DF-21 Forums

[Lionel Fouillen]

I was doing a consistency check in Wdfuse for Archangel 2 (yes, 2) which I slightly improved this week-end and it appears there is a problem with values for the adjoin/mirror flags in one sector. Nothing that causes the level to crash anyway and I can't even see it when I play the level as I just can't find that sector in Wdfuse so I don't even know where it is in the level.

Anyway, I was wondering what may cause a level to crash when playing ? For example, Dark Tide 4 crashed twice at the beginning when I launched it. The third time evrything went fine and I could get to part 2 of it.

What is the biggest cause of crash? Excesssive sector length? Excessive object quantity? Faulty INF? Architectural inconsistency?

[The MAZZTer]

One time I made it error without crashing, which was significantly more impressive because I don't think that happens.

It occurs when you walk ALONG an adjoin. Easiest way to cause it is to craft a level which starts you out facing the direction you need to go to walk right on the edges of both sectors, and then of course making the adjoin right in your path. I did this once. You get a bunch of error messages flooding the screen which go away once you step off the adjoin but it doesn't crash and nothing else odd happens. Weird.

I imagine that there are usual culprits for crashes including hard coded limits which the original levels didn't exceed (so why change the limits?), but it really all boils down to stuff that the original level designers did not do in Dark Forces... if the level designers didn't need to do it, it really wouldn't have been high priority to make sure it worked. Such as unusual combinations of INF. Maybe unexpected bugs from using certain entities with certain INF or architecture... if the original levels didn't use it, there was no pressing reason for the Dark Forces programming team to fix it.

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[DF Veteran]

The Rock and level 2 of Dark Prelude: The Early Missions of Kyle Katarn used to crash all the time when I was on Win95. I opened them up in WDFUSE and found that there were a bunch of textures missing from the gob file. There was only one missing in Dark Prelude, so I coppied an original LEC texture and renamed it to the missing texture name and stuck in in the gob file and that level 2 never crashed again.

I don't know if that was the reason or not. I never tried it with the Rock, but I did find somewhere in the forum that if you open The Rock up in DFUSE, re-gob it and run it that it would work. It did. I have no idea why.

I have never had a level crash in DoxBox, so it may be something with Windows. I don't know. Just some ideas.

[Fenwar]

The DF engine can be very sensitive at times, especially when it comes to memory allocation.

One of my showcase levels contained a 3DO with the line "Textures 2" followed by exactly one (1) texture.

It crashed on Macs and when exiting the level on my PC. (Other people's mileage did, indeed, vary).

Correcting the line to "Textures 1" fixed it.

[Barry Brien]

Textures missing from the gobfile, waxes missing from the gobfile, waxes on vues, waxes that have had their world width and world height messed with, giving the wrong logic to an object (particularly 3dos) or giving conflicting logics to the same object, overly-complex inf trying to do things to overly-complex architecture, - these are some of the reasons for crashes that I have encountered over the years. Also, what crashes on one system doesn't necessarily crash another system. It's all trial and error. When I get an error message and I don't know what's causing it I just pull things out one by one and keep testing until I find out whether the crash in architecture-related, object-related, or texture-related. Often time I find that it's something that I added ages ago that is only acting up now for some unknown reason. It's a weird engine.