MP game crashes

[valdrog]

Hello, new guy here. Been playing BOTF for a long time with my friends, but we always have the same problem in that when we are playing MP games, the game ALWAYS crashes at one point and we cant continue our game. Are there any fixes for this, i know the game had problems and this was one of them, but the patches ive been able to find have been unable to correct this error.

[Flocke]

what do you mean with "always crashes at one point"?
Be a bit more specific plz

If you get always the same crash in one specific battle, Hades 3d patch may help.
Else, a reason for that might be a somehow different botf version / mod version - make a clean install and patch to v1.0.2 - unmodded. (better use same cd / img)

As you said, it's normal for botf to crash from time to time, but that you can never continue isn't.
You might try loading last.sav (the auto.sav of the turn before), in case auto.sav got corrupted. You've just to rename that file in the botf folder.

[valdrog]

Thanks for the response what i meant by always crashes is that like arround turn 200 or so the game crashes when a battle starts, and we just cant continue, we have tried doing auto resolve but when we start another battle the game crashes again, we dont use mods, and we have tried several ways to work arround it, but its not working.

[Malvoisin]

Try the new Hades 2.0 patch or a mod that uses it. Seems like your battles have too much ships involved to handle for the game. Have you tried small battles too resp. is the crash also happening with 1vs1-battles?

Also, turn off trade routes display on map and rezip your stbof.res file with zero-compression. I think this might be a RAM problem though I never heard of it happening this way..

[valdrog]

Hmm, gonna see if i try that, my friends and i like to sit back and build up our empires, then we have HUGE fleet battles..maybe the game cant handle that many ships per side ?

[trevtones]

Yeah the chance of crashing goes up with bigger fleets. Too much to process for an old game I guess. Whoever has the most RAM and faster processor should host, don't know if this is proven but it doesnt hurt to try.

[matress_of_evil]

I've heard that battles involving more than 100 ships is the cut-off point for increasing crash likelihood. If you've got more ships involved in combat than this, the chances of a crash increase significantly.

The compression of stbof.res is something that has caused me problems in the past as well, especially with Winzip 11.0. As trevtones said, as long as the compression level is set to zero, it should run fine.

[thunderchero]

Also try,

when in battle you should not message as a rule, but I found it helps if you do one thing all visitors should post one word messages "done" and close message window and the host of the game should never hit turn til all player have hit turn. so host always starts action. that has always worked best for me.

Also right now I am working on hades 2.0 and is not avail til I fix minor problems for vanilla usage (when used in mods have not had any problems I plan on tring to edit all hob file to see if that takes care of problems). this was done for UDMIII

thunderchero