A Problem with a Mod I'm making.

[Standish]

So I've been working on a World War One mod for a few days now, and it was all going well, things clicking smoothly, (the right time for an error actually ) then when I was trying to add a flag for the French. So it all loads in well, as I was expecting, but as I finished my testing, I clicked on "Exit to Main Menu", and it crashed. No message other then Civ 4 has stopped working.

So I just went and undid a few things and it stopped crashing. Normally I'd be content, but I need that French flag. So, I tried varius other flags, file names, all that stuff, crashed each time. So, I decide to move on.

Now I attempted to add Kaiser Wilhelm II's leader head in, a still pic mind you, and it loads in fine, looks great.

So I test it out ingame as I always do, and as I hit the "Exit to Menu", boom. Crash.
I take out his leader head, it works fine.

Any ideas? It would look like a engine limitation, but I doubt that, as my mod is very small.

Thanks!

 

[Nightinggale]

I have experienced this as well. It crashes in the exe, which means debugging doesn't really help. I suspect that it's a problem where it's like class A contains B, then it frees A and then dies when it tries to access A to reach B to free that one.

Now that you introduced the bug, it could be interesting to know how you did it. Are we so lucky that you use git and can go back in history to see when it started acting like that? Do you have an idea of what you could have done? Did you modify the the DLL/python or is it xml only?

 

[Standish]

Well, I can say the exact bit of XML I was working with at the time, and that I limited it down to. I do record everything I change, so it was fairly easy for me to pinpoint it.

So first time I was working on this section of XML, in the CIV4ArtDefines_Civilization.

This is from the French section. So, I changed that, to

<Path>Art/Interface/TeamColor/FlagDECAL_FleurDeLis.dds</Path>

<Path>Art/Interface/TeamColor/flagdecal_france.dds</Path>

which is in corrispondance to the name of my flag.

So then I load up the game, and it crashes.

I then set it back to the first one, aka default, and it works fine.

Second time it happened, it was under the CIV4ArtDefines_Leaderhead.xml, under Frederick's section.

<NIF>art/LeaderHeads/Frederick_the_Great/frederick_the_great.nif</NIF>
<KFM>art/LeaderHeads/Frederick_the_Great/frederick_the_great.kfm</KFM>

I then change it to,

<NIF>art/LeaderHeads/Wilhelm.dds</NIF>
<KFM>art/LeaderHeads/Wilhelm.dds</KFM>

and same case of crashing as above.

 

[Lemon Merchant]

So first time I was working on this section of XML, in the CIV4ArtDefines_Civilization.

This is from the French section. So, I changed that, to

<code snipped>

which is in corrispondance to the name of my flag.

Where did you put the file for your flag? It sounds like the game can't find the art file.

Second time it happened, it was under the CIV4ArtDefines_Leaderhead.xml, under Frederick's section.

<code snipped>

and same case of crashing as above.

The nif and kfm files have to be represented by nif and kfm files in the CIV4ArtDefines_Leaderhead file or they won't work. If you use dds files, the game will crash because it's looking for animation and there is none in a dds file. Unless I'm wrong, you have to use some other leader's nif and kfm files, or the ones that were provided with the leaderhead you are using.

 

[Standish]

I put the flag in, Assets/Art/Interface/TeamColor and as I said, the game loaded in the file correctly, multiple times. :/

While it could be the nif and kfm things that are causing it, I did it the exact same way for 6-7 other civs and leaderheads, so why did it not crash the first time?

 

[Standish]

Update:

Seems I just needed to go away for a day or two and come back with a clear head. Today I just did it all again, carefully, and it all works. Both the leader head and the flag.

Thanks for the help!