[Herra Tohtori]

Hello everyone.

First of all I'd like to thank and congratulate each and every one who have participated in The Babylon Project.

I have a major problem with the game however, so here's how it is.

I start game, choose my pilot, choose either a single mission or a campaign, all the same. When the program starts loading the mission, it usually crashes, with Windows happily announcing that Freespace has generated an error and will be quit, and offers a chance to announce the problem...

However, sometimes it works all right with no settings changed and so on, but I'd say that on seven or eight cases out of ten it crashes. I've noticed that this happens regardless of the mission or campaign at question, so it shouldn't be a campaign/mission structure related bug, right?

I've also noticed that if it starts to go all right, I can play several missions before it crashes again while loading, but eventually it will happen. Other chance is that the crash will occur when I try to proceed from the briefing/ship/weapon selection window, but this does not happen as often as the previous problem.

So, here's some information about my system.

-Computer itself is Hewlett-Packard t3149.fi Desktop PC
-processor unit is AMD 64bit Athlon 3200+
-got 1024 MB DDR-SDRAM
-Display driver is nVidia GeForce 6600
-Operating system is Windows XP SP2 with Finnish language settings

-I'm using TBP Base build 3.2, with Mission Pack, Earth-Minbari-War and Raider Wars version 2.01 (or so it says in Add/Remove applications -window; I have run the Raider Wars Patch 2.1 file, however) so they should be all compatible, right?

-Another weird phenomenon occurs on the Launcher window; When I choose the Registry page, it opens a prompt window me that says "A error has occurred reading from registry, cancelling" then when I click OK it shows me the Registry page but there reads nothing on the list - is this supposed to be so?

Because the launcher shows registry location as "SOFTWARE\Volition\Freespace2", and I don't even have such a directory on my computer (though if this is just a registry entry, it wouldn't even be an actual directory, right?). I it possible that the launcher refers to original Freespace 2 registry entry name and this screws up the loading sequence sometimes?

Other weird thing that I saw was that on one place of an error log it claimed that my operating system is Windows NT 5.something... Is windows xp actually an updated and renamed version of nt ir is this related to this frequent crashing?

Nevertheless I think this is a *weird* bug, because it sometimes takes place on very early stages of the loading sequence, sometimes on the very end - and sometimes not at all.

Needless to say, it *pisses* me off big time; it really disrupts the enjoyment to get back to windows, try again, no, try again, no... try again, oh, this time it seems to work, great. Well, last time I only had to shoot the big ships, let's choose the 60mm gun this time and proceed... *crash* and again...

I'm posting here 12 first lines of the errorlog created of the last of these crashes; however they are not similar, indicating that there might be multiple things meddled in this. This particular error log was created when I tried to load the Raider Wars mission called "Nobody Expects..."

fs2_open_r caused an Access Violation in module nvoglnt.dll at 001b:6969f3df.
Exception handler called in Freespace 2 Main Thread.
Error occurred at 10/20/2005 01:30:14.
C:\Program Files\The Babylon Project\fs2_open_r.exe, run by HP_Omistaja_2.
1 processor(s), type 586.
1023 MBytes physical memory.
Read from location 058a5000 caused an access violation.

Registers:
EAX=00000008 CS=001b EIP=6969f3df EFLGS=00010212
EBX=00000008 SS=0023 ESP=0012f72c EBP=058a5000
ECX=00000002 DS=0023 ESI=058a5000 FS=003b
EDX=16dcc100 ES=0023 EDI=16dce710 GS=0000

Here's also the windows generated error file, if anyone is able to get anything out of it (which I personally don't believe...) It's a whole lot of text, so if it's no use, tell me and I'll edit it to hell.

There's also some finnish bits amongst  the babbling, so this might very well be the situation.

...hmm, it doesn't seem to be showing anyway. Well, if you'd like to take a look at it, just "quote" my message, it should be seen there. I bet it's those >< signs that make it invisible...






   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   


   


   

[Trivial Psychic]

Have you tried a debug build?

[CaptJosh]

I think you need a newer SCP build than the one that comes with TBP. Especially if your CPU is dual core. There's dual cpu/dual core fix that has been implemented in newer builds due to a bug that someone was experiencing and reported in the CVS builds thread of the Recent builds subforum of the Source Code Project forums.

[Herra Tohtori]

What exactly is meant by "debug build"? I have tried choosing every debug feature on the launcher, if that is what you mean, otherwise I don't know what is such a debug build.

Hmm, that latter message souds more interesting.

Is my processor "dual core"? What does that actually mean?

There seems to be a build with a following description: "This version is the package choice optimized for Pentium 4 or Athlon XP and above processors. This package may be slightly unstable than the standard build, but it should give better performance. This package includes the 3.6.7 executable, the 3.6.7 debug, and 5.3 launcher."

Well, it cannot get any more unstable than it is, really...

So: is this the file you are referring to? If it is, there are folloowing files inside the *zip file:

fs2_open_367_p4.exe
fs2_open_367._p4map
fs2_open_367_p4_d.exe
fs2_open_367_p4_d.map
Launcher.exe
readme.txt

And on readme.txt it says that original FS2 is required...

So, if this is the right file, what should I do with all these *.exe's and *.maps? Do I simply put the *exe file (which one!) onto my TBP folder and rename as fs2open_r.exe?

Or what? I'm a bit baffled.

But thanks for your concern and tips, I hope I can get this working...

[Trivial Psychic]

When it says that "original FS2 is required", it is referring to the fact that the game's content, doesn't come with SCP.  TBP doesn't need FS at all, its a total conversion.  The map files have to do with how bugs are tracked down, but even I haven't figured out how to use them yet.  Best to ignore the map files.  The debug builds have some extra error detection code included.  The result is that the exe file is larger than standard release builds, and takes up more memory.  Also, its tollerance for some errors is less than release builds, which allows you to track down some sneaky bugs.  The debug builds usually have either "_debug.exe" or just straight "_d.exe" at the end of the filename.  The debug may help you, or it may not.

[Herra Tohtori]

Wazaaaa..!

I replaced the old fs2_open_r with a newer one and behold; the bug was squeezed.

My greatest thanks to you people. Now I can actually play the game again without fearing these irritating breaks.

Thnk You!

[CaptJosh]

You're more than welcome. As gamers, we all hate it when games crash and we knew your pain. I'm just glad I remembered that conversation I saw on the boards about dual core CPUs.