What causes Operations to crash the game on load?

[Skarg]

Hi all,

I'm an experienced CM player getting back into playing a bit.

I created a new operation in the scenario editor, with a 6000m x 1200m map randomly generated, previewed it, edited it, I think 30 battles, lots of reinforcements, and saved it as a file.

When I then tried to load it later, either to play or to edit, CMBB (version 1.03, which seems to be the latest) threw an exception and crashed. Windows 7.

So I guess I made it too big or something? I can run other large scenarios and campaigns.

My question is, what are the known causes of scenarios/operations crashing?

And is there a way to recover an operation that always seems to crash when loaded (I assume not)?

[Cranky]

I'm running XP, but I have noticed a few things over the years that seem to render Operations non-functional - generally it has been that the map is too big in one direction.

There also seems to be an issue with too much water.

The only way I know to recover from such problems is to revert to a previously saved version of the map and tinker with it until it loads OK.

A sure sign that an Op has 'gone bad' is that when you press PREVIEW in the Editor, it won't display it, instead you get a dull beep.

This stuff finally taught me to Save my work constantly - I hope you did

Perhaps others can shed more light.

One possibility that occurs is to try loading the map into Pyewacket's Map Converter - just maybe if you convert it to CMAK or convert it to a CMBB Battle and then convert it back?

That's an utter long shot - just a wacky idea, I have no idea if it would work.

I have Map Converter if anyone needs it.

email:

ant2man <at> iinet.net.au

[Erwin]

I created a max size CMAK op map using XP (I have not yet tried it on Win 7) and a huge number of units, plus the whole N map edge was water, and did not have crash problems. (Loaded bloody slow though.)

The only thing is that I had not yet gotten to putting in a mass of reinforcements. Not sure why that would affect things however.

[Skarg]

Thanks Cranky and Erwin!

I hadn't saved any earlier versions, so took a few hours' solemn break, and I started over. No problems so far, with the same size map, and I made regular backups. The differences I can think of are:

* I didn't do as many reinforcements this time.

* I didn't include an all-Partisan-nation reinforcement group for the otherwise-all-Soviet player.

* I didn't mistakenly schedule reinforcements for later than the operation lasted. The max operation battles is 20, which I had used, but I mis-remembered it as 30 when I was making reinforcement groups, and had scheduled some for battle 24, battle 29...

The new battle is otherwise quite similar, and seems to work fine.

[Cranky]

'hadn't saved any earlier versions, so took a few hours' solemn break'

LOL - I know that feeling - "Breathe, be Calm - there's nothing you can do about it...don't smash computer in a rage..."

In my fairly extensive fiddling with the Editors in CMBB and CMAK, I've noticed a lot of subtle and sometimes non-reproducible bugs - it's very hard to say what might be causing your problems - so SAVE, SAVE, SAVE.

And I reiterate: SAVE.

As I mentioned above, a map that won't PREVIEW won't play either, so you can use this fact to test your map without having to exit the Editor.

I'm pretty sure that you can't schedule reinforcements for any battles beyond 20....might have been something else?

Good luck with it.

[Erwin]

Could be that your machine is not up to it and just gives up(?)

[Skarg]

Thanks Cranky.

The number of battles per operation only goes up to 20, but the battle number you can assign reinforcements to arrive on goes up over 100, even though I think they would never ever appear in the scenario. I know I had scheduled some reinforcements for battles 21-30.

In this case, the preview was working ok, at least of the map. I didn't look at it after I'd entered the units, though.

Erwin, I don't think so. I have a nice computer built late last year, so actual capacity of the computer shouldn't be an issue. But it could be a bug caused by it being something that didn't exist when CMBB was programmed.

[Cranky]

"The number of battles per operation only goes up to 20, but the battle number you can assign reinforcements to arrive on goes up over 100"

Skarg, I just had to go and test that, and you know what?

You're right!

I went as far as Battle #701 before my mousing finger got tired.

That's CRAZY, Man....

I didn't know that - I wonder what exploits exist with that wrinkle? And does it cause a problem using battle slots beyond 20, as you suggest it does?

Interesting....thanks for that