Help with mod please.

[nicklemarr]

Hello. I am new to the forum as well as Weird Worlds. I played a lot of SAIS, but I haven't ever made my own mod before. Now with WW I felt I should in my spare time.

The thing is, I just recently started of a mod that, at the moment, is quite nondescript. For some reason, I get a segmentation fault, and I have no clue why, because I haven't really done hardly anything.

I have forbade myself to sleep until it's resolved; I have scanned so many lines, yet I really don't know what the problem is.

I feel like it's something so simple. I am just making it complicated.

I have attached the first backup of when the segmentation fault began. Thank you.

[sgqwonkian]

I'll take a look at it and see if anything obvious jumps out.

Actually, as I click on it now, I realize that there's a problem with the compressed files.

The files won't even expand. It brings up an error message saying "The structure of the archive is damaged (Error #17540)".

If you could try archiving/compacting/zipping/etc it again, and re-upload, that might be helpful. That part could be just an upload glitch, but it also might be an incompatibility between your compression software and my expander software, maybe? (I'm on a mac, if that matters.)

If uploading a new version doesn't get us a workable archive for some reason then we could try using this thread (or making a new one inside the mod subforum) to debug it by you just listing the changes you've made. I've got an hour free tomorrow to devote to debugging / altruism.

What kinds of changes did you make? What sort of content is in your mod at this point?

I've got a number of debugging solutions written up for various known common problems, at http://weirdworldsmods.wikidot.com/bugs

Give that site a look-through and see if anything on it matches the problems you're experiencing.

[nicklemarr]

First off, I got it working. The game crashed from having too many allies being made available.

Originally Posted by sgqwonkian

The files won't even expand. It brings up an error message saying "The structure of the archive is damaged (Error #17540)".

-- Weird. I have no clue.

Originally Posted by sgqwonkian

What kinds of changes did you make? What sort of content is in your mod at this point?

-- Well first off, I am just some regular shmoe with no modding experience. Having said that, I am making the scale a lot bigger. I have added about 40 generic ships so far, about 20 unique (were allies until this error) ships. A bunch of planets. Several quests that I always thought about when I was playing other sci-fi games.

I am a terrible artist, so I use a lot of the games resources with little tweaks like hue and what not.

The biggest thing I have done is all statistical. I felt like battle were over a lot quicker than they needed to be, and that some races, like the Tan-ru, weren't as deadly as I think they would actually be. I have tweaked every item/ship in the game in addition to adding all my own. I have big plans for it, but it's really just for my own satisfaction.

Originally Posted by sgqwonkian

I've got a number of debugging solutions written up for various known common problems, at http://weirdworldsmods.wikidot.com/bugs

I came across that site on google a couple days ago and it pointed me in the right direction but it could be a lot more specific. Thank you though.

[sgqwonkian]

Glad your mod is working again.

There's a hard-coded limit to how many allies you can have in the game. IIRC, if you have more than 5 ships in your fleet, they stop displaying correctly, and just a few ships past that it crashes.

To control how many allies your mod will try to populate the map with, make sure you set "FLAG ally" on all the Quests that generate them.

Then you can tweak how many allies each map size will call up by modifying the numbers in distribution.ini. In the last three blocks of that file there's lines that say "ALLY 2" "ALLY 3" and "ALLY 4". If you alter the numbers that follow the "ALLY" it'll change how many are placed on each map size.

Originally Posted by nicklemarr

I came across that site on google a couple days ago and it pointed me in the right direction but it could be a lot more specific. Thank you though.
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Yeah, it didn't seem like anybody was using that site but me, so I stopped making regular updates. Some of the pages are still rough drafts, and there's a lot of dead links, but there's also some really useful info there. It's a wiki, so if you feel my explanations on that site aren't detailed enough, you could log on and edit them. The password to edit that wiki is "shrapnel and eel".