Wired CTD

The year is 224, I'm playing as Romans, everything is fine. I end my turn, all factions do their moves, everything is still fine. I save the game and quit. When I start EB and try to load the game, it loads, runs for 10-15 seconds then hangs and crashes. No idea why, because if I continue playing from the last "good" saved game it goes well and I'm actually able to make my next turn, but when I save it, exit and load it again it.... right, it crashes 10-15 seconds after loading.

I have no idea what it could be, it's most likely not some script error as I'm doing precisely nothing, just staring at the map, it is my turn so AI is also doing nothing. I've tried clean reinstall but it didn't help. I can load the save which doesn't crash, but after I make a turn, save and exit, it's the same old story.

Here's the save that crashes:

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=ZTE4FIAG

Too tired today to play with the procmon, I'll try to get something useful off it tomorrow. For now I can tell only that JIT debugger starts during the long SFX.dat series on the procmon. Probably the program crashes there, but I'm not sure yet.



Last lines of the output part of the debugger window are:

'RomeTW.exe': Loaded 'C:\WINDOWS\system32\winspool.drv'
'RomeTW.exe': Loaded 'C:\WINDOWS\system32\d3dim700.dll'
'RomeTW.exe': Loaded 'C:\WINDOWS\system32\wmvdmod.dll'
Unhandled exception at 0x006ed5bd in RomeTW.exe: 0xC0000005: Access violation reading location 0x00000092.
The program '[1292] RomeTW.exe: Native' has exited with code 0 (0x0).

Not sure it helps, but it's all I can dig up for now.

It appears to use some video thing. Perhaps it would work to disable movies with -nm? Doesn't sound likely though, and I have no idea why it would be different for new savegames and previous ones. What happens if you run a new campaign and save that?

Some new findings:

1) If I start a new campaign, it works ok. Started a new Pahlava campaign and made one turn, it worked well and the saves didn't crash.

2) If I save the "working" save again without doing anything (virtually "save as"), the new save is working well, just as the "working save".

3) If I make a turn from the "working save", it's still ok, the game doesn't crash, however if I save that "working + 1" save and load it, it loads and crashes after 10 seconds.

What other info can I provide to help to find the source of the error?

P.S. I've tried to go past that good last working save, and it went well. I was able to make 2 turns, but after another big battle near Mediolanum the game crashed on the Euleotheroi (sp) turn because some Ptolie town rebelled. I've tried to reload the autosave and it unsurprisingly crashed 5 seconds after loading :(

I've lost already 2 campaigns to persistent CTDs and it's a very frustrating experience. EB is a great mod, second to none, but it looks it stretches the abilities of a faulty RTW engine a little bit too much.

I think the fault of the instability is our own actually (and we're always trying to improve it), but indeed we are stretching the abilities of the engine.

Could you see if you find any cloned generals and/or bannerless armies? It sounds like the game is doing something causing the problem (consistently, unfortunately) and storing the information in the savegame, and finally the game is unable to read it again and it becomes unusable. Have you tried to load a save from more than 10 turns previous? You should be able to repeatedly tap the end turn button and autoresolve any battles to quickly get to beyond the turn where the crash and corruption happens currently.

I've loaded an earlier save and was able to get past 224, found a cloned Aedui FM, but it looks both clones were killed by Sweboz. I hope there will be no crashes from now on. Thanks for help.