CTD v4.30 on old save (v3.0) - resolved by new start or loading earlier save

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eXodL
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CTD v4.30 on old save (v3.0) - resolved by new start or loading earlier save

Post by eXodL » Sun, 24. Jun 18, 18:50

Hey,

After about 4 years since I last played the game, wanted to come back to it (after recently purchasing Home of Light DLC), just to be welcomed with a lot of crashes.

Last time I've played was on v3.0, which I kept a save from. Had some trouble even getting that save to load on the current game version, but eventually managed to, yet it keeps crashing after 5 to 10 minutes into the game. Had some mods installed, but they are disabled and the game still CTD.

Is there any way I can play the game and continue using this save file? I have over 200 hours on this file alone and wouldn't really want to start over. Any help is appreciated. I've also included the save file in question, in case someone wants to look at it and maybe find what's causing the crashes.

Save file
DxDiag

And some DUMP files:
One
Two
Three
Four
Last edited by eXodL on Mon, 25. Jun 18, 18:56, edited 1 time in total.

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euclid
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Post by euclid » Sun, 24. Jun 18, 19:12

In general mods will leave a trace in the saved game files and hence disabling the mods may not solve the problem if it is due to one of the mods.

To determine whether it is a mod that causes the trouble, just start a new vanilla game. If this works then add one mod at a time. However, before you do that make sure that all mods you are using are up-to-date.

Cheers Euclid
"In any special doctrine of nature there can be only as much proper science as there is mathematics therein.”
- Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), Metaphysical Foundations of the Science of Nature, 4:470, 1786

eXodL
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Post by eXodL » Sun, 24. Jun 18, 20:31

I wouldn't mind having to remove all the mods, as long as I can keep using the save. But it may not even be mod related, so I would need a bit more than just "go and debug the game yourself".

I've been with this game since release and we all know how "flawless" that was. And while this save file has over 200h clocked, I have more than 400h total in the game, and you can imagine where the rest of that time went to (more or less). So I'm a bit sick of having to debug this game, even after all this updates and years passed.

I provided all the information required, so someone from the technical staff could look into and point me in the right direction. I can accept if there's nothing to be done to make this save stable, but if there's a line that needs to be removed or changed, then that's the type of fix I can apply, otherwise I may as well just start a new game on HoL sector (it's just a shame that I will have to do it in a lesser upgraded ship, with no money, no squad and pretty much nothing), than having to test individual mods on separate save files.

Don't take it personal, but I must say, after your post, the desire to play this game again, almost already faded. Thanks for the reply, I wish it was a bit more helpful though.

Alan Phipps
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Post by Alan Phipps » Sun, 24. Jun 18, 21:05

"Thanks for the reply, I wish it was a bit more helpful though."

Hey, moderators are just players trying to help out and are not Egosoft employees. Don't take your game issues out on them!

If it's 4 years since you last played (with mods) then the game has moved on a lot since v 3.0. Some of those mods (and their remnants left in saves after mod removal) will not be compatible with the current version (4.30) which probably fixes or changes things that those mods try to address.

Have you verified your gamefiles cache if from Steam? I suspect that you will need a clean reinstall and a fresh gamestart, with or without (current version) mods. The vast majority of vanilla and updated modded players are not having issues similar to yours.

Looking at your DxDiag, you have a RealTek onboard sound chipset but a default Microsoft sound driver, whilst your Audigy SB driver is from 2009 and cannot possibly be current Win10 optimised. I would suggest getting rid of the Audigy device and driver and use the onboard sound with the latest RealTek HD Audio Codec driver from here. I *know* that this works well.

Looking at the Windows Error Reports in your DxDiag, they all indicate a system in need of some love and care for its hardware devices and drivers.

Sorry that this is a mixed bag of advice, but you asked for help and we only have the information that you provided to go on. I hope that something here helps. :wink:
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eXodL
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Post by eXodL » Sun, 24. Jun 18, 21:44

Yes, the hardware is pretty ancient, but this is not a performance complaint thread. And while drivers may not be optimized for windows 10, it doesn't mean it's the culprit for the problem I have with the game.

So it really comes down to mods incompatibility with current game version and even though I disabled them, for some reason they are still creating problems (thanks Egosoft for the great coding).

I think I had my answer. There's no point in going at eachother's throat. I'll probably end up starting a new game, just doing the DLC and be done with it. There are too many games and not enough time to get angry over this situation.

I was hopping that someone here could actually read those dump files I provided and have a straight answer as to what is causing the crashes, other than assumptions and trial and error solutions. But no hard feelings. Thank you both for your time. Thread can be closed.

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Post by radcapricorn » Mon, 25. Jun 18, 00:18

A bit OT:
Alan Phipps wrote:I would suggest getting rid of the Audigy device and driver and use the onboard sound with the latest RealTek HD Audio Codec...
That actually made me gasp. I guess the context is that you know for sure the game works good with a RealTek, but I mean come on, RealTek vs. a dedicated Creative board, really?

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Post by CBJ » Mon, 25. Jun 18, 08:48

Wow, where to start?
  • Yes, there might be someone who could look into your error reports, but you posted on a Sunday evening when only volunteers were around. If you exercise just a little patience and wait until working hours, rather than dismissing the perfectly valid suggestions given to you by those volunteers, then you might get more help when there is someone around who can examine your data in more detail. Nobody is asking you to "debug" the problem yourself, but given that you are experiencing the problem and other people are not, it is not unreasonable for those volunteers to suggest that you take a few basic steps to help narrow down whether the problem lies with your system, the mods you have installed, or the game itself, especially given that the first two are more likely.
  • If you have a modified game then it is very possible, and entirely reasonable, that the developers may not be able to help you. We make every effort to ensure that mods don't break the game, but we cannot be held responsible for problems caused by unknown changes made by third parties, nor for ensuring that everything we do is compatible with those unknown changes for ever more. We do our best to help with problems caused by third party changes where possible, but it is ultimately up to the people making those changes or installing them to check whether something they have changed has broken the game.
  • Performance is not the only reason for updating drivers. As Windows and game features evolve, drivers often need updating. Sometimes they can cause crashes if not kept up to date, because of Windows updates or because of applications using features that they didn't previously use, thereby triggering previously unnoticed driver problems.
  • When a particular piece of hardware, or the driver it uses, has a long history causing problems, it is perfectly reasonable to suggest using an alternative, particularly as part of an exercise in finding out whether the problem is a system issue or not. Nobody is suggesting that on-board sound is "better" than a dedicated sound card, but it is absolutely the case that Realtek drivers have a very good track record for stability with games, while Audigy ones do not.
Now, if the OP would like further help then they are free to say so and someone will take a look at the error information. Otherwise we will take their final statement that this can be "closed" at face value.

Edit: Typo.
Last edited by CBJ on Mon, 25. Jun 18, 16:57, edited 1 time in total.

Alan Phipps
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Post by Alan Phipps » Mon, 25. Jun 18, 11:25

@ radcapricorn in clarification: I myself have an older version Creative Audigy SB soundcard that was fine in its day but is no longer actively supported with driver updates. I had several issues with it during testing and playing X Rebirth and also with other more recent game releases. Since I updated my motherboard/cpu and switched to using the onboard RealTek chipset with regularly updated drivers for gaming, I have had no such system stability or sound issues.

Onboard sound used to pose a system resource problem with single (even dual) core cpus and older OSs. With a modern system and OS that is just not the case any longer. Dedicated sound cards may offer certain advantages for some sound-critical applications but I personally do not see casual gaming as being one those.
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eXodL
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Post by eXodL » Mon, 25. Jun 18, 18:51

Fine. Just to get it off everyone's chest, I did installed and tested the game with the onboard Realtek sound card and with no surprise (to me at least), it didn't fixed the crashes. Not to mention setting up the Realtek device on Windows 10 is more of a pain than having to debug this game, as the device audio manager doesn't work properly, or at all on Windows 10 and there's no way to set it up for a 5.1/7.1 systems without it, so I rather continue to use those unoptimized Creative drivers, than having to deal with Realtek on Windows 10.

So now that we got this out of the way, is there no one here that could actually help salvaging that save file? I understand, mods are bad, the implementation of mods is even worse, but is there nothing I can do to make that save stable again?

I also did tried all the basic stuff, as verifying the cache on Steam and even starting a new game, which does fix the crashes, however, I would like to avoid doing that.

I'm not going to beg for help, I'm not the type, so if no one want to give any, then we're better off closing the thread. I may not have a desirable attitude, but I don't think I used some inadequate language and I formulated my posts in a readable English (even though it's not my native language), yet I keep getting the most generic answers, as if I'm not already using a Computer since as long as how ancient my hardware is.

Any one of you would've taken at most the same amount of time to look at the save file I provided in any text editor, that it did to reply to any of my posts and with the right knowledge of where the mods get injected in the save, could've given me a solution as to what needs to be removed/changed from it to make it stable, but why bother, am I right?

So, I think it's best to just close this thread, as we're clearly not getting anywhere and it's probably starting to become unpleasant reading these posts and feeling the frustration I keep accumulating with each one.

As a final note, even though it may not seem, I do appreciate everyone for taking from their own free time, trying to help and I'll leave it at that.

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Post by euclid » Mon, 25. Jun 18, 22:48

eXodL wrote: .......even starting a new game, which does fix the crashes......
Well done! Now you know for sure that the problem is at least one of the mods. Now proceed as I've suggested in my initial responds:
  • 1# Check that all the mods you have been using are up-to-date
    2# Enable one mod at a time in your new game to find the mod that causes the problem.
Let us know which mod causes the crash and we are happy to provide further help.

It may be that you won't encounter the problem at all even with all mods enabled. In this case try to load your precious saved game. Does it still causing problems?

Cheers Euclid
"In any special doctrine of nature there can be only as much proper science as there is mathematics therein.”
- Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), Metaphysical Foundations of the Science of Nature, 4:470, 1786

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Post by CBJ » Tue, 26. Jun 18, 00:17

eXodL wrote:Any one of you would've taken at most the same amount of time to look at the save file I provided in any text editor, that it did to reply to any of my posts and with the right knowledge of where the mods get injected in the save, could've given me a solution as to what needs to be removed/changed from it to make it stable, but why bother, am I right?
No, nobody could have done that. Mods are not "injected" into the savegame in one place; they can and do make all kinds of changes, all over the place. That is the nature of modding. As various people have been trying to point out to you, the only people who know what changes a given mod is likely to make are the people who created them, and if you have several installed then that makes things even more complicated. Even if someone did try and identify the problem via the savegame, it is tens of megabytes in size and could easily take many, many hours to sift through, with no guarantee of success.

eXodL
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Post by eXodL » Sat, 30. Jun 18, 15:38

I managed to get an older save to stably run on v4.30. It has the same mods active, yet doesn't crash as the other, so I don't know what to think. It may be something else wrong with this save, although they were both stored on Steam Cloud and both were last played on v3.0.

But no matter, I only lost 7 days of capturing ships and building stations, at least I still have a fully upgraded Skunk and all the zones explored. So, I guess we can call this resolved.

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euclid
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Post by euclid » Sat, 30. Jun 18, 16:56

As a scientist at heart I'd preferred to solve this "mystery" to avoid the same thing from happening again. Anyway, I glad you're now able to enjoy the game again ;-)

Cheers Euclid
"In any special doctrine of nature there can be only as much proper science as there is mathematics therein.”
- Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), Metaphysical Foundations of the Science of Nature, 4:470, 1786

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