission="false"/>
</sectionGroup>
</configSections>
<startup>

<supportedRuntime version="v4.0" sku=".NETFramework,Version=v4.5.2"/>
</startup>

<runtime>
<enforceFIPSPolicy enabled="false"/>
</runtime>
<userSettings>
<CobraBay.Properties.Settings>
<setting name="DXCheck" serializeAs="String">
<value>True</value>
</setting>
</CobraBay.Properties.Settings>
</userSettings>
</configuration>

I think FDev did fix it. When, I have no clue. This is from a Steam install.

Hope this helps.
 
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