Single Player bugs and crashes v36 plus (SVN) - After the 24th of October 2015

Had a week off from work and started that game on the 17th of December with the SVN of that day with the first age.

Just updated to the newest SVN started a new game added an ornicopter and selected the binoculars recon action on selecting a target for the mission the game crashed.

 

Ok. I COULD fix this in the code by disabling the call to graphically enact the recon mission for air units. If they ALL have this problem then I would. But being an issue with just one unit, that is currently in a module that can be turned off, I'd prefer to opt to ask Toffer or Sparth for some assistance in looking at the recon mission settings and its animation on that unit to see if they can figure out what's wrong with it and if they can fix it in ANY way, even to disable its ability to graphically display... I know very little about the animation side of units and it all takes place code-wise in the .EXE so I don't have any tools to evaluate it from behind the curtain. Similar problems have been debugged by other modders so I beseech them now for assistance!

In the meantime, however, if you give yourself another air unit like a fighter and use the recon mission, does THAT crash as well?

 

Well here we are the first bug report for V37 although this might not be a legit bug as I am using prior version material. The issue I am having is that when I loaded this map/scenario called dreamland (a map made back in V36) and I found that every icon, every button whatever ui element minus the terrain and such in front of me is just gone, no end turn button no mini map no nothing. This bug seems exclusive to this map as no other scenario, even the ones made back in V36 is affected.

 

That being the case, the map/scenario maker will have to figure out what's wrong with it. These CAN become incompatible with changes that take place in the main mod and require the map maker update with fixes. I've no idea what would've caused a scenario to behave like that though.

 

Not sure if this a bug or not but it didn't do it in V36 and does not do it with any other game. Upon exiting the game even to main menu or totally the game Crashes to a Black screen were i cannot do anything ctlr esc does nothing ctlr alt delete does nothing its a total black screen lockup i have to hold my power button down and shutdown the computer. also i cant seem to start any earlier than 50000 BC

 

This is a new report. I've not heard of anyone having this problem. Sounds frustrating but I'm not sure there's anything I can do with it. Do you get a minidump when this happens? Minidump files would show up in the BeyondtheSword folder.

That's the date at which Prehistoric begins so that's correct I believe. We'll probably eventually have it start earlier than that but for now that's our start date.

 

i have a dump file it wont let me upload it says its not an allowed extension also have a ThemeParse log that says this
[Dec 24, 2016 - 01:51:16] Messages while processing 'Resource/Civ4.thm'

Error : Decl - ('Civ4Theme_Common.thm', Ln:401, Col:13) Assignment source propertyId 'SF_CtrlTheme_Civ4_Control_Font_Size3_Italic' not found
Error : Decl - ('Civ4Theme_Common.thm', Ln:402, Col:13) Assignment source propertyId 'SF_CtrlTheme_Civ4_Control_Font_Size3_BoldItalic' not found
Error : Decl - ('Civ4Theme_Common.thm', Ln:408, Col:13) Assignment source propertyId 'SF_CtrlTheme_Civ4_Control_Font_Size1_Bold' not found
Error : Decl - ('Civ4Theme_Window.thm', Ln:3048, Col:9) Assignment source propertyId 'SF_CtrlTheme_Civ4_Control_Font_Size1_Bold' not found
Error : Syntax - ('Civ4Theme_HUD.thm', Ln:887, Col:13) Unexpected '.' in the identifier assignment statement
Error : Syntax - ('Civ4Theme_HUD.thm', Ln:927, Col:13) Unexpected '.' in the identifier assignment statement

 

You can use 7zip to condense most file types for uploading here.

I've seen those Theme messages before in a crash scenario which has to do with a graphic issue that may be due to a graphics card issue. It's not been figured out by any known modder on Civ Fanatics so far but has plagued more mods than just this one.

 

see if i did this right

 

Other air units crash as well on the recon mission. is there a way i can turn of animations for air units in my local SVN copy?

 

Possibly some options may allow animations to be turned off and if you get the right one it may avoid the crash. ALL recon missions, eh? That's frustrating. I'll have to disable recon animations in the code then. What about other air unit missions? I had most of them all disabled for most of the v37 development cycle and had them turned back on for the last month of it only to NOW have someone mention the problem still exists so I'm wondering if bombing and more still causes crashes in the graphics.

Give me a day or two to present a dll that has that disabled. In the meantime I'll be looking for your conclusions on other air missions and options that may help to get around the problem.

 

I'll try to look into that before I mess with the DLL and can't look into it again. Unfortunately I kinda doubt I will find anything useful here because the timing you say this is taking place suggests it's going to be a crash in the EXE where I can't see what's happening.

You may want to clear the files in your original BtS cache folder. Try using the Play Now reset method I mentioned in the players guide. It's possible that there's something off with your user settings at some level, perhaps some missing definition or based on an old variable still being cached.

 

There should be no problem in making it a prehistoric tech, pretty sure I did it in my modmod. Anyhow, I don't think the tech will be nescesarry as we have a playable neanderthal civ that should get access to all that the NPC does, we could just redesign the tech out of the game entirely.

Edit: I'm willing to look into it after we turn 2017.

 

the game seems to crash on all air missions i added a save that has 2 cities next to each other with the player owned one filled with 15 different types of airplanes.

 

Awesome. I'll leave it to you then for now.

Thank you for your research efforts. I have been investigating this issue myself and that's what I've been finding but I'd only come to a preliminary determination on that.

I really don't know where Air unit animations went off the rails. It's not something that's ever been worked on in the code so I have to suspect it might have begun crashing when a number of art files were removed due to them being accused of being redundant and unnecessary. Maybe something that should not have been removed was. This took place a very long time ago but we rarely have players getting into air unit usage, especially back then, (this kind of game longevity has been improving a lot!) So it may have taken a while to finally start seeing the results of these changes.

When the crash occurs, as suspected it takes place in the EXE just after the command was sent to the EXE to run the graphic execution of the mission. But when it crashes, it gives a vague message about some process definition missing. That MAY be that a file was removed that shouldn't have been.

So FOR NOW, I'll have to shut down all air unit animations again, but perhaps some digging back when some mod files were being cut out to reduce on mod size may find what caused the crash. Your save should be very helpful for that effort.

 

Thanks. Unfortunately, as suspected, the crash is in the exe, so deep into the exe that it doesn't even show where it last touched any processing in the dll. I suspect you may be able to solve this by taking a close look at your ini file settings. I don't know what to guide you to look at there though unfortunately.

 

Of course there is. For some reason the game automatically builds this up for some units eg workers and Great People but not for others. This means it has to be done by hand and is always out of date.

 

Did someone change the quote for this last version, i thought there was one already??

 

It's been that way since last summer. And in none of my games since then has it been anything else. I've posted screenies too.

JosEPh

 

I'm glad this was brought up again. I wanted to comment on this since I looked into it in the code yesterday. The code SHOULD be compiling this for ALL units with the Buildings tags. But it does it under the civil information hotkey info page so you may not be seeing that it is there. Check that first and if you see any that are not working, let me know so I can check it out as a test case. I didn't see any good reason any shouldn't work but you know how sometimes running a test on the code as it processes can reveal new things otherwise overlooked just in reading through.

If you can capture what is being said in the recording I'd be happy to add the text for the text key. If nothing's being said in the recording then I guess we need a new quote!