Mod: Updated Mod: Sgqwonkian Crisis v1.5

[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?

[Fingers]

I've started the game about 20 times now, and played the gongship mainquest a couple of times. (I set it to always)

The problems so far:
- if you kill the gongship in combat (say, by using a gong) it will crash because the popup tries to display a non-existent image (ships/url_gong.png)
- sgqwonk ship silhouettes have a black square around them. If you can't get PNG images to work, use TGA for this... it's easier.
- the button graphics for the same ships are also broken. The outline frame seems to be all solid.
- Urluquai gong ship sprite (url_gong.tga) seems to have an alpha problem too (a black fringe in front of the gong in the main sprite, a huge black fringe around the gong in the 64x64 image).

I did not see the startgame crash, or any other crashes besides the misnamed image thing. I'll ask Ed to try and debug it on the Mac.

[sgqwonkian]

Sorry to make you do all that work.

The link at the top of this thread is not the current one... once it started crashing I decided not to upload it and inflict it on everyone.

It hadn't occurred to me that one of the games designers/developers/coders/etc would be available to help fix my mod. Talk about incredible customer service. Thank you. I gotta buy more of you folks's games.

I'll throw the buggy files back into it, and upload it later tonight/early tommorrow so you can see if it's causing trouble for you.

[sgqwonkian]

Oh, and the PLNT urlu was an artifact from an earlier version. Thanks for pointing it out... and it brings up a question.

Does the attack command only work if a ship starts off the board, or am I doing something else wrong?

I'd tried it first with them set to FLAG existing, PLNT urlu. It generated them on the Uluquai homeworld, but they would never attack to anywhere.

[sgqwonkian]

Okay, Here's the newest version of the Sgqwonk mod, the version that keeps crashing painfully.