[Privateryan1]

Hi Everyone ,

Having a real troublesome time with a COI mod i made as far back as three years ago . To give a background on the mod, I spent literaly ages adding as many favoured tanks consisting of German , Allied and Russian . This mod worked and test battles without a hitch I would say hunderds of times . So for the experts among you and I hope , some of you can take the time to read this , heres what I did , and it might be able to point you to what my fault / problem / error might be . Firstly as I noticed in the Teams files using Q-clone that some of their Upgrade paths were set to -1 , so i set all vehicle upgrade paths to -1 . In order for me to be able to have the Germans fight the Allies
( British/American ) , and Russians seperately using the option ( restrict player to historical rarity of units ) , I set the rarity options for half of the Russian vehicles to either 7 ( plentiful ) or 0 ( none ) . i did the same with the Allied vehicles and in this way I could create a battle or scenario where if playing as the Germans , the game would only be able to ( pick ) ( buy ) either Russian vehicles or Allied vehicles . This has worked absolutley fine until recently I migrated one of the copies of this mod over to another pc . The game will play for a battle or two and then crash . Now as a modder I know you may well give me the answer that there are a thousand ways a mod can crash , but my head bender is this ... Why did it work all along for me and why is it crashing now .
The usual shadows or wreck problem would not allow a game to deploy in the first place and all of these vehicles have been knocked out several times , so it cant be a wreck problem as COI does not ask for a specific wreck to be assigned to each vehicle ( I think ) . So Im wondering could any of you modders point to what my be my problem considering what I have listed above . As always , thanks in advance for any help or advice .

[Hicks]

This is just throwing ideas out.

Were you using previously unused units when the game crashed? I've had the game shit the bed when I changed a sound reference and *then* use a unit but as long as it wasn't utilised and the sound call triggered it would work.

What system did the mod work on and what have you moved it to?

Is it consistently crashing on certain maps and consistently working on others?

If it would be helpful I can try it out on an install of CoI on an XP machine and if Matrix pulls its finger out I ought to be about to try it on a Win 7 machine as well. If we can produce consistent results it might help narrow down the problem?

[Pete]

I am not familiar with the bug you are describing nor have I ever modded CC3/COI but if you upload the files somewhere (including the graphics and sound files) I will have a quick look for you.
As Hicks says it could be something as simple as a sound reference and I'd suggest to check all cross references between the files. Even if you have played hundreds of times, this tedious work has to be done in order eliminate possible causes.

[Privateryan1]

Hi to both guys ,

My main problem is of course that if this kind of crash happens on a CC5 mod , you can simply change sides and deploy unit by until and in that way you can isolate a tank or vehicle thats causing a problem . The problem with COI is that , you have no way of seeing before the next battle commences , what untis the AI has ( purchased ) as there is no ( edit oponent ) screen to ( see ) what units are about to fight against you . To try to eliminate this I used CC3 pointreq edit and set both sides to zero points and in this way there would be ( no purchases ) by either side and ( i think ) then eliminating the fact that an ( about to be deployed ) vehicle would not enter the battle . The game still crashes despite the fact that no new untils were about to be deployed by either side . I use many/most of my own custom maps and Eg : 004 and if the crash happens as the battle is abou to ( move ) to lets say that map 004 , I will then create a single battle for that map and it loads and plays with no problems at all . I never considered ( until now ) that there might be a sound problem as to be honest I have messed around quite a bit with the sound files as all of my mods have airstrikes in them with a plane streaking acorss the map on bomming runs .But my main head bender is this , why do all of my vehicles deploy work , fight , get knocked out and still work with no problems on a single map . its for this reason I am baffeled as it has worked fro so long . To answer the question as to what other pc i migrated to , both are winxp and the mod versions reside on and external drive which can be attached to either .Do either of you guys know where or how i can actually upload the entire game itself for people to have a look at it and shot a few games up and then see what I mean .

[Pete]

You can create a free account of Dropbox, Google Drive, Onedrive, Mega, HubiC etc and provide me with the download link.
Does the crash occur on random maps? Does it occur always on the same map in an Operation or  random?

[Privateryan1]

Hi Pete ,

Yea its random . For instance I played out a fourteen out of fifteen day battle fighting as the Germans with no problems . The problems started when I fought the same scenario as the ALLIED side . When it eventually progresed to the second map , none of my untis apeared on the map and the game ended right away . Most of the time tho , it just fails to load at all . Will get a dropbox account but will 2.5 gig be allowed to upload on a free account . Will get at this right away then and will be back with the details ...

[Privateryan1]

Hi pete,

Have left a private messgae but for some reason it stays in my Outbox and cant figure out how it actuall gets to ytou if it stays there . Have uploaded the COI mod to Gogle drive and the PM is about this ...

[Pete]

Yeah, don't worry about that. It stays in the outbox until it has been read by the recipient.

[Hicks]

I'm wondering if the problem seems to stem from the Allied units whether the game is looking for original forcepool references to units that have been replaced and tries to force load a missing reference? I've only poked about a little in the games modding potential but I'd imagine if there is a conflicting reference at any point among the vehicles graphics, sound, vehicle.txt references or the teams references it could all cause a fatal error.

If it's working on single maps but not operations then it would seem there is a problem with the games data carrying across, perhaps an issue with the game's compatibility with the mod?

The other thing that comes to mind is this, have there been any updates to the Cross of Iron executable since you switched platforms? If there's been a patch in that time that you've applied then that could cause problems as well.

[Privateryan1]

Dont recall applying any patch and as I said in the opening post , it baffels me with the fact that it worked so well for so long and then just stopped and in particular as I have made no changes to the games data files at all since . As we all know with modding there can be it seems , hunderds of ways for a game to crash and trying to find it can be a nightmare . I have uploaded it to Google drive but it looks like i'm facing a total rewrite from scratch , which takes months given the spare time one would have . It was my baby but now my baby is very sick  

[Pete]

I'm sure you don't have to start from scratch, just like you don't replace baby's once they get a little ill  

[Pete]

Hi Privateryan, I played a number of single battles and a 3 map Operation. No crashes occurred. I don't see custom ops created by yourself, just a  lot of 'company commander' and stock game Operations. Are you experiencing crashes in those operations?
Other than that I wonder if it is intentional that the vehicle graphic of a Tiger II is used for various allied tanks and there are many more choices that i am assuming are personal. However, with besa mg sounds sounding like a big gun and a smoke grenade sounding like an airstrike I also feel I have to question some of your data input. I am playing the game with the data as supplied but after I initially was not able to start up the game I did the following: copy my installed game to a new folder, then copy your game data, graphs, FX, maps etc over them. After that it worked fine and without crashes so far.  Another point: seeing the various custom subfolders in your folder structure I wonder if I should be switching between files for certain battles.

[Privateryan1]

Hi Pete ,

Yea lots of the mod has my choice of sounds as were all a bit funny   . The airplane run though should sound like an airplane fly over as it does for me . You can see how frustrating it is when you have played a few battles with no problems and as i said I can play as many single battles as I like but its on the third of fourth battle of a scenario that the game crashes .To answer the question about a german tank being used by the allies as well is true and I have set the vehicle side to ( any ) , and hope thats not a fatal error .The sound options folder is where i simply copied an entire Sfx sound file from other mods and changed the sounds from German / vs Allies or German / vs Russians ect . This action has never crashed the game either . In my testing as i have said , I have used CC3 hack or edit to set each sides points to zero when trying to load the next game that will noty play so that there would be no ( purchase or deployment ) of new vehicles as neithwer side would have points to purchase , but  the game still crashes and really leaves me in the dark . I have sent you an E-mamil as well and I bet you are as baffeled now as I am .