Implications of path length CTD discovery

[LusitanianWolf]

After many years, Siege CTD bug finally solved thanks to efforts of makanyane, bovi, & Kull. Huge! - The EB Team

Yay!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Here's the key - path lengths in excess of 127 characters will cause CTDs, no matter WHAT GAME you are playing. If you have a long paths in EB1, they'll cause crashes too. Be ruthless in your naming conventions, and this might solve problems in many areas. C:\EB2 in comparison to C:\Program Files (x86)\Medieval II Total War\ is 3 characters compared to 45. That buys you a lot of space if games and/or mods haven't been judicious in their naming conventions. We will be taking a wholesale look at this in EB2 (potentially there are many other CTDs that hitherto seemed random, but have this as their basis), but individual players can do their part by minimizing the length of their game directory names.

That seems way just to simple....
My EB1 as allways been very unstable, I will surelly try that!

[Kull]

That seems way just to simple....
My EB1 as allways been very unstable, I will surelly try that!

It does, doesn't it? Several of us were skimming around the edges on this, but @bovi (huge props) made the critical connection. This isn't the thread for substantive discussions on the matter, but I want you guys to recognize how key this is, so I'll violate that rule this once:

But note that the full path to the triarii officer texture (129) is above 127, which is a magic number in computing as it is the maximum number you can represent with 7 bits.

Emphasis added. And that's it in a nutshell. Crazy simple, HUGE stability impact. I haven't felt better about where we are with EB2 in......ever.

[LusitanianWolf]

It does, doesn't it? Several of us were skimming around the edges on this, but @bovi (huge props) made the critical connection. This isn't the thread for substantive discussions on the matter, but I want you guys to recognize how key this is, so I'll violate that rule this once:



Emphasis added. And that's it in a nutshell. Crazy simple, HUGE stability impact. I haven't felt better about where we are with EB2 in......ever.

Crazy indeed! Deserving of epic sized props!!!

[BroskiDerpman]

May I share this information?

[Moros]

May I share this information?

Obviously.

[BroskiDerpman]

Ok, this is of great use to some people who keep getting errors and such. I have always installed to more direct places so this explains why I never really get CTDs in many mods.

[Kull]

Ok, this is of great use to some people who keep getting errors and such. I have always installed to more direct places so this explains why I never really get CTDs in many mods.

It should be noted that bovi is a lot more cautious with respect to how widespread this impact could be. He believes the tie is something that CA hardcoded into the Mediterranean climate, and thus the ramifications are much more limited. I think he's technically correct in the instance of this particular bug, but to me this just begs the question of how many similar hardcoded relationships are buried somewhere in the CA source code?

If we know path lengths lead to CTDs in one area (where there is a high probability they will appear, such as in sieges), I'm willing to be they may exist elsewhere where the path-length is only occasionally an issue, and thus the resulting CTDs appear to be much more "random". And if a short path can eliminate the chance of them occurring, why not take that simple step?