Tactical Combat Crashes

[KrazeeXXL]

this theme is a little bit like my avatar. you see it often

in my experiences (I mentioned that fact before some times) Klingons crash more often than any other race in tactical combat.

An interesting example was my last multiplayer game against JBL. Our first fight was between one stolen kvort1 on JBL's and one new kvort2 on my side.

JBL may correct me but we used to load this situation at least 3 times until it finally ran at the 4th one.
It crashed even before the camera slided around in an early state.

I know some of you have big experiences with ship models and I guess it maybe has something to do with it. I have tactical combat errors with any other race, too. but Klingons match them all (in their ammount of crashes).

So are there any attempts to dunno... find out whats behind all of that or shall I put it ad acta under "10 year old game which uses to crash more than often"?

If someone has some ideas about this issue ... some presumptions... anything about it plz post it here.

Sad to say that I like to play klingons but it is really annoying most of the time and I often avoid them to play because of that.

[TurboC]

SURE WOULD BE NICE!!

My last game I played Romulans on Hard. I was doing decently, I found some awesome systems and had about 8 or 9 systems. Wasn't in the corner, but at least had the bottom middle. Encountered Klingons to the north of me, they managed to take one of my new systems before I could protect it. It was ok, I was establishing a fleet and had some close calls. Then the ferengi declared war. They had 2x my fleet strength. I was throwing everything I had at the system nearest them, cloak-ambushing the waves of ships coming in. The last big wave came in, I was outnumbered but managed to just barely prevail. I had 3 wounded destroyers left, he had 1 destroyer left. Victory was in sight!! ... CRASH.

I went back to playing Master of Magic. It very RARELY crashes.

If you ask me, I think something in the combat system is dividing by 0 or going out of bounds, blowing the stack etc. If we had the source code I bet it would be a pretty basic problem to fix. Obviously we don't. I think it might probably be easier to just rewrite the entire combat engine, unless someone has a way of catching error codes or what part of an EXE was last accessed before a crash?

[Osk]

same problem, but most often with romulans

and mom has only crashed in a combat for me, when someone uses call lightning. usually me.. i like that spell!

[TurboC]

Sometimes Master of Magic crashes when an overland enchantment is cast, like Just Cause or whatever, it will come up with the "completed" announcement and then get these vertical colored lines similar to the Matrix. Ha. It's pretty infrequent though.

I found a website for Master of Orion 2 which gives some tips about running it in DOSBox, etc:

http://lordbrazen.blogspot.com/

I might try that later or this weekend.

[KrazeeXXL]

@crossposting@ link/OFF-Topic

Does anyone remember if the tactical combat crashed that often in win95/98 times? For me it seems that it doesn't happend that often but its just a guess. 10 years is a long time.

[captaindusk]

Well surprisingly it never crashed often for me, it just lagged hard sometimes.If I remember right the crashes happened slightly more ten years ago compared to today. At least on my old machine.

[DOT]

I guess in the good old times, when pc's and everthing else was worse, BotF didn't crash that often...
On the other hand, I didn't play any mods at all some years ago.

Has anybody tried to run the game in a virtual win95 or virtual win98?

[KrazeeXXL]

I guess in the good old times, when pc's and everthing else was worse, BotF didn't crash that often...

this coincides with my experiences (at least in sp)

Has anybody tried to run the game in a virtual win95 or virtual win98?

To run the game with a V 95 seems to be a good idea. 95 is fast installed and doesn't need much RAM. I would say it is worth a try and a crashchecking would at least be interesting. Could be even insightful, too.
I allways suspected Direct X7-switch to DX9 and maybe the XP Patch for possible sources of errors.

Furthermore interesting is the use of the drivers a virtual system runs with. So a virtual xp could be interesting, too. "Standard" graphics card with standardized drivers of vmwareserver, which I would use in this case, is interesting to check out, too.

I ran BotF with an V XP, a year ago. But it was to test out, if I was able to establish a mp game between the virtual machine and the local one.


another idea would be to change the latency of the graphics card...

Thanks for the idea DOT, I guess I'll try it out, if I find some time.

[DOT]

Thanks for the idea DOT, I guess I'll try it out, if I find some time.

You're welcome. When I find my old dos disk, I will create a vm for BotF...

[KrazeeXXL]

I have the floppies here but I remember a little problem I had with Win95B and fat32.

So you needed to create a bootdisk for Win95B (under a running Win95B) and without it you won't be possible to get FAT32 instead of FAT16 running... But as it seems I have only got some bootdisks for Win95A...

never mind, I will try the VXP first. It needs much more RAM but maybe the virtual systems graphics card drivers mean a change.