Questions about crash when clicking on a ship in the ship list

Sorry no reproducable crash till now. All ships are from my own manufactur and mostly already a vew turns in my service.

The one or two times this has happened to me the ship had not been destroyed or traded, and I didn't notice any odd values. I had clicked on the ship list icon on the bottom, then selected a ship on the right. If I remember correctly, it may have been the Survey Ship that I had been clicking on.

This has started to happen to me every time I reload a saved game. Usually its a battle cruiser, but the last time it was my survey ship. What files do I need to send to you? (:(

I just saw this crash on the Beta 1D build. I had just completed a turn (autoturn off) and was using the shp list to make sure all of the ships had moved (a bug report in another thread). I was clicking on any ship I had that was NOT in orbit, which at this time consisted of one survey ship, three scouts, and lots of colony ships. Only the colony ships were on autopilot, and some had reached their destination, some with moves left (already described in another thread), some having expended all of their moves. As I went down the list I colonized planets with colony ships that had reached their destination (I have been sending them to a tile NEXT to a star instead of the tile containing the star). It is possilbe that the ship in the list that I clicked on was one that had already been distroyed. Since I am seeing many ships that have expended all their move points show up in the list with moves left is it not also possible that the list is also a bit tardy about ships that have been destroyed?

Cheers,
Jack

Well, that's the only thing that I can think of, that it's not updating the ship list quickly enough. Someone sent me a saved game with this problem but apparently my saved game code was smart enough to weed out the one ship, or else the ship was not destroyed at the time that the game was saved. It's really frustrating trying to debug this one; I colonized planets, both from within and without the star system, got ships destroyed with the list open, invaded planets, etc, and nothing that I did corrupted the list.

If you can send me a saved game where you can reproduce it on your system, and tell me which ship it was (or at least what kind of ship it was so that I can narrow it down), I can try reproducing it again here.

Just zip up your SaveGames directory and e-mail it to [email protected]

Yes its realy hard to pinpoint this bug. In Beta 1A I have a phase where I get this bug every time and repetable but after I turn my computer off for the night and load the same save game next day again the bug was gone .

If only SmartException was working. This crash to the desktop has to be a trap of some kind. An exception report would have to be very useful.

Cheers,
Jack

I've had it happen repeatedly, but never under the same conditions. It occurs most often just after launching or destroying a colony ship or transport though. The last time it came up here, I colonized a second planet in the same system, and had a second colony ship moving. The ship list properly updated the first ship being destroyed via colonization, then crashed when I tried to select the second (and on reloading that game, I found it also crashed if I tried to select the U.S.S Hero, which is still in service after about 50 years).

I do have to note that my system may be an unusual case for the ship list mess, as it doesn't come remotely close to the specs that were mentioned in the newsgroup a while ago. (P-200 MMX, 48MB RAM, Permedia2 3D card w/8MB VRAM, for reference). The AI threads are probably getting the majority share of the processor time, possibly causing slow updating on the main thread.

The more I play with this problem the more it looks like it is related to the problem described in the thread "Not all ships found -- not all ships moved with autopilot". It only crashes when I have convinced the code to complete the autopilot moves, give me a colony ship that has reached its destination (next to an uncolonized system) and I colonize the system. Then if I find the colony ship still in the list and click on it the game crashes to the desktop.

Cheers,
Jack

I have just confirmed that destroyed ships get removed from the ship list immediately. I did this with a freighter. It was still on autopilot and close enough to its destination that I took it out of autopilot and, with the ship list up, sent it manually (using the key pad) to its target. It dissapeared from the list so fast I blinked and it was gone. When I clicked on the next ship in the list, the game crashed.

Cheers,
Jack

I have had a similar problem to what John described above: after colonizing a system, the game crashes when the next ship is selected from the ship list.

hmm....well, I'll try clikcing on the second ship immediately after colonizing with the first one. Thanks, guys.

Cari,

It isn't always the next ship on the list, or the next colony ship in the list. My game currently has tens of colony ships enroute to destinations on a gigantic galaxy. It took time to get to where I could produce so many colony ships. Try it with one of the saved games I sent you, or, if you like, I can send you a new saved game.

Cheers,
Jack

Cari,

I am watching a charactoristic of this problem that may be of some aid in solving this problem. I have noticed that after colonizing a planet that sometimes the planet advisor will go away and the ship view window will switch to a ship or contain a lot of "N/A"s. Sometimes the planet advisor stays. So I started trying something. I am now ensuring that the planet advisor gets replaced by a ship view by clicking on a ship I have on manual that I have already moved. Nothing conclusive so far, but I saw an action that I have not seen before and may explain some of the why on the crash. After selecting a moved ship I scanned the ship list for ships on manual that had not moved. Since they had all been moved I started clicking on the ships on autopilot that the ship list said had not moved. When I clicked on one that realy had not moved it started moving and another ship on autopilot also in the screen area moved. What I will continue watching for is whether this action could have been instead of a crash.

Cheers,
Jack

It's possible that clicking on a ship on auto-pilot made it move and if it was the last ship with moves, it could have caused the game to autoturn. There was a bug where AI ships were getting deleted in a thread, which could cause the game to crash if it happened to be trying to update the ship's animation at the same time.

But I have autoturn off. And there is no way to scan the ship list for unmoved autopilot ships after an autoturn. It has to be done after all non-autopilot ships have moved and before the next turn.

Cheers,
Jack

I also have autoturn off and this kind of crash hapends to me some times.

Ok, I think that I have finally figured out what caused this, since I finally had it happen to me. I've fixed this instance, at least. I had a ship selected on the list that got deleted, but the list didn't clear the selection pointer. So then when I went to click on another one, it checked to see if anything was already selected, but it crashed since it was now pointing to junk.

Hooray! This one bug has crashed the game more than every other one combined. Thanks!