Fall Further - The Original Thread

Jhoniten · Aug 7, 2008

I loaded the save game Xien, and can get it to reproduce intermittently. Running Vista on an 2.8ghz dual core machine with nvidia geforce 8600GT video card. This is the info i get from crash report, if it helps at all.

Spoiler :

edit: no idea why it says version 3.1.3.1, I know I am running 3.17.

The Crash occured regardless of the number of figures left in the group, indicating in my mind it is not dependant on number of figures or amount of damage taken. Possible it could be tied into the after combat effects of his combined promotions? Another suggestion what exactly occurs after combat? Assume combat is over, what is the next thing the computer is processing?

xienwolf · Aug 7, 2008

Cool, how were you running the test to get the crash to happen? I loaded the save, then did a quicksave (SHIFT F5) and then I would simply end turn, and if the next turn started, hit quickload (SHIFT F8). I ran it long enough to see my unit lose once, and to see the EastWinds trigger for an extra move point once.

Anyway, you are saying that you were getting the crash when you did win, regardless of how much you won by.... so the first big notifier would be if your stats were showing in the lower box. While you are in combat it will show you with ?/4 for your strength stats. As soon as all of the combat routines are done the actual remaining health will show as one of the last steps. (You have to select the unit, then click on the End Turn Button, or hit SHIFT+ENTER to see the stats during battle)

I believe that before it reaches that point it updates your XP, so if you still have ?/4 for strength, watch the XP to see if that changes at all.

Another thing to try would be turning on Quick Combat for defense. That removes the animations and we can eliminate any possibility that it is a graphical issue.

EDIT: Oh, and unfortunately I know nothing about crash reports, so it winds up not being useful for me. That is the one thing I do like about Python is it can tell you where it was in the code before running into an issue.

EDIT2: Also, if turning on QuickCombat does cause the crash to clear, and it is most likely graphical, turn quickcombat off and see if it still crashes when you do not have the screen focused on the unit.

EDIT3: Just had my strangest test yet. Had not noticed that the unit had Feral, he went Barbarian on me in this latest run without fighting the tiger at all, but still no crash sadly. Ran it till i got a fight and turning barbarian, still no crash.

Jhoniten · Aug 7, 2008

Doing the same quick save and load for when it doesn't crash. when it crashes never actually seeing strength or xp numbers, just going by number of pieces that were still standing before screen went black on me.

Quick combat is not fixing the problem with unit selected, trying unselected now

edit: unselected took 8 tries before unit crashed. After that i had 4 straight crash on me

Jhoniten · Aug 7, 2008

Well, I got good news and bad. Good news is I do not think the crash is related to the tiger or the tribesman. Ran it through numerous times, changed combat settings to and from quick, changed the tiger for a few other units. changed the tribesman for a few other units. But the clincher is when i just deleted the tiger. It was still crashing before next turn. Looking through the world builder only thing I can see is that there may be a warrior coming out of a barbarian town in SE part of the map. Other than that I am clueless

edit: going to use the method I saw Vehem mention once. Delete everything piece by piece in the WB til I fail to get the crash.

edit: Think I found it. We are 12 turns into a game that is not advanced start. Think we all missed that. That is one heavily promoted tribesman for having 0 exp. And he is not the only strange occurence. Acheron is in the game on turn 12. I am pretty sure he is not supposed to be there and no idea what that may do to the code with him being there. What is up with all those barb towns on the same continent? Anyway, I deleted him and his burning tundra and not a single crash. Played the game through about 30 odd turns when the tribesman went barb and totally wrecked my life.

KingOfLands · Aug 7, 2008

Jhoniten said:
Well, I got good news and bad. Good news is I do not think the crash is related to the tiger or the tribesman. Ran it through numerous times, changed combat settings to and from quick, changed the tiger for a few other units. changed the tribesman for a few other units. But the clincher is when i just deleted the tiger. It was still crashing before next turn. Looking through the world builder only thing I can see is that there may be a warrior coming out of a barbarian town in SE part of the map. Other than that I am clueless

edit: going to use the method I saw Vehem mention once. Delete everything piece by piece in the WB til I fail to get the crash.

edit: Think I found it. We are 12 turns into a game that is not advanced start. Think we all missed that. That is one heavily promoted tribesman for having 0 exp. And he is not the only strange occurence. Acheron is in the game on turn 12. I am pretty sure he is not supposed to be there and no idea what that may do to the code with him being there. What is up with all those barb towns on the same continent? Anyway, I deleted him and his burning tundra and not a single crash. Played the game through about 30 odd turns when the tribesman went barb and totally wrecked my life.

Not that I'm the Master of Debugging or anything, but it sounds like you've got the barbarian world option checked or one of the Terra variants loaded. Speaking from past experience, Acheron may show up as soon as the barbarians have even one city. This is likely not the source of your problem, at least not directly.

tipwong · Aug 7, 2008

the latest update version includes animals that will spin out forever as soon as it has space to do so, is it possible to apply it to ffh2 easily by myself?if so, how to do it?

Vehem · Aug 7, 2008

Ambreville said:
Whether you can reproduce the CtD at this point is neither here nor there. The fact it does trigger on some machines and is clearly identified ought to be enough. With all due respect, I think you are missing the point, which is that land units should not end up with ship-specific promotions, for one. Conflicting promotions, for second, such as Weak + Strong remain a tad absurd if anything. Either way -- they are a clear cause of problems on some PCs.

xienwolf said:
It is great that you are able to find issues with the game, and that you report them. It is unfortunate that none of them are reproducable and thus we cannot solve any issue which might be behind it. It is horrible that you are starting to become confrontational about the fact your issues are not reproduceable.

I must admit I've bitten my tongue a couple of times already with the way some of the reports have been phrased, but have given Ambreville the benefit of the doubt (some degree of frustration coupled with the fact that the internet is not a perfect medium for communication - it's hard to judge attitudes accurately).

That being said - I'll also remind people at this point that all work on these mods (Fall from Heaven, Fall Further or any other mod that's provided on these forums) is done because we enjoy modding and like to create something that's fun to play. It'd be great if everything worked first time, but that never happens. What you do have here is a community willing to work on improving each release with new features and new fixes - it should therefore be getting better over time. What you don't have here however is an entitlement for it to be perfect or fit for any purpose - we haven't sold a product nor taken anything in return for what is offered. Every save that is posted has at least 2 people checking it - if we can get any useful information from it, we'll use it.

Short version is that I really like these forums and we've managed to keep this thread constructive through over 2000 posts. If I were to repost the very first version of FF for new players to compare with what we have now, you'd be somewhat amazed at how far it's come. Please don't make it any harder than it needs to be.

xienwolf said:
And yes, some promotion combinations can happen that do not make too much sense, but they do NOT cause any issues and thus are not really worth programming the code needed to ensure they never happen.

I'm going to remove East Winds from the list though - that should be happening and is probably my fault anyway (besides - a tribesman with "wind" is just...)

I can't see anything specific about that promotion however that could cause you a problem Ambreville (the Naval thing shouldn't bother the game) - can you check a clean game (just started) with a warrior vs a warrior, one of which has both the weak/strong promotions and see if that causes a problem? If it doesn't, try with the weak/strong/east winds promotions and see if that does... I'm basically trying to eliminate all variables from that report other than what you suspect is the cause.

Vehem · Aug 7, 2008

Jhoniten said:
Well, I got good news and bad. Good news is I do not think the crash is related to the tiger or the tribesman. Ran it through numerous times, changed combat settings to and from quick, changed the tiger for a few other units. changed the tribesman for a few other units. But the clincher is when i just deleted the tiger. It was still crashing before next turn. Looking through the world builder only thing I can see is that there may be a warrior coming out of a barbarian town in SE part of the map. Other than that I am clueless

edit: going to use the method I saw Vehem mention once. Delete everything piece by piece in the WB til I fail to get the crash.

edit: Think I found it. We are 12 turns into a game that is not advanced start. Think we all missed that. That is one heavily promoted tribesman for having 0 exp. And he is not the only strange occurence. Acheron is in the game on turn 12. I am pretty sure he is not supposed to be there and no idea what that may do to the code with him being there. What is up with all those barb towns on the same continent? Anyway, I deleted him and his burning tundra and not a single crash. Played the game through about 30 odd turns when the tribesman went barb and totally wrecked my life.

KingOfLands said:
Not that I'm the Master of Debugging or anything, but it sounds like you've got the barbarian world option checked or one of the Terra variants loaded. Speaking from past experience, Acheron may show up as soon as the barbarians have even one city. This is likely not the source of your problem, at least not directly.

Aye - it does sound like a Barbarian World start. If Acheron is there (with his attendant burning tiles), that sounds a little like the situation with Hyborem that Ambreville reported before (deleting him resolved that issue). Not sure if that gets us anywhere, but it'd be interesting to see if Ambreville can resolve this problem as well by removing Acheron/flame tiles.

Tarquelne · Aug 7, 2008

I noticed that python assigns Austerin naval units "East Winds" when built. What would happen if "East Winds" were instead defined as the Austerin racial promotion, and "East Winds" a racial promotion? Since "East Winds" is a promotion for naval units would that do the same thing - give ships the promotion but nothing else? (Though you'd certainly want to take it off the mutation list.)

xienwolf · Aug 7, 2008

Well, we'll wait to hear from Ambreville about Acheron deletion solving the issue. It could be Flames related, in which cases FfH 33 will solve the issue (ideally) with the new Flame Effect/Graphic.

From what I've seen so far with other racial promotions, it would be difficult to isolate application to just Naval units via that tag. Though the code could probably benefit from having the code cleaned up so it isn't applied quite so liberally as it is now (IIRC right now it applies even to non-living units, and units that were captured who didn't already have a race)

Vehem · Aug 7, 2008

Tarquelne said:
I noticed that python assigns Austerin naval units "East Winds" when built. What would happen if "East Winds" were instead defined as the Austerin racial promotion, and "East Winds" a racial promotion? Since "East Winds" is a promotion for naval units would that do the same thing - give ships the promotion but nothing else? (Though you'd certainly want to take it off the mutation list.)

xienwolf said:
Well, we'll wait to hear from Ambreville about Acheron deletion solving the issue. It could be Flames related, in which cases FfH 33 will solve the issue (ideally) with the new Flame Effect/Graphic.

From what I've seen so far with other racial promotions, it would be difficult to isolate application to just Naval units via that tag. Though the code could probably benefit from having the code cleaned up so it isn't applied quite so liberally as it is now (IIRC right now it applies even to non-living units, and units that were captured who didn't already have a race)

Aye - the Racial promotions are pretty liberal, so I tend to avoid them for anything other than races. What would be possible now though is using one of Xien's new tags to cause the promotion to be "AutoAcquired". I don't think there's a prereq yet for "Civilization" - but that should be easy enough to incorporate, then all that would be necessary is setting the prereqs of "Austrin Only" and "Naval Only" with "AutoAcquire" enabled to make all Austrin Naval units automatically start with that promotion.

We could actually remove the need for the Svaltafar Hunting Lodges and Bannor Training Yards etc again (the main reason those were added as I recall was to get around needing to use Python to grant the promotions). At the least we could alter the actual purpose of the buildings if not removing them entirely. It may be a little convoluted however in cases where the promotion isn't "unique" to that unit ("Guardsman" is no longer Bannor-specific in Fall Further for instance).

Tarquelne · Aug 7, 2008

Vehem said:
Aye - the Racial promotions are pretty liberal, so I tend to avoid them for anything other than races.

Thanks guys.

MagisterCultuum · Aug 7, 2008

Vehem said:
I don't think there's a prereq yet for "Civilization" - but that should be easy enough to incorporate...

Yeah, Xienwolf hasn't added that yet, although it was practically the first thing I requested of him when he started his modcomp. I consider that and <UnitReligionPrereq> (<StateReligionPrereq> was added for normal BtS, but I don't think that an Order unit should be able to get FoL unique promotions just because of the State Religion) to be the most important things he has been avoiding. <CivicPrereq> woud be cool too while you are at it, but it is less important.

xienwolf · Aug 7, 2008

I wouldn't term it "avoiding" so much as "developing"

I have no intention of ever adding anything like:
<CivilizationPreReq>CIVILIZATION_INFERNAL</CivilizationPreReq>

Much preferring to work on figuring out how to add:

Code:

<CivilizationPreReqs>
    <Civilization>CIVILIZATION_INFERNAL</Civilization>
    <Civilization>CIVILIZATION_MERCURIAN</Civilization>
</CivilizationPreReqs>

Same goes for Unit preReq and a few others. I pretty much know how to do it now, and could have done it weeks ago if I was willing to do it the same way that SeeInvisible works (<SeeInvisible>INVISIBLE_LAND,INVISIBLE_ANIMAL</SeeInvisible>)

arkham4269 · Aug 7, 2008

Started up a new FF game last night after putting in the new "D" Patch. Okay, new FF screen-shot start-up. In the game, there is the neat "Big" image of what unit is currently clicked on, cool, cool.

Everything was fine and running well but even with "...just one more turn" I have to sleep some time. So shut down and came back to it this morning. Boot up the game and first thing I notice is that the game is running slow, the "Big" unit image is missing and within one turn I get that damn error I always get: File:\main\Civilization4\SDKs\Gamebryo2_0\NiDX9Renderer\NiDX9SourceTextureData.cpp.Line:1019

What gives? Why is it that a game can go fine as long as I don't shut it off? What is changed? I've recently been playing the Beta-Test Warhammer and I was amazed that I wasn't getting this CtD. You mentioned earlier that you're worried that it's the artwork. What I'm wondering about is why saving the game seems to 'break' the graphics. This is really, really pissing me off since I'm not in a position to get a more powerful machine and I can't seem to get about 2/3rds through a game without it crashing. My 2005 HP laptop runs hot so I can't just leave it on all night and come back to the game in the morning.

I really, really, REALLY would like some glimmer of what's going on. I don't just think it's my machine since most other mods I play, I don't crash like this.

Vehem · Aug 7, 2008

arkham4269 said:
File:\main\Civilization4\SDKs\Gamebryo2_0\NiDX9Renderer\NiDX9SourceTextureData.cpp.Line:1019

Now that one is odd as it's an assert error from the graphics engine - which isn't code that we have access to at all (I wish we did...).

Does this happen on any game that is loaded, whilst you can start a game with no problem? Or is it now recurring every time you start a game after the first time it happened?

Tarquelne · Aug 7, 2008

xienwolf said:
Same goes for Unit preReq and a few others.

Wow! Moving to that format would be really useful. Well, you know that... Anyway, wow, that'll be really useful!

arkham4269 · Aug 7, 2008

Vehem said:
Now that one is odd as it's an assert error from the graphics engine - which isn't code that we have access to at all (I wish we did...).

Does this happen on any game that is loaded, whilst you can start a game with no problem? Or is it now recurring every time you start a game after the first time it happened?

I get it in every game of FF/FfH I play. It used to happen very late in the game (usually when there was lots of burning sands) and it used to be Line: 319 or something. Now the crash tends to happen earlier in the game.

I've tried running on low graphics, turning off practically everything that is running on my game other than Civ, turned the music off and nothing helps. I tend to play games on the "Tiny: Tectonics: Lakes 30%) with 6 Civs so there is less stuff for the game to deal with. I also tend to turn off the Hell terrain which is irritating.

What I don't understand is that my last game was going good, through right toward the end there were some times the computer seem to be thinking a bit longer. However, many of my games conk out after one turn after a reboot and start the next day. Plus, as I mentioned, that new "Big Image" of what ever unit was active was missing on the reboot.

UPDATE: In rereading you post, let me answer with more info. First off, after the CtD, I usually have to reboot since my graphics go to hell, like 400 x 200 resolution with like 8 bit colors. This doesn't always happen, but most of the time. If it doesn't, however, if I start a new game from scratch, it'll error out almost instantly. It doesn't seem to care who I play, it happens with every race. Also, the CtD happens as the system is processing between turns.

MagisterCultuum · Aug 7, 2008

xienwolf said:
I wouldn't term it "avoiding" so much as "developing"

I have no intention of ever adding anything like:
<CivilizationPreReq>CIVILIZATION_INFERNAL</CivilizationPreReq>

Much preferring to work on figuring out how to add:

Code:

<CivilizationPreReqs> <Civilization>CIVILIZATION_INFERNAL</Civilization> <Civilization>CIVILIZATION_MERCURIAN</Civilization> </CivilizationPreReqs>

Same goes for Unit preReq and a few others. I pretty much know how to do it now, and could have done it weeks ago if I was willing to do it the same way that SeeInvisible works (<SeeInvisible>INVISIBLE_LAND,INVISIBLE_ANIMAL</SeeInvisible>)

Well, I suppose that would be better.

I am really also of the opinion that Invisibility should be changed to allow units to have and to see multiple types of invisibility, and for promotions to effect this. This code could probably be borrowed directly from Dom Pedro II's Conqueror's Delight modcomp. I also love how he made it so that certain invisibility types apply only on certain terrains/features/hills/(it might be good if you added the ability to be invisible on peaks too). That would let us bring back Forest Stealth without making the game need to update the unit's promotions whenever it moves. I'm really hoping I can convince you to include this type of invisibiity soon, as it is kinda important in my plans for the OO religion. It would also be nice if the invisibiity from the Nox Noctis were of a new type which coud be seen though by certain high level Empyrean units.

There are a ot of things in that modcomp that I'd like you to adopt. Invisibility for sure, and also unit nationality/home cities. Puppet States and unit trading though diplomacy would make great game options. His Naval changes (like making the speed of ships depend on map size) are worth considering too.

----------------------------

I just had another bug which I thought I'd mention. This one is rather common on my computer, but not a particularly bad one. The game often CtDs when I am trying to exit to the main menu. It doesn't really matter a whole lot since I'm trying to quit anyway, but it does make it take slightly longer to start a new game.

Psychic_Llamas · Aug 7, 2008

it would also be cool if there was terrain specific invisibility, ie hill concealment, forest concealment etc.

Fall Further - The Original Thread

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