[Lightspeed]

With the newest builds, a bug I had for the last months has gotten worse, to a point that it crashes my game with an access violation.

Here's what I noticed:

I) Whenever I start the game without any MOD selected from the launcher it crashes.

II) When I *do* select a MOD, it does not crash.

I kept searching and searching for some bad data in the original folders until I had the suspicion that later was to be confirmed.

As some of you may know (or not know) movies haven't been playing for me for the last months - they simply stopped working since build X. It was when you 'cleared all the issues' with movie playing that they stopped working here (they worked perfectly before).

Now, in my main folder I have the intro movie. If its there - it crashes. If not, it doesnt.

So, long post cut short, as soon as FS2 tries to play ANY MOVIE my game crashes with an "FS2_OPEN_BOBBOAU_5-23-04 caused an Access Violation in module DDRAW.DLL at 0177:baace3cf.
Exception handler called in Freespace 2 Main Thread.
Error occurred at 5/25/2004 17:34:40.
C:\GAMES\FREESPACE2\FS2_OPEN_BOBBOAU_5-23-04.EXE, run by Lightspeed.
1 processor(s), type 586.
511 MBytes physical memory.
Read from location ffffffff caused an access violation."

Please, fix my movies - I've removed the intro cutscene for now, but it will still prevent me from playing any campaign with movies.

Some things I already answered in various other threads:

MediaPlayer is working correctly. The movie is in AVI format. When I play it with mediaplayer it works perfectly. If I revert to a (very) old build (for example 1-20-04) it works perfectly.

[J3Vr6]

U know, I had a similar problem but it wasn't crashing.  I put all the media stuff into a mod directory.  I had the movies in the main directory.  If I try to play the game, it won't play the movies.  I have to put the movies into that media folder in order for them to work.

[Lightspeed]

I know - that's the reason why it didn't crash with any MODs, and it's a good thing (if the MODs use custom movies for example).

But that's a whole different issue here. The game crashes every time it tries playing just ANY movie.

[Bobboau]

I was just about to post about a bug I found with the mod comand line I found last night internaly, though I don't have the time to now

[mrduckman]

IIRC lastest CVS snapshot has that problem when playing movies.
And LOL, why would it want to access the last ram address?

[taylor]

The whole thing with movies not playing is fixed (add exts to CFILE list) but not in CVS yet.  I'm not sure about the crashing but I guess it could be something with path construction that's giving invalid info.  Lightspeed, try with my newest Linux/Win32 build and if it still crashes then PM me and I'll get you a test build that will spit out some info that might be helpful.  My build also fixed the movies not playing with mods so if it does crash then it's going to do it no matter what so keep that in mind.

[Lightspeed]

Works without the slightest problem.

No crash, no anything, just a perfectly working movie

[taylor]

Originally posted by Lightspeed
Works without the slightest problem.

No crash, no anything, just a perfectly working movie

Good news!  Anyone else having a problem should test that build as well since that code will go in CVS pretty soon.  If it causes any problems with movies then speak up quickly so they can get fixed.

[Psychonaut]

Hi there! I´m new to this forum. First of all i have to give all my respect to all this creative people doing so much work to a 5-year old game making it look new, fresh and fantastic

Now on topic.

I had the same problem with mods since the last two env-builds. I´m far from being a coder (i´m more a Trial-and-Error-Chimp) but i found out, that if you rename the mod-directory (example: INFERNO to INFERN) the program runs pretty fine. I know it´s weird and i have no explanation but it works for me with every mod that didn´t run before.

[RandomTiger]

Psychonaut, whats the full path of your freespace dir?

[Psychonaut]

\spiele\Freespace2

nothing unusual, i think

(BTW "spiele" is the german word for "games")

[taylor]

Psychonaut: If you don't mind try with my build if you haven't already.  There was a problem with the mod either having a letter removed or a space added.  This should all be fixed now but I don't know if everyone has all of the updates for the fix.   You can try, with your current build, not using the MOD button and specifying it on the command line options instead.  Just add "-mod INFERNO" where it's *not* the last thing on the command line, and add something like "-n" (no music) after INFERNO so the mod is not last.  If it is the same problem I'm thinking about then it should work fine this way.

[Setekh]

Welcome to HLP, Psychonaut.

[Psychonaut]

Thx for the reply.

I will try this later this weekend.