Sprites, WTF?

After many weeks of trying to find what was causing the second battle of any game to crash, i have found the problem: sprites. For my mod i added in new sprites, but now these are causing this strange bug. Has anyone else had this problem?

yes, if you are pointing to sprite files that don't exist it can cause the game to crash when starting a second game.

No, the entries are correct, the game just crashes without an error message.

so the sprites look ok in the first battle ? even the cavalry ones (harder to notice) ?

Yup, sprites work fine in the first battle, but the seocnd battle crashes when the loading bar is at about 40%.

well then how did you find out the sprites were causing the problem ? I can't check it for you, but I'm almost sure you are pointing to an inexisting sprite file somewere.

Well i removed all sprite entries in dmb and it worked. All the units work fine in custom battles, i've tested, so it isn't down to a missing or incorrect entry.

We;ve been having a similar problem at EB, we'll tell you if we manage to fix it. (It seems like we may have got it but I don't know yet, I'll report back once I'm sure.)

Thanks, any help will be appreciated. It looks like redoing the sprites may fix the problem, but i dont know yet as the people helping with thw aprites have not finished redoing them yet.

We have found the cause of the problem. The sprites were made before i implemented new animations, so the game was looking for sprites for animations that weren't there causing it to crash on the launch of the 2nd battle.

That doesnt make any sense? As SPQR uses all the old sprites from 1.2 which didnt have the new animations from Alin, and I have experienced no crashes with them, and there are Several new animations that are totally different. Like teh doublehanded pike phalanx, and the Gladius animations. My understanding is the sprites would just use different animations than the 3D models since they are only 2D pictures anyway?

I think you might want to look deeper into it as you may have had corrupted sprite files or something, but I seriously doubt its the animations before making the sprites. Otehrwise I should be getting crashes alot as SPQR 5.0 didnt use all the new animations that 6.0 does, and I made ALL my sprites before the new 6.0 animation pack.

Lt

Yes, further investigation shows that it is the new sprites that are causing the problem. The problem does not happen the first time you play the game but happens then after. It is now suspected that sprites and another file are causing the problem. This thread details the investigation into the problem:

http://www.twcenter.net/forums/showthread.php?t=46001

This thread details the investigation. The problem disappears with the default sprites, but not the new sprites made for my mod.

http://www.twcenter.net/forums/showthread.php?t=46001

My only question then is why doesnt it happen with SPQR? I use old 1.2 animation sprites and I use Alin new animation pack.

I dont believe the skeletons have anything to do with the Sprites once they are made the Game doesnt know whether you used New or old animations, its just 2D images.

Now it is possible if someone did the sprites wrong that could be a problem, but the theory of animations beifn the cause when the sprites were made would apply to alot of mods out there using new animations but older versions of their sprites. SPQR uses all Custom sprites, no default so it would be showing in my Mod all the time and it doesnt.

I just didnt want it stated as fact, yes its possible you solved your issue but if others think that is a problem and redo all their sprites that is alot of work for an issue that only happened with your sprites and none of the other mods that I know of?

Anyway its good to know your findings,

It turns out the spirtes or the animations weren't the problem, i have no idea what is causing this strange bug now. Which is very annoying.

Could an error in my descr_model_battle.txt be causing this problem, one that doesn't cause the game to crash when loading up.

Its possible, Did you try testing you 2 battle theory? I mean taking the same battle with the same units and seeing if it crashes on the second go? Do you have crashes in Custom battles or only campaign?

Crash Before the battles loads is usually 2 things.

1. System Video card is overheating
2. DMB file has an error with a unit, this can even be an officer. Pretty much its best to test everything out in Custom battles. You need to TEST EVERY unit in your custom battle and see which factions crash, then narrow down to the unit.

I do this with SPQR and have a basically Bug free mod atleast regards to human errors that cause CTD. Also keep in mind that RTW still has some hardcoded bugs that can cause CTDs, but in your case based off what you are saying I would say you made an error somewhere.

What you need to do is be methodical and you will avoid wasting your time in the wrong areas. :book:

The thing is all units work fine in custom battles, ALL of them, i've tried them all out. And the crashes occur in both custom battles and campaign's, its the 2nd battle you fight after loading RTW. If i remove the sprites from my game, it works fine, if i revert to the vanilla animations it works fine, but i cant work out what to do with the animations/sprites is causing the problem. I've treid it with both vanilla sprites and the new sprites and it happens with both.

Could my mod just cause severe memory leak or something?

Can anybody help with this problem? It is driving me nuts!!!!

After further investigation i have found that it is not the animations that are causing a problem, it is something to do with the sprites. Could anyone offer any further advice?

Hi Lusted,

I run in the same problem you have in RTR: Ancient Empires mod. Sometimes the game crash upon reloading a battle without any reasonable reason and without any error message. I will check the sprites issue, too. Anyway, check this link for a tutorial about debuging http://forums.rometotalrealism.org/i...howtopic=15059. I hope this can help you out.

Regards/Ahmose

I had a look over TE 2 to see if I could spot anything. I can see why you found this so hard to fix - I couldn't even get it to crash consistently. :wall:

Anyway, I saw a bunch of minor errors with the sprites. At least one set was borked (Pontic archers I think - looked like maybe it hadn't been converted to DDS). Some riding sprites were not made with the sprite_root flag (so riders looked like they were standing on elephants etc). At least two units were not using the new sprites (east_bedouin). But, alas, I don't think any of these problems would cause CTDs.

I did have a similar problem in XGM a while back with one set of sprites. Somehow the old .SPR file got combined with the new .TGA.DDS files, and that caused problems. My only suggestion at this point is that you start adding sprites back in, a few units at a time, until you run into problems again.

Thats what im going to do. For now i've released 3.0 without sprites. Once i fix this bloody problem ill release a version of 3.0 with sprites. I've also noticed the pontic archers problem, and there was also a merc sparabara problem, but none of these are causing this problem.