Game Fixes Only mod causing crash when approaching escorted convoys
 

Hello, me again...

Came up against this problem yesterday, and again today - when I'm approaching a convoy (no particular size, the latest was just listed on the map as "convoy") that is escorted (to be honest I've not found an unescorted convoy) the game crashes to desktop on me.

I've narrowed it down to being the Game Fixes Only mod causing the problem, because the same convoy doesn't give me the problem when I don't have GFO enabled in JGSME.

I've got the sh4.exe patched so it can use >2gb of RAM and my game is patched to v1.5.

I have only 2 mods installed 3000yd bearing plotter and the GFO v1.1 mod.

The problem only happens when I get within the range where the game would draw the lines to the ships on the nav map.

At the moment my career has me in the area of the Carolinas/Guam (Marshall Islands actually but I moved myself over to patrol the Guam area for richer pickings), don't know if it's just that specific area the problem occurs in.


Is there any fix for this (besides not using the GFO mod)?

Thanks in advance.

Webster, the creator of GFO, is still very active on these forums, so with any luck he should be along soon with some ideas on what the problem might be.

Well if it helps him the convoy this time was made up of 3 DD's and a large European liner.

No idea what the other 2 convoys I had the same issue with yesterday were comprised of because I hadn't narrowed down what caused the problem thus I never got to see the ships, but oddly they didn't cause the game to CTD with the GFO mod installed after I went back to a previous save. But of course I lost a whole days play (literally!) doing that.

Sounds a bit like a corruped save.

If you want to test a new carrer (only gonna take you like 10min or so to check).

Start a new career from Manilla and go to the Lingayen gulf (NNW of Manilla) once there take a course of 345-ish, on Dec. 10th you'll come in contact with the filippine invasion force.

If it doesn't crash i could well have been a corrupt save.


Come to think of it, what game resolution are you using, the 3000yrd bearing tool has different downloads for diff. resolutions.

Might be your problem.


HJ

Don't think it's the 3000yd plotter, I'm running the game in 1920x1080 and I'm using the 1920x1080 version of the 3000yd plotter.

I had a problem earlier where the game would lag massively on time compression higher than 64, not at all helpful when I was trying to get from Guam to Midway...

I loaded up an earlier save and the lag was gone.

So I think the crashing and lag could well be down to corrupted saves.

I did enable/disable the Real Environment mod whilst at sea so I'm now wondering if that somehow corrupted my save (it includes reskinned warhips).

Anyhoo I'll see how mission 3 goes and see if I get any further problems.

:yeah: What TorpX says

Yeah I know. Just didn't think the real environments mod would cause an issue if installed/uninstalled whilst I was at sea.

Think I need to do a complete reinstall anyhow because I just tried the Environment v5.0 mod with GFO and 3000yd bearing plotter, and my Mogami warship in the sub school mission goes see through when I hit it.

Tried uninstalling the mods (I do use JSGME) and the problem still persists. Think one, or more, of the files got overwritten, caused the problem, but wasn't backed up by JSGME so wasn't restored when I uninstalled the mods.

Ho-hum.

EDIT - the disappearing Mogami (parts of it at least) is not related to mods because it's doing it on a vanilla install. Seems to have been related to a change to my AA settings I made. Grr.



As far as mod soups go I'm quite happy just using the GFO mod for the moment, it's as close to vanilla as I guess you can get whilst improving the vanilla game. I plan on trying TMO at some point though. I am undecided on Real Environments - on the one hand the waves are better, but on the other hand it seemed a lot darker at night for me.

glad you got everything sorted out

as for the game being too dark just use the gamma settings in the game options to change that.

your CTD issue was as you found out, just a corrupted save.

if you use real environment mod then don't forget to also add my real environment patch in order to fix a few changes it makes to GFO

I played with the GFO mod and I've never installed any other mod. I had to abandon 2 out of 3 patrols because of crashes related to convoys, but I just assumed the base game was buggy. For me, the crash seems to occur when they detect me. It's not necessarily related to saved games because it'll crash even if I've never loaded a game. However, if I save near one of those bad convoys, the saved game will be corrupted in that reloading the game doesn't eliminate the crash. If I reload the game and manage to avoid being detected, the game doesn't crash, but it runs so much more slowly that I can only get away with 128x time compression. Since it takes so long to return to base at 128x, I just abandoned the career whenever that happened. It was frustrating, so I gave up on SH4 and went back to SH3+GWX.

If this problem is fixable, I'd be very interested in seeing it fixed...

as discussed above its caused by a corrupted save or a corruption in the games base files because of mods that were installed wrong or didn't uninstall correctly. it also happens with most mods if the game isn't patched to v1.5 but you said yours is so that's not it.

make sure you always use JSGME to install mods and keep a copy of the unmodded base games "data" folder so you can quickly restore the base game in case you ever get any corruptions and don't have to go through the uninstall and reinstall process.

hundreds of people are using GFO daily with none of these issues so its not related to the mod itself but any mod can "trigger" such things if there are already corruptions in the game files somewhere.

often these small corruptions go unnoticed until a CTD happens and then the true cause can go unnoticed and the whatever mod that triggered the CTD is wrongly blamed for it.

in cases where convoys trigger a CTD it is almost always a remnant of another mod that changed the ship files and one or more ship files from that convoy are missing or corrupted. this may not show up or be a problem until you run across that ship so that's why convoys are the most noticed trigger since they have so many ships, if there is a corruption in the ship files it will show up then since convoys contain so many of the ships.

sh4 is a different game then sh3 in the play and feel and it takes getting used to but once you do you will find it very enjoyable. many people play sh3 and sh4 and are happy once they get used to the differences in them.

Well, as I said I have only ever installed one mod, GFO, so if it's caused by a mod then GFO is the culprit. If GFO is not the culprit, then it's not caused by a mod (in my case).

I installed the game just a few days ago, followed immediately by GFO 1.1 (including the orders bar), and that's it. I've never uninstalled a mod. I'm not blaming GFO because I have no proof that it's the culprit, but it's either GFO or it's a bug in the stock game, I think.

what are your system specs and grafics card? it might be you are running out of ram because that will cause CTD when a lot is going on like a battle scene or large convoy goes into alert status.

also what are your game settings? are you running with it set on high and are you using anti-aliasing

4.2 gHz 4-core AMD processor, 8 GB system RAM, MSI Gaming N760 TF 2GD5/OC (NVidia GeForce GTX 760 w/ 2GB video RAM). The graphics settings are high, but with either no anti-aliasing or minimal anti-aliasing. (I don't remember if the game has the option, but I never "force" anti-aliasing or other changes using the GPU control panel.) I don't think I'm running out of system resources, and it's not overheating either. I'm not expecting you to solve my problems, though. At some point I'll try some SH4 patrols with and without GFO to see if I can figure it out, but for now I'm satisfied with SH3...

well I would like to figure this out too

its not your system, you have more then enough for sh4 so its something else.

I know its not GFO v1.1 because its been running on hundreds of systems without any issues for years.

what did you use to unzip GFO? did you use WinRAR or winzip? because if you did they will corrupt the mod, only use 7zip program to unzip your mods