Capital ships causing CTD when exploding

[jmarso]

This isn't happening with the regular game, just with the new capital ship OPT's I've been creating. I figure there's a step somewhere I'm missing.

Tested the same mission with an ISD II and my Saratoga and Chig Mothership opts. The ISD II blows up fine. My capital ships start to blow up fine, right until what would probably be the final moment and then zap- CTD.

I notice that regular cap ships blow into pieces temporarily. I haven't done anything to make mine do that. Possible problem or not? (I don't care if they blow into pieces or just vanish in fiery fireballs- as long as the game keeps running.)

Since it happens with the Chig ship, I know it's not related to poly or vertex count. That thing has next to none compared to most ships. Not having this issue with smaller craft.

Or am I simply missing something really basic that's part of the tribal knowledge here but I'm missing?

[Ace Antilles]

Post your Event Viewer crash log please. That normally helps the tech gurus

[jmarso]

Whew! How do I do that?

As in, where would I find that?

[jmarso]

Actually, before we go to error logs, a simple question:

I tried converting the textures with the simpler Chig ship, it exploded once and didn't crash the game. The more complicated Sara opt still causes a CTD even with all textures converted to 8 bits, as does the Chig ship although the CTD comes a little later.

I was under the impression you could use 32 bit or 8 bit textures, as long as it is all one or the other. In fact, the smaller ships I've made all use 32 bit textures.

Are capital ships somehow limited to 8 bit textures, or should ALL models regardless of size be using 8 bit textures?

Also, are the size of the texture maps themselves limited by the game engine?

[jmarso]

From the event log (if this is what Ace is referring to:)

Faulting application name: XwingAlliance.exe, version: 2.0.0.2, time stamp: 0x3765a9b7
Faulting module name: XwingAlliance.exe, version: 2.0.0.2, time stamp: 0x3765a9b7
Exception code: 0xc0000005
Fault offset: 0x0019778b
Faulting process id: 0x2b10
Faulting application start time: 0x01d6232ca76b2f17
Faulting application path: C:\Games\Star Wars - X-Wing Alliance\XwingAlliance.exe
Faulting module path: C:\Games\Star Wars - X-Wing Alliance\XwingAlliance.exe
Report Id: aedc9086-f1c3-4987-8007-dcc50a864651
Faulting package full name:
Faulting package-relative application ID:

[jmarso]

Okay, I think I've figured out what the problem is- it has to do with the size of the texture files, and as a result the overall size of the file.

I've been trying to figure out why my opt files are so 'fat', and it has to do with the texture plates I'm using. By going back and resizing those down to a max of 256x256, I knocked the overall file size from 35.4 KB down to 4.5 KB, which is far more in line with the majority of the opt files in the flight models folder. I did a quick-and-dirty insert into the game with both capital ships reworked this way, and when destroyed they blew up A-OK without crashing the game. Guess I'm going to spend a little time resizing texture plates.

We'll see how it works out... At the very least my opt files will be a lot thinner.

[Driftwood]

Unless you're using a single texture map, I wouldn't go above 512x512 if you have many texture files within an opt. 1024x1024, 2048x2048 and 4096x4096 are all fine provided you have either A) 1-10 textures, B) single large texture map for the entire model at a higher resolution.

The more textures you have, and the higher definition they are impact performance heavier than one would think given the player doesn't see any additional textures in the case of Flight Group colors but the game still seems to detect them.

We are still trying to find the balance between model detail and texture resolution and total number of textures per opt at resolutions beyond 512x512. Some work great, some don't. Generally speaking thus far my findings seem to indicate that the fewer large textures the better performance.

Also, for most ship related things we are finding out (my opinion) that 32 bit textures are better off for .dat file related things and 8bit textures are better for ships. I also don't think the game likes a mixmatch of textures on a model basis. Again, entirely my opinion I may be off base technically speaking. Also the 32 bit textures increase the size of an opt file dramatically and with large enough resolution texture files I think one can achieve a pretty decent balance between size and visual clarity.

Results may vary.


Oh, and as for crashing consider the need to recalculate hitzones. Also there is a known bug that I have experienced with Opt Editor on "large" Starship/Freighter classified ships by setting the hull to "Main Hull" on the entire hull, rather than leaving as "default". Change all your non component/wing/whatever specific meshes that you would mentally classify as "Main Hull" and revert those to "default"; the game translates that into "Main Hull" on the targeting computer anyways.

That should probably resolve your crashes.

[jmarso]

Okay, thanks. I think I'll just go ahead and convert all the textures to 8-bit and make sure the maps are 512 or smaller. That seemed to do the trick with the two ships I was experimenting with earlier.

Did not know about the Opt Editor bug regarding the hull settings- that's good info to have.

Once again, many thanks.

[JeremyaFr]

Basing on the fault offset, the crash seems to be related to the textures.