Frustrating error with minidump at program load

from Sins Forums

I have an error that is quite frustrating to diagnose.The program immediately minidumps if I include a race file with some ships in it. However if that same race file is copied from an existing stock race and then modified after the game has loaded (with watchedfiles=on) the game has no problem with any of the ships that are added and no errors or minidumps in game. The next time I start up the game with the playerRACE file in the mod directory it minidumps again. Obviously something is checking the files more stringently at load than during the game execution.

 

the race file is simply a copy of the PlayerPhase.entity file with the name string changed at the top (shows up correctly in game) and the other change is to change the referenced ship in the frigate/capital section. if I load without changing the ship references I can load, select and play the race fine (obviously without changes) if I start with modified ships it minidumps without error immediately before the opening splashscreen.

 

for reference I am using ship entity files that are copies of the stock ones, the only difference is that I am changing the model referenced in the file to a custom model. Other ships exported the same way work in a different race (in fact the ships that crash in one race file work in the other race correctly during load....) I am using mod tool and have had no problem with many of my ships and these new ships are only different because of the faction they are on and like I said they work in race A but crash when added to the build list of race B unless I change the files after the game starts up.

 

If I could get a Ironclad dev input on what checks are going on here it would help me a lot as I didn't find anything with the debug Exe file that was tellign me what was throwing the exception.

modding
7,563 views 9 replies
Reply #1 from Sins Forums Top

Why not set showErrors to TRUE in the user setting and launch with the standard exe? I don't understand the fascination with the developer executable. It's pretty crappy for error checking because it spits out code errors rather than showing you where in your files the problem is. The dev exe is best for just modifying easy values on the fly and spawning stuff to test.

Reply #2 from Sins Forums Top

I had a simmilar problem, and it turned out to be a case spelling. The engine is still quite case sensitive, so the first thing you should check is that all your references are properly spelled, especially when they involve file names. If a bug is not obvious, its likely something silly like that.

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Reply #3 from Sins Forums Top

I have show errors set to true in the normal exe as well, which is why I haven't been able to solve the problem on my own, it minidumps immediatly after the window is instantiated and before anything else loads.

 

I will check case on the files, but as a rule I have done everything upper case to avoid that.

Reply #4 from Sins Forums Top

Nah sins isnt unforgiving at all isnt it.. :p

Not only should you check case, but you should make sure there are no spaces between lines in the entity files. Sometimes that causes some nasty things to happen.

Reply #5 from Sins Forums Top

there shouldn't be, the ships are using existing stock files with only the mesh line changed.

Reply #6 from Sins Forums Top

I don't know if this would be your problem but I modded a ship once and I put, I don't know, maybe 15 or 20 exhaust points on it, the game mini dumped right off the bat. When I lowered the exhaust points to I think 12 it worked. Same with Flair points. I think 10 is max. And I think 2 is max on strike craft exhaust.

 

Reply #7 from Sins Forums Top

yeah I did run into that problem, but in this case I am using a very minimal set of points just to get the ship in the game and functional, it works for 20 some odd other ships, but this seems to be something with the PlayerRACE files or something with the models themselves.

Reply #8 from Sins Forums Top

Well, if the mod dumps as soon as you just replace the mesh entry, then its most likely what I call the Freaking Spelling Bug. They are HARD to spot. I thought there was something wrong with my eyes, because it took a dev checking out my files to spot that I had one letter of the wrong size.

Also, check out the mesh file. If you make any misspellings there, including case sensitive errors, it will also dump on load. I ran into that little issue when I was using the early version of the planet resize tool and it wrote one of the entries in the .mesh file with incorrect capitalization.

I doubt that it has anything to do with the model itself. Early on I had all sorts of messy models imported into Sins and it didn't crash on me once, it just goes all wonky with the graphics of the ship.

Basically, you have a very narrow area to search for the bug, if the only change you did was to replace the mesh reference in the entity file. If you haven't already, check that out by returning the mesh reference to the vanilla and see if the game crashes. If not, you've got your culprit.

Reply #9 from Sins Forums Top

oh man that took a lot of searching, but the actual cause was that the lines

 

squadTypeEntityDef:0 "SquadTechCombat"
squadAntiMatterCost:0 0.000000
squadTypeEntityDef:1 "SquadTechBomber"
squadAntiMatterCost:1 0.000000

 

were entered as

 

squadTypeEntityDef:0 ""
squadAntiMatterCost:0 0.000000
squadTypeEntityDef:1 ""
squadAntiMatterCost:1 0.000000

this is because in my export test for capital ships I wanted to eliminate the variable of possibility having buggy fighters...

 

 

everything seems to work fine now that I put fighters into the ships (why I have no idea, I guess it actually checks to see if the ship has command points?) hopefully this works across all my ships