Suspected corruption issue due to overrun of missions list?

[glenmcd]

First, here's the info "required by all":

1. Albion Prelude V2.5.3 English Steam

2. Game is highly modified. However! I've been researching this issue through (literally) thousands of game starts, both vanilla and modified. Today was a breakthrough in that I pushed the number of concurrent missions beyond anything before, with interesting results.

3. For a long time I've played only DiD mode. So can't comment whether issue exists with other starts. Expect so, don't know at all.

4. The problem arises only when I generate many concurrent generic missions. I routinely have 10 or more on the go, often 20+ but today I pushed that to probably around 40. Symptoms include getting messages of "mission failed as you did not deliver the ship in time", and this happening in spite of the fact that the mission with least time left had multiple minutes remaining. For a while I thought there was a problem with game time, perhaps something in the game continued to run while supposedly game was paused. But now I'm thinking that I've gone past some artificial limit on how many generic missions can be concurrent, and in doing so data has been corrupted within AP. It isn't just deliver ship missions that appear to end without being visible in the list. It also includes taxi missions. There may be others but these are missions I most often take on. If the game is going to have a problem with how I play, then it should force a limit and not just allow itself to become corrupted. I would much prefer that the max concurrent generic missions be raised significantly. I enjoy the challenge of doing more in less time, and so anything less than 100 is likely to still be a limit to me at some time in future. I've had a long time to work out ways of doing more in less time and I'd like to continue to develop this.

5. I've made tons of changes using the scripting language, however I really can't think of any that could possibly relate to this issue at all. The fact that I've had it happen in vanilla kind of suggests that similar issues happening now while in modified are unrelated to the mods.

6. As mentioned above, the error messages I'm seeing are simply stating that some generic mission has failed due to running out of time. If said mission was visible in the list, then I'd have completed it. One of my "house rules" for a game is that I never fail any mission. If I do, I count that same as dying and force a restart. Thus, I'm quite sensitive to failed missions and able to pickup this issue easily.

7. Click here to see my DxDiag, generated today.

Glen

EDIT: I just remember another symptom that seems to be associated with above. You have multiple taxi missions. You have guidance enabled on most urgent one. You pickup the passengers, and expect that the guidance thing will guide you to the destination of same mission. But sometimes, it instead enables guidance on the next mission in list which is rather confusing. Again for a long time I thought this was a seperate issue, but now I feel that it is associated with having more concurrent generic missions only.

[glenmcd]

Update 30 March:
When attempting to duplicate, be sure to swap to desktop (which should pause the game) for some minutes. Today, I was setup to complete a mission, one of just two remaining (the other was the first Argon Sector M148 that is generated automatically) and I had to swap to desktop to do a couple of things. When I got back into the game (clicked on X3AP in taskbar), I had only the M148 mission in the list. I didn't have the game going long enough to determine whether that mission timed out or not unfortunately.

[GlassDeviant]

Egosoft probably did not expect anyone to run so many concurrent missions, and so did not provide enough data structure to keep the mission details for that many in the code.

I don't think my brain has enough data structure to keep track of more than a half dozen 8^D