Mod: Updated Mod: Sgqwonkian Crisis v1.5

[sgqwonkian]

Update: I'm attaching a link to the 1.5 version.

No new content since the 1.1 version, just bug fixes and graphics tweaks. However, since the 1.1 version was very unstable, there's probably some amount of content in 1.5 that you've never actually seen before.

It's still a little rough around the edges, not quite up to the standards of my other recent work, but at least it's not likely to crash to the desktop every 3rd game.

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Original post:

Hello, I'm a new member of this forum (been lurking for a couple weeks though). Weird Worlds is a wonderful game, and I'm really enjoying the various mods people have made. Thought it was high time I get my but in gear and give something back to the modding community...


Here's my first Mod ever, the Sgqwonkian Crisis.

This mod mostly adds to the main game, presenting a new mission and a new take on old badguys. The Urluquai are commiting genocide! Only you can save the Sgqwonkian Confederation!

Here's a list of changes in this mod:
+ Added new original race, the Sgqwonk, along with several small quests involving them, and a variety of modified equipment on their vessels.
+ Increased the importance of the Urluquai, modified the Tan Ru, and technically created another race as well.
+ Changed the items available at the Terran homeworld.
+ Added the Relief Supplies item.
+ New mainquest. It's a little derivative, but supports the theme.
+ Deleted the Mantle of Babulon, since an anti-Urluquai theme would be pointlessly silly if you could just throw on a cloak of charisma and make nice with them.

The following items were borrowed (without express permission, I'm afraid - hope this doesn't piss anyone off) from other Mods:
+ Added every Urluquai ship I could find. If you've made a new Urluquai hull, there's a good chance it's in here.
+ Added the Terran Assault Ship from the sample mod.

[sgqwonkian]

If anyone experiences any really nasty crashes with this mod, please let me know. I just had one, a really brute that took a full reboot, and I'd never had it before.

I'm on a mac with the new beta patch, so there's a chance it's a patch issue, but more likely it's a bug in my mod I didn't know about.

Anyhow, please post here if there's anything you see needs debugging.

[Fingers]

You should remove the game.cfg from the zip file, that's what's causing the crash. It seems to be from an incompatible version. Ideally, you should delete game.cfg, start the game, clear the high score list if necessary, then quit. This should produce a clean game.cfg with no scores on it that you can safely package with your mod.

Having said all that, there may be a way to make the code handle it better but I'm not sure when I'm going to get around to working on this again.

[sgqwonkian]

There's clearly something else going on here. I deleted the game.cfg, and got the bad crash again on the next time I booted it up.

So then I rebuilt the mod from the ground up using a new game.ini file (and the patched version at that since I was going to all this trouble).

Caught a couple little coding errors of mine, and fixed them. (in case it matters, these were quests labeled as both ally and event, some flag strangeness with a time capsule I'd made, and one quest not appearing in the game.ini file)

Launched it again, and it crashed upon clicking on major brass's briefing button. It's got me stumped.

[sgqwonkian]

Get this - it crashes whenever I use the right-hand mission.

I've changed what ship that is, and it still crashes.

The middle and right-hand have the same game_brass file, and it still crashes.

Other than scoring data and text these missions are identical.

I can't figure out why it's crashing.

[sgqwonkian]

And the answer is...

...something totally unrelated, I guess.

It crashed like 7 times in a row on the right-hand mission, but loaded fine on the middle mission 3 times in the midst of that.
I thought it was something wrong with the last third of mission.ini. So I copied the middle third to the last third.

Crash on right-most mission. Huh? Why didn't that fix it?

Tried the middle mission again - and now it crashes.

So I pulled the whole mission.ini file and run it with just the normal missions.

Hangs for 20 seconds on the right-most mission, but doesn't crash and eventually generates the univers.
Try again (still on right-most), no hang this time. Seems fine.
So now I try the middle mission, and it crashes.

Grrr!

[Fingers]

Oh.. I thought the only crash was on the highscore screen (as it crashed when I went to view the highscores), which is what the game.cfg issue has to do with. I've only tried the actual game once (the third mission) and it didn't crash (on PC).

Is the crash you're seeing always occurring at the beginning of the game ie. when it should generate the universe? There are/were situations that could cause the game to hang such as not having enough quests of specific type to distribute on the map (defined by distribution.ini), but the patch should actually fix these.

The mission you choose should not affect any of this unless a mission launches a quest that crashes; but that appears not to be the case. Have you tried if different map sizes behave differently?

[sgqwonkian]

I fiddled around with it like crazy. There had been a crash at the end of games, which getting rid of the .cfg did indeed fix.

But now there's a crash happening at universe generation. I now believe which mission is irrelevant, that it was just coincidence that it was happening with a certain mission or ship. I'm of that opinion because I broke everything down, and then slowly rebuilt it file by file, testing multiple times between each file I added.

It's clearly caused by one or more quests, as it ran without error in about 30 straight games before I started adding in my quests.

Specifically, I believe the crash is somehow linked to generating ships off the board. I have a mainquest that does that, and when I changed it to always, it crashed 4 out of 4 tries. Pulled it out of the game.ini, and ran about 6 or 7 games in a row just fine.

So I went over with a fine tooth comb. Found one typo in a graphic name that quest referenced, but fixing that typo did not solve the crash.

Zapped that and went back to only maingame's quests plus very basic amb_muk and ally_muk -derived quests. They ran fine 12 or 15 times in a row.

Put in a very simple quest, reads like this:

"FLAG always

STAR 0
FLAG protect offmap
PLNT urlu
FLET urluquai 1 attack terran
END STAR



STAR 1
FLAG protect offmap
PLNT urlu
FLET urluquai 2 attack sgqwonk
END STAR

STAR 2
FLAG protect offmap
PLNT urlu
FLET urluquai 4 attack sgqwonk
END STAR"

That ran just fine, generating 3 fleets and putting them on an attack course. So I made a second identical quest, only thing different being the name, and which fleet numbers.

Ran with both, and it crashed. So I thought "maybe you can only have one fleet generate ships off board per game".

To test that I set them to FLAG event and KEYS invasion. They ran fine 4 or 5 games, but of course I didn't always get an invasion.

So I made 6 more quests, just changing which fleet numbers were generated and which races they attacked. Those ran fine for 3 or 4 games, and then crash.

Checked all the files. Nothing wrong with them, and all are identical except the FLET lines. No other mod quests are set to anything but FLAG always, so the crash has to be from these, or it would happen all the time, right?

So I thought, maybe it's that there's a mainquest trying to generate a fleet off the map as well. So I set all my 8 invasion quests to FLAG event KEYS mainquest, figuring either events generate first, and I'd never get a mainquest, or mainquests generate first and my invasion wouldn't happen when a mainquest was going on.

Crash. Crash. Crash. Three in a row. So I guess that's not the problem, afterall. Back to the drawing board...

[sgqwonkian]

Continuing from my last post, since it gets even better.

I post the above, here. Then i go remove all 8 invasion quests, and doublecheck that my original mainquest that seemed to be the source of the crash is gone too.

Launch the mod... (wait for it) ...CRASH while generating the universe!
And it's a doozy, too, forcing me to restart the computer to get out of it. (which the problem before i'd tried to rebuild the mod had been doing, but the crashes while experimenting with 8 invasion events were softer and less drastic).

So, what's different in the mod now than before i put those quests in? NOTHING.

What's different on my computer now? I have my DSL plugged in and Mozilla Firefox running in the background. Next up, I'll log out and see if it's a compatibility issue between Mozilla and Weird Worlds.

[Fingers]

Have you tried different map sizes yet? Sometimes you can hit various limits easier on a larger map, while a small map works just fine.

Creating a ton of fleets will require you to modify the world_max_fleet number in numbers.ini. Trying to create more fleets than this shouldn't actually crash (just cancel the quest), but it might be worth a try. If your fleets are large, increase world_max_ship as well. Doubling them should be plenty.

You should remove the PLNT lines from your offmap fleets as you're not creating a new planet.

Also, a ton of attacking fleets may "hang" for a long time as they all try to find a path to the target planet. This is why the Ravian invasion fleets are set up to start at different times. If the fleet is slow-moving (no nebula drives) it gets worse, as the pathfinding algorithm has to actually simulate the fleet traveling through space to make travel time estimates and avoid black holes etc.

I'm going to play the mod on PC a few times today.. is the download current?