crash on 'start battle'

does anyone have any idea what, missing from a BI modfolder would cause an errorless CTD when you press "start battle" on a campaign map battle?

it seems to work fine for custom battles, and loads to the extent of seeing and deploying the army, whichever side you start as, just CTD's on pressing start.

I know it's because I've been trying to thin out the BI modfolder to try and avoid copying / sending everything, just have no idea where to start looking for what might be doing this... only tested intermediate stage on custom battles and everything seemed fine....:wall:

Any chance it could be related to voice files? I seem to remember it was when we had that problem a long time ago...

nope, thanks but I finally just found it....

when you generate sprites into a folder which already has sprites (something I now would not recommend) if anything has same name it gives you a new tga file but does not apparently update the .spr file. So if you have for instance slave_horse_light_sprite.spr which didn't get updated (being about the only unit that shared a name with old bi units) and in order to clean file you sort by date and remove all old ones, then it leaves slave_horse_light_sprite.tga.dds's but deletes the .spr That apparently does not give you the normal can't find error message, loads battle fine, just crashes when you try and start the battle.
Strangely though I had non-slave factions using that sprite in custom battles and though I can see now, when I know to look for it, that the sprite is invisible it doesn't CTD.

Now bearing in mind I started trying to find what it was by replacing folders, started with World and UI as I had, had trouble with those before.... Then went alphabetically down from 'A' in attempt to find problem, and eventually found it in Sprites folder, in sprite starting Slave_....

Maky is not a very happy bunny tonight!

LOL. It's always the way...

I used a sprites/sprites_new folder for FATW.

Sprites are weird things sometimes. Glad you found it. And good luck with what I suspect you are doing ;)