Ways to make CTD with script ?

**Makanyane** · 12-11-2007, 19:55

DG, I've been on the dark side for a Long time :P

Squid thanks for the idea but it doesn't accept all for either of those, I get faction type or character type not recognised message if I try, would have been useful if it had. I could try adding for other types specifically, still trying to work out why it seems happy to run any combination of four of my script sections just falls over (occasionally) when I have all five together ........

**Makanyane** · 12-31-2007, 15:09

Update no.MMCXXVII for anyone I've been boring with this!

I did test and it didn't seem to mind having armies spawned on same square as agents. (it would be a lot more of a fluke for that to happen as well)

Anallein reminded me about problem with spawned_armies for human player - if they spawn outside your FOW they don't reset the FOW and you can't select them from campaign map. I'm not sure if that affects the AI when AI faction armies spawn or not but am back to testing script with a lot of spawns deliberately induced at start of game.

Getting a mixture of armies slave and faction spawned on first turn, some of which won't be visible from settlements/existing armies does indeed produce a random crash on some runs about 10/20 turns later.

Was trying to see if making the army spawn with a general instead of named character makes any difference and found it won't accept a spawned slave army with a general (though same one as named character works fine). Has anyone got any ideas on why that is, or if spawning slave armies by script is perhaps just a bad idea anyway?????

Other question is should you ensure that all spawns take place in area within line-of sight of settlement owned by spawning faction? In case AI does get version of the FOW problem....

**Caius** · 12-31-2007, 18:30

If you are getting a CTD in the same turn with the same faction, is there any chance that faction is having the problem?

I'm a n00b at modding, but I'll help.

**Makanyane** · 12-31-2007, 18:45

Thanks Caius, its good to see more people willing to help

unfortunately this one's not that simple. Definitely isn't same turn, lots of times it will run through 200 turns without problem. Damn thing has never done it when I can see it either, only has happened when running campaign under ai command using -ai on shortcut or when using year jump script, all with FOW on so I can't see if its any particular faction.

Attempts to watch it with FOW off (which takes a lot longer for it to go through) have so far resulted in either, it not crashing or me getting bored and looking away just before it happens.....

Having spawned armies for non-slave factions use generals and not named characters seems promising so far. My test script with a lot of armies spawned on turn one crashes about every other run through with named characters but not so far with generals.

The crashes happen quite a long while after the spawned armies have been placed and test script has terminated, so it seems there is some long term after effect to do with what happens to the spawned armies / characters later in the game..... umm, possibly..... I've been through quite a few theories on this already, and am about to go off and celebrate New Year.

Happy New Year all

**Bardo** · 01-31-2008, 18:08

I'm interesting to know if you have discovered something new about this ctd caused by scripted army spawns.
We are using in lotr-tw a lot of army spawns, mostly using generals (not family memebers) and we do have some random ctds during ai turn that could be caused by the scripts. I'd like to know if it could be related to the command spawn army.

These are the only ctd causes that I have noticed using "spawn army":
-wrong general name (or not allowed for this faction)
-wrong unit name (or unit not allowed to this faction)
-it seems it is not possible to spawn naval units with this command: when you choose character type=admiral, and general unit=naval unit, and the position= sea tile, the army is still spawned as a land unit and this will cause ctds when some other army tries to attack it.

-once, we found a ctd caused by a wrong name in the names.txt that became much more frecuent when we used the scripts: since the scripts creates a lot of armies and the ai tends to split them, they need to use a lot of random names from the name pool of the faction and the ctds are more often if there is a misspelled name in the names.txt.
Maybe you have some kind of similar ctd here ??.

**Makanyane** · 01-31-2008, 18:53

I'm afraid I got very fed up with testing it so didn't come up with anymore of a conclusive answer. It seems happy with the version with spawns not using named characters, is released and I'm not getting any reports of random looking CTD's.

Dol Guldur did spot for me later that I had some duplicate names for trait triggers which might have been adding to problem. Though I can't think of logical reason why it would only have crashed with script due to those.....

bad name, again I would expect to crash occasionally without script and I did spend hours/days running the damn thing with/without script and it refused ever to CTD without.

The suggestion Anallein made to me which made me consider again the spawns being possible source of problem was to do with the FOW problem you get if your faction acquires a spawned army for your faction out of your line of sight. The new army doesn't reset the FOW and is only selectable via the army list and not on the map. I was wondering if that might form some part of problem for AI, or whether spawned characters that don't get added to family tree can cause confusion later.

Does yours go frequently enough that you can get any sort of with / without scripted spawns comparison on -ai ?
(can't remember if you can get year-jump to work on Alex, that's faster if you can)

**Squid** · 01-31-2008, 19:12

Question about the possible fow issue, first if my knowledge isn't totally wrong you should be able to turn it on and then off again in your script, if you can do that and you do that does it correctly set the FOW for out of sight spawned armies?