Mod crashes when a ship is decloaking

posted on December 29th, 2023, 8:24 pm

This is maybe the weirdest issue I have seen so far.
Wile working on my mod I added cloaking device to some ships. Simply copypasting the rom_cloak.odf file, and adding the necessary stuff for a special weapon. Now, the ship cloaks just fine, but when it decloaks, the game crashes, and I have not the slightest idea, why.
The stock game works fine with the cloaking, but as soon as I implement it into the mod, it crashes. Any ideas?

posted on December 29th, 2023, 8:37 pm

Maybe the decloaking sound file is missing? Also check if adding a cloaking device to a stock ship works

posted on December 30th, 2023, 7:40 am

No, that's not it. The base game works perfectly fine, it only crashes if I try to use the cloaking device in the mod.

posted on December 30th, 2023, 7:45 am

Then you have to check every aspect: does the mod override the stock sound with a corrupted/wrong extension file, does it work with other ship models? Is it a hardpoint issue? Are you sure there's not a typo somewhere? What about the ship odf, is there a typo when it comes to special energy or its regeneration, etc... ?

posted on December 30th, 2023, 8:54 am

Yeah... I'm tracking it down right now. It's not ship or faction or ship specific, because it affects both Klingons and Romulans. My best guess right now is a techtree issue, but only because I have no other idea. I use the stock sounds ad effects, and if I just throw all the mod files into the main folder, it still crashes. If I pick any ship with a cloaking device and put it into the base game it works fine, so something must be wrong with the mod.
This is going to be a looong week...

posted on January 5th, 2024, 1:39 am

Does the game crash every single time the ship decloaks without fail? Or only sometimes. I'm wondering what would happen if the cloak extra weapon ended while the ship was in the middle of a decloak cycle...but that would only occur if you decloaked at the wrong time.

posted on January 6th, 2024, 10:19 am

Well, I eventually figured it out.

I am using replaceweapons with shotdelay on invisible pods to control time advancement. And it turned out that if a ship decloacks anywhere near to such pod, it will crash the game. But tinkering a bit with the pod's odf, adding a footprint and forcing ships to avoid it like any other station solved the issue. Finding the solution was only a single day but hunting down the cause took me more than a week.

Oh well, live and learn. I'm just glad it wasn't an unresolvable issue with the engine or something. Onto the next weird CTD I just found. That's the life of modders I guess