Posted: Mon Jul 04, 2022 2:30 am Post subject:
[TS] Game crash: secondary weapon on a structure
Subject description: Giving a secondary and a burst weapon to structures could be a cause of game crash
In the recent weeks, I have been chasing down a hard-to-pinpoint bug that causes the TS mod I've been working on to crash, whenever there is a large scale combat involving base siege. After much testing, the bug turns out to be related to the secondary and the burst weapon on a structure.
Short story, if you have a structure with:
* Both a primary and a secondary weapon, and
* A least one of the weapons has burst=2 or larger
Then the game tends to crash whenever there are a lot of such structures involved in combat.
Even the hyper patch does not fix it.
Long story:
This might be resulted from that the TS game client wasn't designed to manage structures with a secondary weapon. In the original Tiberian Sun/Firestorm, all structures, including deployed Tick Tanks, Artilleries, and Juggernauts, did not have a secondary weapon. The game client might not have reserved enough memory to compute complex ROF timings on a structure. If you have a structure with non-bursting primary and secondary weapons, the game client seems to be still able to handle. However, if you have a structure with primary and secondary weapons, and at least one of them have burst>=2, then the game client will occasionally crash.
Many TS mods, including mine, have Lin Kuei Ominae's deployable Nod Redeemer mech art, which is designed to use two weapons in the deployed form. I have been letting it use two non-bursting (i.e. burst defaults to 1) weapons to keep the game stable.
Recently I added a new advanced stealth tank, blending the Tick Tank's deployability and TW Stealth Tank's multiple missile launchers. It has made the game very unstable, often crashing when a lot of such tanks deployed defending a base. Interesting symptoms I have found with the deployed form:
* If both the primary AG weapon and the secondary AA weapon have burst>=2, then the game client will "forget" the secondary weapon's ROF timing and allows the AA weapon to burst infinitely.
* If both the primary AA weapon and the secondary AG weapon have burst>=2, then the AG weapon will burst infinitely.
* If the primary AG weapon has burst>=2, but the secondary AA weapon does not have burst, the unit will appear to work correctly. However, if you or the AI builds a lot of such units, the game will still crash when these units in deployed form engage in combat.
I have therefore given the new stealth tank only a burst=4 primary weapon, handling both AG and AA. It's not as visually appealing, but it has made a game client a lot more stable. Dozens and dozens of these tanks, deployed, can engage in massive battles and the game client has not crashed.
I hope this discovery saves my fellow modder some frustrations! QUICK_EDIT
Do you have an except.txt error log you could upload here?
I did not save copies of those except.txt's (the current one is a graphics card-related crash). However, I still kind of remember that the last except.txt was "006BB2A5". The game client was trying to write at that memory location, where it did not have permission. QUICK_EDIT
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[TS] Game crash: secondary weapon on a structure
