The Future of DLV

[Joehtosis]

I'm not a long time poster here.. But I've been playin the game since the 4.0 release, and I've noticed with each update the mod team seems to just add more and more content.
While typically this is well and good.. I can't say that I approve. Not that I don't appreciate, but I think there's so much more attention the DLV team could be putting towards bug hunting.
Not to pat any ass here, but I love the mod, brings a whole new level of depth and playability that most other mods fail to capture, but I think that as it continues to add depth, it's only digging itself farther into the grave.

As I'm sure anyone who's played this is well aware, after a few turns of play, the game has a habit of kicking your ass back to your desktop after taking maybe say, 15 - 2 turns. My concern is, as I said, as more things are added, it seems that more problems could arise and eventually you have so many neat trinkets and features with potential problems that eventually it would become nigh impossible to polish it into a stable and actually playable (for the most part) game.

I've recently just said screw it and I'm re-installing the entire total war game from scrap in hopes that maybe it'll change things up for me and make things more playable.
I've tried a lot of remedies for this problem; deleting .bin files, muting speech, etc. but I can't help but feel the effort towards adding more content is a bit mislead.

Personally, I know next to nothing about modding games, I use them frequently, but I've never actually messed with the files inside (save for when I'm reading instructions...) but if there's anything I can do to help try and squish some of these nasty little bugs I'd be glad to help out.

P.S.
I refuse to accept these bugs as "unfixable".

[Kjertesvein]

Well said. I tried to solve it before, but it had no serious help. I think we need a plan from someone who know their way around and know the problem. I have restarted the whole med2 file more times then I have fingers, but to no help. It is now crossed the line I consider playable, when I can't go pass the loading at turn 1 .

[SirWarts]

I to love the mod Its the the best med2 or kingdoms mod out there in my opinion and I have played a few.

But I do have a lot of bug issues and its good to know Im not the only one.Since 6.2 came out I have tried England,Scotland,Norway,and Holly Roman Empire. I keep having battle field ctds. I wish I could help but I just don't know anything about modding and I am in no place to invest the needed time to learn.

[Xtiaan72]

I'm not a long time poster here.. But I've been playin the game since the 4.0 release, and I've noticed with each update the mod team seems to just add more and more content.
While typically this is well and good.. I can't say that I approve. Not that I don't appreciate, but I think there's so much more attention the DLV team could be putting towards bug hunting.
Not to pat any ass here, but I love the mod, brings a whole new level of depth and playability that most other mods fail to capture, but I think that as it continues to add depth, it's only digging itself farther into the grave.

As I'm sure anyone who's played this is well aware, after a few turns of play, the game has a habit of kicking your ass back to your desktop after taking maybe say, 15 - 2 turns. My concern is, as I said, as more things are added, it seems that more problems could arise and eventually you have so many neat trinkets and features with potential problems that eventually it would become nigh impossible to polish it into a stable and actually playable (for the most part) game.

I've recently just said screw it and I'm re-installing the entire total war game from scrap in hopes that maybe it'll change things up for me and make things more playable.
I've tried a lot of remedies for this problem; deleting .bin files, muting speech, etc. but I can't help but feel the effort towards adding more content is a bit mislead.

Personally, I know next to nothing about modding games, I use them frequently, but I've never actually messed with the files inside (save for when I'm reading instructions...) but if there's anything I can do to help try and squish some of these nasty little bugs I'd be glad to help out.

P.S.
I refuse to accept these bugs as "unfixable".

It's only certain factions that do that. Ones that the team has modded in recent updates. You may have noticed there are some beautiful new models for a lot of the Eastern Factions. You should post your bugs in the bug thread with your error logs and they will get fixed

[Reinoldus]

Hi Xitiaan72,

cool you wish to help us. I probably will be calling on you in the coming periode as maybe i will try one more round of DLV.

recently i posted a same sort of statement as jeohthosis. Without a doubt DLV is the best/challinging/and most beautifull mod but the stability is ringing alarm bels. Gamers put hours in a game to see it crash. And if they have the energy (and for me its a question of scarce time) they start over. Gamers wish to play the mod not need to be worrying wether the game crashes or not the next turn. I totally agree with jeohthosis that the focus must be to stabalize this great MOD for vista and xp users.

We all agree on the beauty of the mod, and there for a lott of thanks, my worry is that instability whil find myself leaving DLV behind what would be a waste. I would love to play the full lenght game without crashing. Hope that it is possible.

We, me and some other users are simply rininging the alarmbells. Hope you guys can do something about it. And thanks again for giving me this free game,

[Xtiaan72]

DLV is always a work in progress. The team does it's best but there is always RL to deal with. Know what I mean?

[Joehtosis]

Really now?
I didn't know this was faction specific.
Although I have read a few tales about how as the Polish or Novgorods, (Or some other Eastern/Central European faction I can't remember which...) where if they expanded to the east, the system was almost completely stable, and if they went to the west, it seemed the DLV God went crapstorm coocoo and started dividing the universe by 0.
If this is the case, I'm sorry but seeing as I completely eradicated my entire Total War folder to start fresh, (mods, save games, and all) the only thing I have to offer is a retrofit campaign save as the Scottish lol.
However, I can say that while playing DLV I've had these problems with the Scottish, the Teutonic Order, and the Irish. Typically my empire never exceeded more than 10 territories so I was primarily in the location of Northern Europe. (With the exception of Greenland).
When I start up a new campaign with the latest DLV release I'll go ahead and report all the crashes I have. Coincidentally, before I start flooding the threads with bug reports, has the main cause of these notorious CTD's been uprooted yet or is the hunt still on? I don't want to waste anyone's time with a problem that's already been identified.

On another note; I'd like to ask again and re-affirm my statement that I'd like to actively help this game move along. Is there anything I can do? I plan on searching the forum and researching this problem later but as of right now I'm a bit hard pressed for time with other things I'm trying to study and work on, so a few tips on where to get started would be great.

I'm quite frankly sick of sitting watching this game have a heart attack and flat line on me then have to pull out the defibrillator. I'd like to be a bit more pro-active about this now.

[Xtiaan72]

My advice is to turn off auto-save and save after every turn. This helps for some reason

[The Longbowman]

I was playing the new 6.2 beta with Portugal and had horrendous CTDs during the campaign and battle screens. I downloaded the latest 6.2 version and reinstalled it, started a new campaign as the Germans and have not had one CTD in 60 turns! It's bizarre.

[Taiji]

You'd probably find that Portugal will also play without CTD, it doesn't seem to be faction specific in my experience. I'm pretty certain that these issues are caused by some area of the scripting. Repman says that m2tw scripts sometimes do not work, I don't know if this applies to all of them or only certain kinds. Presumably if at some point a script intermittantly does not work for some unknown reason, it could cause a CTD. I suppose that if a script that underwrites a load of other scripts intermittantly fails then the symptom could be expressed in as many areas as the script is connected to. For example, if the script that determines whether it's summer or winter is failing then any script which depends on knowing if it's summer or winter might also fail.

With regard to this deleting .bins thing, I never experienced the problem until the 5.8x betas. I might have been lucky, since the problem is not consistant, or maybe some scripting added around there caused or compounded the problem. I imagine it suggests that there is some error in the \text stuff, or in some file/script that is using the text stuff.

Since rebuilding these .bin files seems to often* have a noticeable curative effect it would be a good idea to rebuild them one at a time. We might be able to narrow down the suspects in this way. If we can work out which text file needs rebuilding we can perhaps examine it and the scripting elements that make use of it.

*that it doesn't always fix all of the issues, suggests that there is another problem perhaps unrelated to this one.

BTW I really don't like the implication in the OP that the future of DLV is threatened by bugs, it seems like an exageration. While I agree the issue deserves some attention, I still find DLV to be very playable and (compared to other mods) extremely rewarding the vast majority of the time. Basically, I do not need this issue fixing before I can enjoy DLV and I suspect that neither do the majority of people that play DLV.

This is because there has been no problem with the vast majority of campaigns I have played. For most people that experience a problem reinstalling a restarting the campaign is enough to continue playing without any serious error.

[Xtiaan72]

There are some scripting errors in the EDB, I'm sure of that because I have been messing with the files alot.. Everybody should be posting error logs. Some of these CTD's can be fixed by moving one comma!

[Taiji]

Which bits of EDB do you think are suspect? I'll take a look maybe...

[Xtiaan72]

It's hard to say, that was about 46 hours of modding ago! I didn't think about cause itwasn't crashing my game. Maybe Byzantium.. There is some new stuff in there right?

[Taiji]

Only new unit entries, I don't see anything wrong with them. But that depends what you mean by 'new'. They're the only difference between 6 and 6.2beta2.

But then this problem with CTDs has existed since at least 5.8. I never experienced it with 5.7 but it would be very useful to know when it was first reported. Maybe someone could search the forum for 'CTD', and 'crash', 'crashing', and find the first report... (edit: no I don't think this would work since the previous version's bug report threads are not present).

BTW posting error logs isn't helping, they all say the same thing - nothing. Unfortunately CA's m2tw error reporting system leaves us in the dark with this issue.

[Harry Lime]

If there were any potential CTD errors in the EDB, the game wouldn't run on start up.

[Joehtosis]

Taiji,

I apologize for any mislead implications but by the title ,"The Future of DLV," I am moreso implying what direction the modding community is going to take it's direction towards. For example, adding more features, or fixing current problems?
To be quite frank, I don't see a need for more features at the moment, you said it yourself, "I still find DLV to be very playable and (compared to other mods) extremely rewarding the vast majority of the time."
Stability is a must for games, without it they are quite the frustrating things and can lead to people taking long breaks to just abandoning the game all together, no matter how enjoyable it is to play. Whether or not you personally have experienced these problems is somewhat insignificant (not to be rude), as many of us are. I do realize however some of the time it's simply from a faulty installation or other easily fixed issues, however, there are those who have these problems while doing all the right things. I know the mod is not finished with updates, and may not be for some time, I'm simply putting my request for some extra effort on the bug hunting out there.
The only reason I bring so much emphasis to these problems is that a game crashing multiple times after less than several turns once the campaign has been drawn out after 60+ turns seems like a severe problem to me. Also, again as stated before, this mod is just about all I could ask for in a game, and I've sat here for hours just reloading the game constantly just out of the sheer will to play due to the quality it's in. To have the experience ruined by bugs in such a way is frustrating.

I have to ask though, what do you mean by restarting a campaign? As in reloading the game from the desktop and continuing from your last save or starting a new campaign all together? The latter seems to me to be a serious if not major problem. I don't know about you, but something about losing hours of gameplay strikes me as rather aggravating.

[Taiji]

I'd imagine that if there's solutions to be found they're in the campaign script, or in the trait and ancillary related files.

I suppose there could be errors in the \text files also but then anyone installing 6.1 after loading up 6.0 should have a problem since the .bins won't be rebuilt unless they're deleted. So there is potential to mess up there already, I think perhaps both of my experiences with it have been caused this way.

@Joehtosis,

I almost completely agree with you. It has potential to be a very bad problem. Wasting 60+ turns of gameplay is a real shame, no matter which way you look at it. If the issue can be eliminated then this would be an excellent advance for DLVers.

But if there is no apparent means of preventing the issue then doing nothing is appropriate. Even better than doing nothing is to add something to it. If you're really lucky something you add might help to highlight the existing problem(s).

Actually you might be in a somewhat unique position, if the issue is always occuring for you then you could try removing stuff and then playing 60+ turns to see if that has solved the issue... The issue does not happen very often for me at all... like one in 10+, so it's difficult for me to test anything.

But then even if I could test it I would not feel confident in removing sections of the campaign script, for example. The ramifications of removing the script may be more than I can fathom with my present knowledge, so I might wind up fixing a load of problems before I can test for the presence of the existing problem (if it even happens to me again).

It's a really annoying issue, but the fact that it's so rare for me means I don't fear it.

BTW I run XP sp3 on an intel e4500 with 2gb ram, a 8800gt and an xfi soundcard. What system are you running DLV on? (I hope for your sake you don't say 'vista'...)

[SirWarts]

Xtiaan72:You should post your bugs in the bug thread with your error logs and they will get fixed

I did this two of my battle bugs. one ctd and one freezing. Im waiting still for response

[Joehtosis]

I understand. I don't have as much experience with dealing with these problems, I've just been lurking around the forums so I don't know exactly HOW ingrained this problem is, but, it is a program. With the right information you can make a program do anything, sooo, I suppose it's just a wait and see what comes up and just hope the answer comes soon.
I'd like to clarify that all these sentiments I've made are about DLV 6.0 and a bit of the 6.1 patch. Never got around to playing the 6.2 patch and I think I'll go ahead and install and give it a shot tonight, see what happens.
"I hope for your sake you don't say 'vista'..."
I just loled my pants off when I read that at the end while replying.
Quite so though, Vista home Basic Service Pack 1, 2 GB ram, AMD athlon dual core 4,200+.
Lag isn't exactly a problem, I have most of my settings on medium, runs perfectly fine on huge unit settings.
As for the conception of whether or not Vista in itself is a buggy OS, I've never had any real problems with it. I quite frankly like Vista over XP anyway lol. Just turned off UAC and I've been good to go. How this could give me problems with the game that it wouldn't for XP, I have no clue.

[Xtiaan72]

I should just shut up now. Harry and Taiji are much more experienced than me. But I"m getting there.

I'll leaved you with this, bugs can be faction specific and I know this is true because played Ireland for since the beta came out with no crashes and since I stated modding it heavily I've had bugs that let me play for a while and then random CTD.

And anybody thats getting kicked off the battle map. I bet if you made a list of factions that were doing that they would all be Eastern Factions that have relatively new models ( awesome models though). That's my opinion though.

I tell you what, if you post your next error log I'll try to fix. OK, high-jack over