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    Maelstrom New Horizons


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Fixed Suggestions and a few bugs

The Havana bug can be fixed now that it is known to be there. I kept getting escort missions to Santiago and Martinique and they work fine.

You seem to be having worse luck than most. I rarely ever have any of those problems, and if it aint broke you can't fix it. :shrug
 
That is the problem with developers today. The difference between a good developer and an excellent developer is that the good developer will tell you it's not broken if it works on his computer, the excellent developer will tell you it's broken if it doesn't work on either computer.

I consider myself to be, not one of the best developers in the world today, but THE best developer and if I tell you something is broken you better listen to that. If I get pissed enough off I might consider fixing the crash bugs, it will take me exactly 35 minutes to do that, what this community didn't manage to fix in 10 years.

Sorry about my directness. I get irritated with bugs. I don't produce them anymore myself, that is mostly why I get irritated when other people create them. Because it's laziness, it's not incompetence.

I remember I visited a different forum and they had a discussion about a bug in the engine of a different strategy game, they had that problem since 2005 and I joined the forum and coded a patch for that bug, they banned me from the forum after I fixed it.

Spend 5 times more time, and you'll be fine.

Pirates of the caribbean is a very shiny ferrari with a huge bulk on one of its sides and many tiny bulks all over the car. If you only open one of its door, you're likely to crash something. This community seems to be focused on adding new things to the ferrari, instead of focusing on fixing the bulks. The problem with that philosophy or that approach is that, if you some time in the future decide to fix the bulks, you probably have to strip off the new things from it and fix the bulks, then add the new things onto a new ferrari where the objects have to be adapted to a non-bulky car, which is basically sillyness. Focus on the bulks, then focus on modding.

Stop being lazy. Get the crash dumps, locate the module with error, locate the error, fix the error. (The tiny "apple-fixes" that you guys have fixed until now, are almost irrelevant fixes, it doesn't fix any major problem)
 
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We want to fix all bugs, of course. And not ever will you be banned here for reporting them.
And for fixing any, you'll just have a lot of our gratitude and you'll very an immediate firm promotion to Storm Modder.

Our main problem these days is that we're severely underhanded.
Most fixing needs to be done by me because there is nobody else left to do it.
Which is especially annoying because generally I find myself cleaning up after all the modders who left and I hardly ever get round to doing much of my own.
Not much fun, really.

Anyway, for your Havanna Escort quest issue, please provide a savegame just prior to getting into port so that I can try to replicate it and figure out why it is happening.
 
I think the answer is not really to solve problems in the game engine, but rather to split it up (Basically pluck out parts of it) and put in new modules to replace it. There are two ways of fixing a broken engine, one is to directly alter the engine or to try to separate out parts of it into your own modules, I think the latter is the better option for this game. After a while you gain a lot of control over the game by doing it that way. It's a lot of work, lucky for me, the game I fixed earlier, I were already familiar with the modules, I have no familiarity with this game yet.
 
We have no access to the game engine (ENGINE.exe and the DLLs in the MODULES) folder, so all the coding we do is in the PROGRAM and RESOURCE\INI folders.
One of the challenges we have is that many, many modders have done all sorts of things over the years, but not all of them did it equally well and some of them never finished their work.
Understandable, as most of us were never professional programmers to begin with. But it isn't an ideal situation. We deal with it as best we can, though.
 
What can I do to produce a crash, what is the most known cause of crash, tell me what to do to crash the game. I just want to take a look at what is going on. (Preferably a crash that can be produced in stock game, not with mod installed)
 
Not all the problems are crashes. Actually, I think most of the known issues are bugs of a different kind.

One of the known crashes is an occasional one apparently triggered by looting during boarding.
But that one is inconsistent and not a huge issue. I can think of worse problems, most of them listed on the bug tracker:
http://www.piratesahoy.net/forums/build-mod-bug-tracker.161/
 
The one about the game crashing after looting during boarding is a very significant one for me. More so than the top 10 entries in "Bug Tracker", and two of those are my reports. xD It doesn't happen in the stock game, though, and neither did it happen in Build 13. In fact, as far as I remember, both of those were very stable - it's only Build 14 which has a habit of crashing, and looting when boarding is the most frequent way to make it happen.
 
Nice rant.

The Havana escort bug was found and fixed years ago. We did not know it had resurfaced. Got a save game?
 
I found that it is trying to load a texture which is called BOUSOLLE.TGA.tx but the real name of the file is boussole.tga.tx and the game has memory leaks too (in which it is doomed to crash at a time you can't predict) I would also highly recommend to increase the stack and heap size, which are set at 1 Megabyte, just in case there is a lot of fragmentation it might just fail to get heap space from time to time. Other than that, I tried to produce a crash, failed to get a crash, so I just have to play until one occurs and then see whats going on. A minor issue with directsound it seems to be handled in the same thread as the game thread, which is bad programming philosophy, I/O operations should be in a separate thread, that is why sometimes the music repeats a specific part when loading a game. But then again this game was created when multithreading was in a very early phase.
 
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That Bousolle.tga bug surfaced years ago but it doesn't seem to hurt anything so nobody has bothered to fix it.

Yes the game does have memory leaks and yes it does crash randomly. Always has.

Increase stack and heap size? No one has suggested that AFAIK in all these years. I am no programmer and do not know where to look for that.

The boarding crash used to happen almost every time, but then became rare. I still do not get it but it sounds like others are getting it again. Fixing it should be a priority.
 
You can use editbin.exe that comes with vc++ or you can use any hex editor too and just change the number to whatever you like. It's defined in the PE header of the executable (engine.exe)

The commit size should be one page, 4096 bytes, it grows automatically up to reserve size, you should only change reserve size, which is the maximum it will allocate. And I would keep it at multiples of 4 or multiples of 4096 and no more than 10 MB, more than that is probably madness.
 
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Could you repeat that, in English this time?

I have no ideer what you just said. I looked at the EXE in my hex editor and saw nothing like a PE header.
 
If I recall, somebody did increase those numbers in ENGINE.exe sums years ago and I did put that in the modpack then.
It should still be in there, unless it secretly managed to sneak back out again.
But I don't know how to check that.

You're welcome to update the file though and I can add that to the next update.

If we know what model file refers to the wrong texture, it would be easily corrected. Di you have any idea what triggers it?
I do know that because of limitations in the TOOL we've been using, a lot of unused textures are referred to anyway.
They don't do any harm not being there, but it's still ugly and gets listed in system.log too.
 
Change byte at file offset 330 from 10h to 80h and byte at 338 from 10 to 80h as well and it increases from 1 MB to 8MB then overwrite the original executable.

That is, 330 (decimal) and 338 (decimal)

--------------------------------
or the file offset in hex:

Offset 14A (Change from 10h to 80h)
Offset 152 (Change from 10h to 80h)

8 MB patched engine.exe http://www.filedropper.com/engine
 
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I don't know a thing about hex stuff.
All anyone here really knows is that when there is a recognizable filename hidden in there, it can be edited to something else.
 
That will probably not solve anything, but it will make sure that it always have access to enough heap and stack memory.
 
It's been too many years since I messed with that stuff and it did not stir any memories. I will try it anyway.
 
I installed that engine.exe change and there was one crash early on but no others since. That crash happened when a lot of very large ships got caught in a storm with lightning strikes, all at 10X speed.
 
So I started a new game, and it is a NEW GAME! I don't know if this EXE is the reason but beta 3.5 now plays at least as well as beta 3.3 does. :monkeydance

The shipyard menu scrolls smoothly now and there is no hint of that game breaking pause every half second. Since I changed nothing else I can't point my finger at any other culprit. There also have been no more crashes. This is worth mentioning as at least one crash a day is mandatory.

Anyway, the real test will come later when I gets lots of BIG ships.
 
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