[Aurora Paradox]

This crash came out of the blue really.  I hadn't used FSO in a couple weeks at least because I got stuck on the mission Hold the Line in WOD.  Today I was finally able to get passed the mission by lower the difficulty a notch.  The odd thing is that the menus were responding very slow.  For example when I selected my pilot the game would hang for five seconds at least.  This delay was also noticeable in the configuration settings.

While playing through the next mission the game crashed.  I'm using the latest Antipods 8 build.  I ran the debug build and the result is attached.  I didn't get past the pilot select screen.  The game just hung there until Windows told me it had stopped responding.  If I run the normal build it will get to the main menu but it will crash when you try and resume the campaign.  I also tried clearing the cache of WOD for the heck of it.  This didn't make any difference.

Thanks in advance for the help.



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[niffiwan]

How big is your pilot file?  i.e. Aurora WOD 1.WingsOfDawn.csg

I had a similar problem once where an Ant8 pilot file got corrupted in the Red Alert data, the file ended up growing to around 1GB in size.  I don't know if this is the same issue or not...

[Aurora Paradox]

How big is your pilot file?  i.e. Aurora WOD 1.WingsOfDawn.csg

I had a similar problem once where an Ant8 pilot file got corrupted in the Red Alert data, the file ended up growing to around 1GB in size.  I don't know if this is the same issue or not...

The file is certainly bigger than it should be.  Its about 326 MB.  The first crash did not occur during a red alert mission though.  Assuming the file is corrupt is there a way to prevent this from occurring again? 

[niffiwan]

When I had the problem, it didn't occur during a red alert mission either.  It was in the main FS2 campaign, Endgame I think.

I haven't looked into the problem any further so I don't know of a way to prevent the issue from occuring again, sorry.  I don't know the root cause.

Did you switch campaigns with this pilot at all?  The only interesting bit of information I got from my issue was that my pilot file had a blueplanet mission listed in the red-alert section, and I had been switching between blueplanet, blueplanet2 and FS2 to test if the Ant8 campaign switching worked correctly.

Would you be happy to open the pilot file in a hex editor?  i.e. to look at what the corrupt data is?

EDIT: another idea - if you 7-zip the fie, how small does it get?  If it compresses well you could upload it to mediafire or similiar for someone (me? ) to have a look at

[Aurora Paradox]

When I had the problem, it didn't occur during a red alert mission either.  It was in the main FS2 campaign, Endgame I think.

I haven't looked into the problem any further so I don't know of a way to prevent the issue from occuring again, sorry.  I don't know the root cause.

Did you switch campaigns with this pilot at all?  The only interesting bit of information I got from my issue was that my pilot file had a blueplanet mission listed in the red-alert section, and I had been switching between blueplanet, blueplanet2 and FS2 to test if the Ant8 campaign switching worked correctly.

Would you be happy to open the pilot file in a hex editor?  i.e. to look at what the corrupt data is?

EDIT: another idea - if you 7-zip the fie, how small does it get?  If it compresses well you could upload it to mediafire or similiar for someone (me? ) to have a look at

I did not switch campaigns with this pilot file.  Even using the Antipods 8 build I follow the rule of one pilot per campaign.  I opened up the pilot file using a hex editor but couldn't make much sense of it.  I'm attaching my pilot files related to the WOD campaign in a 7 zip archive.  Maybe they will make more sense to you.

Thank you for all your help so far.

EDIT: I may have accidentally started the FS 2 main campaign when I first created the pilot but I can't remember for certain.

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[niffiwan]

Thanks for your pilot files, I'll have a look and see if I can figure out what's going on.  I suspect it is something to do with red alert missions because that's where the debug build hangs, and that is the part of the pilot file that is huge.  It might take me some time though, I'm still learning my way around the code...

FYI, the mission stored in the red alert section of the pilot file is M09-1 Enter Dawn.fs (which I think is the last red alert mission in WoD before M17-Simulation.fs2), and the red alert section consists of "Alpha 1" to "Alpha 4", each repeated 663552 times!!!

[Aurora Paradox]

Thanks for your pilot files, I'll have a look and see if I can figure out what's going on.  I suspect it is something to do with red alert missions because that's where the debug build hangs, and that is the part of the pilot file that is huge.  It might take me some time though, I'm still learning my way around the code...

FYI, the mission stored in the red alert section of the pilot file is M09-1 Enter Dawn.fs (which I think is the last red alert mission in WoD before M17-Simulation.fs2), and the red alert section consists of "Alpha 1" to "Alpha 4", each repeated 663552 times!!!

Mission 17 was the mission I was on when the game crashed so it makes sense.  I have a backup from a couple weeks ago that would have some of my progress so I'll use that.  The only thing that bothers me about doing that is the exact same thing could happen again.  The other option would be to restart the campaign using the 3.6.12 executable.  Maybe "The E" can make some sense of this.

Thanks for taking the time to look over my pilot files though.

[niffiwan]

I haven't figured out the cause yet and I haven't been able to reproduce the issue, but I think I've "repaired" the pilot file.  I chopped out all but 4 of the red alert ship entries, and reset the size of the ship index to 4.  It seems to load OK and I can enter mission 17, but I can't guarantee it'll be completely stable, or that the original problem won't occur again.  If you want to completely avoid problems, restarting with a 3.6.12 build would be safest 

However, if you feel like doing some more testing, you could start with your backup ant8 pilot file and play through with that to see if the problem occurs again after M09-1?

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[Aurora Paradox]

I haven't figured out the cause yet and I haven't been able to reproduce the issue, but I think I've "repaired" the pilot file.  I chopped out all but 4 of the red alert ship entries, and reset the size of the ship index to 4.  It seems to load OK and I can enter mission 17, but I can't guarantee it'll be completely stable, or that the original problem won't occur again.  If you want to completely avoid problems, restarting with a 3.6.12 build would be safest 

However, if you feel like doing some more testing, you could start with your backup ant8 pilot file and play through with that to see if the problem occurs again after M09-1?

Thanks for repairing my pilot file niffiwan.  I didn't think it was possible to repair a corrupted pilot file.  I haven't had a chance to try it out yet though.  I saw that you posted a potential fix for this problem in the Antipods 8 test build thread.  Hopefully that will prevent someone else from having to deal with this annoying problem.

I'll let you know how the repaired pilot file works when I have a chance to test it.

Thank you for all your help.

[niffiwan]

Normally a repair of a corrupt pilot is too complex, you've got campaign specific variables, goals, weapons, etc which would be a real pain to sort through if something went wrong.  In this case however, it's lucky that it's just the red alert section which has the problem, and that's easy enough to completely remove especially since you've moved beyond the red-alert mission and therefore the data really isn't relevant anymore.

Anyway, looking forward to hearing how the testing goes

[Aurora Paradox]

You will be pleased with the results of the test run.  That repaired pilot file works like a brand new one.  No sign of any problems whatsoever.

Thanks again for all your help.