OK. I finally made it to the "Hell and Back" mission, and got the CTD. Now, at the time, I was using WMCoolmon's latest build, that actually gave some kind of vertex buffer error, but no other builds give any kind of message. PhReAk's build actually works better for me, so I used the debug version of his build, but it too CTD'd on me during mission load. I've never been able to use debug build of FSO, as they always crash on me during mission load. I may attempt to use the debug verson of WMCoolmon's build. Anyway, I'm working under the assumption that its the battlewagon model that's the problem, since the game would CTD whenever I clicked on it in the techroom... no message. So, I extracted the offending mission from the VP and loaded it up in the debug version of FRED2_Open, 3.6.5. The following is an exerpt from the debug spew, relating the the battlewagon:
Using alternate ship type name : Unknown
Loading model 'battlewagon.pof'
A subsystem was found in model that does not have a record in ships.tbl.
A list of subsystems for this ship will be dumped to:
data\tables\.subsystems for inclusion
into ships.tbl.A subsystem was found in model that does not have a record in ships.tbl.
A list of subsystems for this ship will be dumped to:
data\tables\.subsystems for inclusion
into ships.tbl.A subsystem was found in model that does not have a record in ships.tbl.
A list of subsystems for this ship will be dumped to:
data\tables\.subsystems for inclusion
into ships.tbl.Warning: Ignoring unrecognized subsystem fighterbay01, believed to be in ship battlewagon.pof
Warning: Ignoring unrecognized subsystem fighterbay02, believed to be in ship battlewagon.pof
Now, using the line about an unrecognized subsystem as a guide, I extracted the battlewagon model and opened it in MODview. At first, I didn't notice any problems, until I opened the editor and saw that the subsystem name for the engine submodels, don't have the "a" on the end, but the table entry does. I assumed that that was the problem, and changed the table entry accordingly by removing the "a". Unfortunately, when I reopenned FRED, an error message came up telling me that the subsystem name was wrong. I tried adding the letters back into the table, then adding them to the submodels' subsystem names, and while the error message went away, I got the same lines in the debug spew. I'm kinda stumped right now. I do know however, that the battlewagon worked under 3.0, without any CTD. I'm gonna look into back-patching it and seeing if it makes a difference.
Later!