Is there anyone out there who can instruct me in how to access the data in the MDMP file? These no-message crashes are REALLY starting to get on my nerves and I would like to find out what's causing them, aside from the simple 'well, you must have broken something' answer.
So, I've done a bit more testing and found that there are underlying bugs that have been introduced in newer builds that seem to have gone unnoticed.
Recently, I've been playing Unification War, and I've been updating my copy with newer available (but still compatible) models and a few effects. I also noticed that there was an inconsistent use of the escort list, so I decided to load all of the missions and add escort lists to them... at least those in which you HAVE targetting sensors. I had being doing them a couple of missions ahead of where I was playing and suddenly had the missions giving me a CTD without error message and wouldn't let me proceed. I thought that I'd corrupted my pilot file so I restarted the campaign, and also did the escort list changes to all of the relevant missions. I'd again proceeded a few missions in and suddenly got the CTD again, and I hadn't even made any changes. Oddly enough, the mission that gave me the CTD I had previously loaded properly, before exiting the program without flying it. THAT was what had gotten me frustrated. I then had an idea and switched back to an older, that is the 20.4 release build, and was surprised when it loaded properly. A quick test with subsequent Knighlys reveals that whatever is giving me trouble was introduced AFTER the Sept. 29th build.
Also, I decided to test the TBP issue I was having and decided to try older builds. I ended up jump back to the oldest build I had in my list, from early July and was surprised when the release build (I.E., not a debug build) gave me an error message. It seems that the fighter in question had 2 primary banks in the model, but only 1 listed in the table. I checked and found that there is space for 2 primaries in the table, but one of them had all text within the quotation marks removed. I guess that someone decided they wanted those banks available for FREDders but didn't want it to suddenly give more banks to the fighter in preexisting campaigns. I also guess that a coder decided to make it an option to leave banks empty in the tables but the change was incomplete, and the error message was taken out. That's why it just crashes without any apparent reason. I added data for the second bank on the affected fighters and they load properly now, even in recent builds. I'll do some further research and maybe find out when this was introduced.