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Kienja Kenobi
Kienja Kenobi
Join Date 04/2007
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Freeze on Mod Load

My mod should work with 1.1 Beta 3 but freezes on load

October 18, 2008 5:52:03 AM from Sins of a Solar Empire ForumsSins of a Solar Empire Forums

I am attempting to update a moderation so that it works with 1.1 Beta 3. 

However, every time I go to the Mods screen in Sins and choose to load my updated mod, the game freezes.  It is not a total computer freeze or even a total game freeze.  The mouse still responds in-game, it is just that everything else is frozen (menu buttons, sound, graphics, etc.).  When I do a Ctrl + Alt + Del I see that a "MiniDump" window has appeared in the background, though this window in itself does nothing.  I check the location where MiniDumps should appear and I never find any dump files or debug information of any kind. 

I have loaded many other mods, including some large ones like 7 Deadly Sins, plus I have a very fast computer, so I know for a fact that this is not simply a normally long loading time.

This happens all the time when dealing with a mod that was made to work on an older version, but I do not understand why it is happening in my case because I have specifically gone through all the files, comparing all differences with the old versions, and updated them where necessary.  Here are the exact file changes my mod makes:

 

Adds 4 new meshes (Due to the fact that I have merged Sins Plus)

Adds 7 new textures

Changes 13 textures

Changes 150 files in GameInfo (They are all .entity files except for Gameplay.constants)

Adds 6 .entity files to GameInfo (Some due to Sins Plus)

Makes small changes and some additions to English.str so that everything shows up properly

Changes six .brushes files in the Window folder

 

I manually went through all of the text files above and made a decision on every single difference I found between the original file from the 1.1 Beta 3 and the file from my moderation.  All of the decisions seemed very clear cut to me and made perfect sense, so I have no idea where the problem could be.

 

It would help if I just knew what types of discrepencies/conflicts/problems tend to cause these freezes.  There are thousands of possibilities unless I have at least some idea of where to start.  For example, I know that problems like not having all of the required strings defined in English.str do not produce freezes.  I once successfully loaded a mod that had a really messed up English.str and it loaded fine (Of course the only problem was that I saw "String not found" everywhere).  So my question is, what kinds of problems in my files could POSSIBLY be causing this freeze?  With so many files I really have no idea where to start. 

At this point the only thing I can possibly think of is that some of the numbers in my mod's files do not have the full number of decimal places.  For example, in some .entity files my mode has the entry 0.65, whereas the 1.1 Beta 3 files have 0.650000.  Should that be causing problems?  I ask this just because I had around 100 files that were 100% updated with the 1.1 Beta 3 files except for a decimal problem like that, so I decided to cut my work and just not fix that in the 100 files.  If someone knows for certain that this causes problems then I can go through the 100 files and add the decimal places.

Also, I have not done anything to the texture or mesh files to update them.  Is there any work necessary to make old texture or mesh work with a new version?  It seemed obvious to me that there should be no work but I will ask just to rule it out for certain. 

 

Thanks very much for your thoughts

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Kienja Kenobi
ManSh00ter
Join Date 02/2008
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Reply #1 October 18, 2008 7:26:04 AM
from Sins of a Solar Empire ForumsSins of a Solar Empire Forums

If a minidump window opened in the background, then you don't have a freeze, you have a minidump and that means there is a conflict or missing critical data in your mod. The cause for minidumps can be varied, from missing files, incorrectly formatted file content, even missing capital letters in some cases as the game engine is often case sensitive.

You can usually rule out meshes and textures (especially textures, no way to crash your mod with those). Check for case sensitive errors in mesh files. After that, its probably something in your entity files... that's why it is a good idea to add changes to your mod in manageable batches, say 5-10 files at once, otherwise if you get an error, you have 150 files to go through.

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Kienja Kenobi
Kienja Kenobi
Join Date 04/2007
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Reply #2 October 18, 2008 9:13:04 AM
from Sins of a Solar Empire ForumsSins of a Solar Empire Forums

  Thanks very much.  That helps. 

 

I went through the files and I found one problem file that I solved (It was referncing a sound file that did not exist), and a second problem where all three of my planer*.entity files were refering to other .entity files that were not present.  Both problems were entirely my fault, but now it plays perfectly on 1.1 Beta 3!

 

Ironclad has all ready done many things for the fans of the game, but is it too much to ask for a debug report for something like this?  Something as simple as "File "foo" referenced by "foo.entity" NOT FOUND."  I think something like that was the purpose of the minidumb thing, but I have yet to see it spit out a single debug report.

 

Now that it is working I can confirm that the decimals problem I mentioned above does not have an affect on anything. 

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Kienja Kenobi
Annatar11
Join Date 11/2006
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Reply #3 October 18, 2008 10:00:02 AM
from Sins of a Solar Empire ForumsSins of a Solar Empire Forums

Ironclad has all ready done many things for the fans of the game, but is it too much to ask for a debug report for something like this?  Something as simple as "File "foo" referenced by "foo.entity" NOT FOUND."  I think something like that was the purpose of the minidumb thing, but I have yet to see it spit out a single debug report.

Open your user.setting file and towards the end set showErrors to TRUE. It'll give you the file and the line where the minidump occured, with a short description.

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Kienja Kenobi
Kienja Kenobi
Join Date 04/2007
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Reply #4 October 18, 2008 11:13:48 AM
from Sins of a Solar Empire ForumsSins of a Solar Empire Forums

Oh my goodness!  Thanks very much! 

 

How did I miss this?  Is this in some documentation somewhere?  I thought I read all of the manual and readme and I never noticed this. Perhaps I read it and just threw the info out of my brain because I never thought I would need to manually edit my user.settings file. 

 

Oh well, thanks and sorry I was stupid on this one.

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Kienja Kenobi
Annatar11
Join Date 11/2006
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Reply #5 October 18, 2008 1:52:25 PM
from Sins of a Solar Empire ForumsSins of a Solar Empire Forums

It was mentioned in the patch notes when they added the feature, but that was a long time ago

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Kienja Kenobi
striker7770
Join Date 12/2008
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Reply #6 December 30, 2008 2:06:01 PM
from Sins of a Solar Empire ForumsSins of a Solar Empire Forums

hey, i have the same problem except i dont have the mini dump, it just freezes with the mouse able to move. i have the origins mod that i want to try out and the game just freezes. i have waited for up to an hour and a half with no luck

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Kienja Kenobi
Tkins
Join Date 10/2008
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Reply #7 December 30, 2008 5:09:08 PM
from Sins of a Solar Empire ForumsSins of a Solar Empire Forums

yeah the error reporting doesn't always work. I've had quite a few minidumps and freezes where the error didn't show. That being said it does help HUGELY when debugging if the error shows up.

 

Thanks for that by the way Annatar.

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