More woes with Stiebler4B_Addon_for_V16B1

[GJO]

Having loaded the patch mod: Stiebler4B_Addon_for_V16B1, correctly as the final mod after loading h.sie's V16B1 patch, I managed to complete two enjoyable patrols without problems, then on my third patrol with the revised set-up, this was my 22nd patrol in the game and quite a long patrol working the North American coast in a Type 9b during mid 1943. I found that I could no longer successfully save my game - none of my game saves would re-load - in every case the game would load up to the point where the screen goes black with the message "Not so long ago . . ." and then it would CTD. I always save from the command room position (F2) at 1:1 time compression, surfaced and having checked that there were no other ships or land detectable and this has generally worked well before now. On two previous patrols with this set-up everything worked fine and I was able to save my game, break off to do other things and re-load the game where I had left off a couple of days later. I had tried using GWX Integrated Orders with the patch but had already removed this mod to avoid potential conflicts.

My MOD list with the above set-up was:

GWX - 16km Atmosphere
GWX - Enhanced Damage Effects
GWX - No Medals on Crew
LITE RADIO TRAFIC V1
Spirit of machines
Torpedo damage Final ver2.0
Waterstream+Exhaust Combi V2.3 for GWX3
WB's Renown Replacement
Wooden_Lifeboats_Mod_1.1
GWX_DFa-Flag&Pens_2010
V16B1 (JSGME)
GWX3_Stiebler4B_Addon_for_V16B1

Incidentally, I have also found that 'GWX - No Medals on Crew' and 'GWX_DFa-Flag&Pens_2010' also stopped working after I had installed Stiebler's patch.

I am running the game with Windows 8.1 but this has not caused a problem during my first 21 patrols.

My current plan is to uninstall the Stiebler's patch, and start the patrol all over again from the home base and see if I get the same problem.

[GreyBeard]

Originally Posted by GJO

...........and having checked that there were no other ships or land detectable........

Do you submerge and listen on the phones yourself for contacts and maintain a minimum of 50km from land and ships you have sunk?

Game saves are my biggest compliant, quite likely my only complaint, about SH3. It's unacceptable that one cannot just stop playing when one must. And it appears it's unfixable or I'm sure someone would have by now. Please excuse my rant, needed to add my $.02 worth.

[BigWalleye]

Originally Posted by GreyBeard

Do you submerge and listen on the phones yourself for contacts and maintain a minimum of 50km from land and ships you have sunk?

Game saves are my biggest compliant, quite likely my only complaint, about SH3. It's unacceptable that one cannot just stop playing when one must. And it appears it's unfixable or I'm sure someone would have by now. Please excuse my rant, needed to add my $.02 worth.

Two days ago, I saved a game while there was a convoy overhead and escorts were raining ashcans on my head. Reloaded that save with NO problem. I can testify that I personally do not have any problems saving SH3 games with no in-game restrictions. I have had problems in the past - terrible problems that took me weeks of work to track down. But those turned out to be the result of a) sloppy practices on my part which corrupted my install, b) failure to explicitly follow mod set-up instructions and incompatibility warnings, and c) a couple of mods that have a reputation for causing problems. Mostly, it was my own bad practices. Like forgetting to roll back Commander before changing mods. Like changing mods, then trying to reload a mid-patrol save. Like reusing a save (saving with the same name without deleting the earlier save). There was no single mistake that wrecked the game, but the effects accumulated over time and left me with a corrupted installation that would not make a reliable mid-patrol save.

In order to unwind the mess I had created, I had to uninstall EVERYTHING, then run a registry cleaner. I then reinstalled SH3 (and Commander and JSGME and Weather and all the other external add-ons I use). Then I restored all my mods from the original downloaded zip files, carefully following all instructions for V16B1 and Stiebler's patch. Then I activated them all, carefully monitoring the incompatibility warnings from JSGME. Since then, I have had absolutely no problems with crashing reloads. BTW, my problem occurred about almost a year ago. Since then I have played, and saved, many sessions without a CTD.

All of this is a LOT of work and requires more attention to detail than I was willing to give the first time out. But the problem of lost or stuck patrols is extremely frustrating. It can lead to a loss of interest in what is otherwise a terrific game. I found it was worth the extra time and effort to get a good, reliable installation, so I can now enjoy my favorite subsim.

[GJO]

Originally Posted by GreyBeard

Do you submerge and listen on the phones yourself for contacts and maintain a minimum of 50km from land and ships you have sunk?

Game saves are my biggest compliant, quite likely my only complaint, about SH3. It's unacceptable that one cannot just stop playing when one must. And it appears it's unfixable or I'm sure someone would have by now. Please excuse my rant, needed to add my $.02 worth.

Yes it is a worthwhile rant! I am lucky in that my wife is tolerant - when she calls me to dinner, for example, I often find myself saying "hang on a minute - I have to check that there are no other ships first and then surface before I can save the game and shut down the computer!" - its even worse when there are destroyers circling above! And yes, I do listen to the Hydrophones myself - usually with all machines stopped to cut background noise . . .

[GJO]

I take on board the comments by BigWalleye above - perhaps I need to re-install, start a new career and then not mess with the installed mods until that career has ended. But, having reached the end of 1943 and survived 21 patrols, I was, sort of, hoping to reach May 1945.

[GreyBeard]

Originally Posted by BigWalleye

Two days ago.......so I can now enjoy my favorite subsim.

So, if I just sunk a ship and I'm still submerged I can save right then and there, without surfacing? If that's true

I understand what you stated about installing mods and how careful one must be. It's one of the reasons I don't bother with SH5. Way to many mods required from what I can see, increasing the possibility of a conflict, imho.

Originally Posted by GJO

I take on board the comments by BigWalleye above - perhaps I need to re-install, start a new career and then not mess with the installed mods until that career has ended. But, having reached the end of 1943 and survived 21 patrols, I was, sort of, hoping to reach May 1945.

I agree with your positive connotation of BigWalleye. I have been around SubSim longer, but considering postings, he has been more involved than me by a longshot. I too may try reinstalling everything. Perhaps I should try a few saves with no restrictions first and see what happens.

[BigWalleye]

Originally Posted by GJO

I take on board the comments by BigWalleye above - perhaps I need to re-install, start a new career and then not mess with the installed mods until that career has ended. But, having reached the end of 1943 and survived 21 patrols, I was, sort of, hoping to reach May 1945.

AFAIK, it is almost always possible to change mods while in port, between patrols. I only know of one mod - for SH4 - that must be activated at career start. Just don't touch JSGME if you plan to reload a mid-patrol save. Even then, some mods (sound-only mods, for instance) can probably be changed mid-patrol with no ill effects, but I'd avoid it.

You might rename your entire saved game folder (in Documents). Then do all the reinstalling. Finally, change the saved games folder back to SH3 (or whatever you are using if you have multiple installs). That might cure your corrupt saves problem. (Might not, too....) Or, as happened to me, wait until nearly every save you make CTD's and it becomes impossible to complete a patrol. I reached the point where I couldn't advance my career because of the bad saves. That's when I gave up and decided I had to fix the problem. If you're not there yet, maybe it's worth pressing on. But if the CTDs get too frustrating, know that you don't have to live with the problem or give up on the game.

[BigWalleye]

Originally Posted by GreyBeard

So, if I just sunk a ship and I'm still submerged I can save right then and there, without surfacing? If that's true

I have done that. I wait till the ship stops exploding, although I confess that is just superstition. But I have successfully saved with the sinking wreck still on the surface. And me submerged.

I'm currently in the Humber estuary, well within 50km of Kingston-upon-Hull. Save and reload OK.

Here is the thread recounting my efforts to solve my particular savegame problem. http://www.subsim.com/radioroom/showthread.php?t=205755 (Only nine months ago, not a year.) It's lengthy, but so was the process of finding ALL the problems I saddled myself with.

Since making my reinstallation and rigidly maintaining a sanitary copy of the game, I have found the game saves to be pretty robust. Maybe I've been lucky. If so, I hope I can share it with you.

[GreyBeard]

Originally Posted by BigWalleye

.....Maybe I've been lucky.......

Nice disclaimer. I like that. In today's world it seems it has become a necessity. No different from what I would have done.

I am proceeding henceforth with restriction-less game saves with optimism.

[GJO]

This is quite interesting - I haven't abandoned my career but I did a registry check with CCleaner and it identified 768 corrupt registry entries all of which appeared to be connected to SH3 - these have been removed and I have carefully re-installed the game and my mods (without Stiebler's patch - but that doesn't mean that I have given up on it) whilst preserving my career and SH3 Commander files. So far it seems to be working OK - but I haven't yet been brave enough to save and reload in the midst of battle.

I was also in the habit of using the same gamesave file names over and over again - i.e '2 Sunk', '3 Sunk' etc. I did have a suspicion that this may have been problematical so I have adopted a new regime of naming my gamesaves with a simple formula as follows: The game limits save names to 9 characters so my plan was to use the date and time (in game) of the save - my first character indicates the year (i.e. 3 = 1943) the next four characters the date (i.e 1022 = October 22) and my last four, the time (i.e. 1504 = 3:04 pm) that way there should be no duplication of gamesave names . . .

[GreyBeard]

Personally, I never overwrite game saves. My first save on a new career is always Patrol 1. The next is Patrol 1a, then Patrol 1b and so forth and so forth, until I'm back in port. Then it's on to Patrol 2. Nothing complicated, no dates to discern or anything else. Just something to differentiate between each save. I have yet to reach the end of the alphabet.

I use CCleaner on a regular basis. I like to use it to wipe the free space clean too. I also use the Jv16 PowerTools by Macecraft regularly. I have never had a problem occur after using either of those tools.
Yet.

[BigWalleye]

Originally Posted by GreyBeard

Nice disclaimer. I like that. In today's world it seems it has become a necessity. No different from what I would have done.

I am proceeding henceforth with restriction-less game saves with optimism.

Not meant as a disclaimer, except in the sense that I disclaim infallible knowledge of how anybody else's game will behave. With a system as complex as a computer environment running SH3 (and that's obviously not highly complex), I'm not smart enough to know for sure that what works for me will work for you. I know what has worked for me, I think I know why it has worked, and I hope that, if you try it, it will work for you, too. Computers erased any certainty I might have had a long time ago.

From my experience, it is not re-use of names that causes the problem. (This is a problem, BTW, which I have found is common to SH3, SH4, and SH5.) If you call your first save "Save1", then delete that save and call your second save "Save1", there is no problem. But if you call your second save "Save1" and tell the program to overwrite the old Save1, that seems to cause problems sometimes.

[GJO]

Originally Posted by GreyBeard

Personally, I never overwrite game saves. My first save on a new career is always Patrol 1. The next is Patrol 1a, then Patrol 1b and so forth and so forth, until I'm back in port. Then it's on to Patrol 2. Nothing complicated, no dates to discern or anything else. Just something to differentiate between each save. I have yet to reach the end of the alphabet.

I use CCleaner on a regular basis. I like to use it to wipe the free space clean too. I also use the Jv16 PowerTools by Macecraft regularly. I have never had a problem occur after using either of those tools.
Yet.

Brilliant! That just seems so easy - I may borrow your idea! My system of using the date now seems so complicated in comparison! One of the things I really like about CCleaner and its stablemates is that they are so simple yet so effective . . .

[GJO]

OK - so I have now meticulously removed the game and all of its directories and files, cleaned the registry and removed al unnecessary flotsam that may have been left behind. The game has been carefully reinstalled together with GWX3, SH3 Commander and only those mods that I have decided to install. It is August 1939 and I shall now report to Königsberg to take command of a new Type 7b U-Boot . . .

ETA - I shall also adopt GreyBeard's system of choosing names for when I save the game . . .

[GJO]

It is a long learning curve - at the moment, I seem unable to play Silent Hunter at all because since starting all over again with a squeaky clean install, whenever I try to reload and resume a saved game, I get a CTD. Now I am not blaming the GWX3_Stiebler4B_Addon_for_V16B1 but after 22 enjoyable patrols, my problems didstart after I had downloaded and installed that MOD. So it is clear that I did something during that process that has upset the equilibrium.

Reading the crash reports I note that one of the culprits is a file entitled: msvcr71.dll - that particular dll came with SH3 and is dated 2003 - it may have been corrupted so perhaps I need to download a newer version - any ideas?