engine? plug-in? something else?

I posted this upon the EVN boards a little while ago; I didn't get too much help there, so I may as well post it here.

Quote

I now have three private plug-ins and have heard of one public plug-in (Smuggler's Alliance) that is nonfunctional on Windows 1.0.6 EVN because of this bug. The error manifests itself when I jump into particular systems- the game crashes to desktop. This is strange because other plug-ins such as Polycon and the SFA alpha (which I downloaded quite a long time ago) work normally (as far as I can tell)...

Does anyone know what in the program is causing this, and by extension will this problem be fixed with 1.0.8 for PC? I think it would be the height of irony if I released Retribution and was not able to play it myself (as is now the case). (Although it would be rather amusing in a situational sort of way.)

(...)

Thank you for your time, and have a good night .

Basically, I want to know if anyone's pinpointed the cause of this problem, and whether the 1.0.8 Windows fix is on target to fix it. Barring that, is there any difference between the systems in plug-ins that work (e.g. the EVC/EVO conversions, the SFA alpha, and Polycon), and those that don't (SAE, for example)?

I know y'all are more knowledgable about the whole issue, and yeah, I've brought up the issue with mrxak. Thank you for your time and have a nice day.

I've only encountered 3 plug-ins which have caused WinNova to crash.

1. PlugPack - Extra Outfits 1: WinNova crashes on entering the Obatta system, in which there is one new spob. In this case, the spob used an invalid graphic/spin (500 spob graphic/1500 spin, when the Nova Bible asks for 0-255 graphic and 1000-1255 spin). For whatever reason, this causes a crash for Win users, but not Mac. Fixing this eliminates the crash.

2. Arpia (initial release): Crash occurred when buying one of the new Arpia ships, with a custom interface pict. Investigation revealed that there was a problem with the compression type used for the pict, and reformatting as a bitmap fixed the problem.

3. SAE: Crash whenever entering a new system. Frankly, the data files were so disorganized it was impossible for me to track down the problem.

I'm no expert, but I think that WinNova is just more sensitive than the Mac version. Values (like spins) which the Bible defines as invalid may not crash MacNova, but do on WinNova. Same could be said for compression type for graphics/sprites. That's all I've got. I'm useless.

(Note: I have experienced crashing due to the AI ships destroying stellars thing, but that's another story).

This post has been edited by slouch : 06 November 2004 - 03:16 PM

As I posted in one of the thread. The ELS people think that SAE crashes were do a problem with weapons on the AI ships.