CTD adding a SH3 ship... only sometimes.
 

I've come into something I had never faced before when adding ships to SH4, something I've been doing for a long time with very few failures. When I failed, the ship simply crashed the game. Always, no exceptions. It meant back to work and check all the stuff I usually check when doing this kind of work.

But now I've found a ship that crashes the museum while loading (for the ship to be considered "successfully added to SH4" I want it to display OK in museum), but only sometimes. I can start the museum and get a crash to desktop halfway the loading bar, or sometimes it loads till the end and the ship displays beautifully. I've discarded other possible causes for the crash.

The aforementioned ship is The_Frog's SH3 Southampton class cruiser. A SUPERB 3D model with a ton of textures. The ship came in a pack together with a beautiful substitute for the SH3 Fiji, and initially I wanted to add them both, but had constant crashes, so I split the pack into single ships, to try to discern what was going on.

The first time I loaded the new folder with only the Southampton the museum loaded fine.

https://i.imgur.com/LgUKQwR.jpg

I thought the problem was then the other ship... but I was wrong. Without loading or unloading anything in JSGME I run the game again, go to the museum to take some screenshots and... CTD :o. Tried many different times, and randomly sometimes it crashed, sometimes it loaded fine.

Does anybody have an idea about what could cause this apparently random behaviour? I'm kinda lost with this ship, and would hate to have to remove it from my Dark Waters installation because it looks gorgeous.

Ooops, this was supposed to be sent to the SH4 forum. My apologies.

Hello. Great model/textures indeed ! :yep:

Maybe, open NCL_Southampton.cfg and remove the text :

[AirGroup 1]
StartDate=19370305
EndDate=19480101
Squadron1Class=LBSWalrus
Squadron1No=2

Or add the air unit Walrus to the game.

Oh, yes, those lines are already removed. But in case I hadn't and the plane wasn't properly added, it's not the museum that crashes, but the whole game. I just would not be able to get to the main menu and select the museum.

And regarding the ship, I can't but recommend ALL of The Frog's ships for SH3. They're nothing short of "works of art".

Caustics or DynamicShadow in the model still? Do you have UnifiedRenderControler? (yes, only one "EL"... lol)

Caustics and DynamicShadow controllers removed, and UnifiedRenderController has been added.

I assumed you had, from your excellent past work, of which we have some in FotRSU (thank you very much), but ya never know - doesn't hurt to ask. :salute:

Finally the culprit was found and "eliminated", thanks to s7rikeback who put me in the right path.

Now the frog's Southampton sails in SH4 :yeah:

https://i.imgur.com/HWUSp2x.jpg

:yeah: So, who was the culprit ?

There were two waterreflection controllers (nodes 263 and 335) wrongly setup. Apparently this has no effect in SH3 (or at least nobody reported crashes other than related to the plane addition in the .cfg file of the ship), but turned out to be critical in SH4. As soon as I fixed them, the ship worked.

The Fiji has exactly the same problem.

Excellent work, team!

Well done ! :up: