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    Maelstrom New Horizons


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Solved Black load screen upon starting the game

S

Spekulatius

Landlubber
Installed the New Horizons Mod few days ago, build 14 beta 4 btw, really loved it and sunk many hours in it which should have been part of my sleep schedule and planned to sacrifice some more of those hours today.
Problem arose when fighting at sea. Game would stop rendering frames but audio continues. Problem would vanish for about half an hour upon restarting the game and start resurfacing again, which resulted in some frustrating moments. So I defragmented my drive and deleted the option thingy and looked into the error.log
which said something along the lines of runtime error seadogs.c line 749, if my memory isn't deceiving me.
But this was nonetheless a cause for confusion, since I had not touched it even once. So I inspected briefly, closed it whitout saving any changes and attempted to reproduce the crash. Don't know to which extend this is connected to what happened after that, but thought I would mention it, put the seadogs.c file into the attachments if someone else spots a problem with it.
Point is when I tried starting the game again, I got no intro movie just a black loading screen with the aztec coin in the lower right corner and I had to forcibly shut down the game in Task manager after a while. Since the game didn't even initilize completly the compile and system logs are pretty short, but still hope that there can be found a clue inside them.
Help would be very much appreciated.
thanks.
 

Attachments

  • compile.log
    814 bytes · Views: 208
  • system.log
    340 bytes · Views: 207
  • seadogs.c
    86.1 KB · Views: 318
The only odd message I can see is in "system.log":
Code: 
ERROR: Techniques: Find duplicate technique name: radeon8500sea
This is defined in "MODULES\Techniques\Weather\RadeonSea.sha". It is also defined in the identical file "MODULES\Techniques\Weather\Sea\RadeonSea.sha".

Anyone know why both those files are there?

@Spekulatius: delete the file "Options" again and see if you can start the game. Also, where have you installed the game? If it's in "Program Files" or "Program Files (x86)", Windows is liable to do silly things.
 
Thanks for the quick replies. I have allready looked through the faq. And i somehow got it working again. Problem was apparently a foulty nvidia driver. I noticed it when I got some weird bluescreens and after a bit of troubleshooting I fell back to an older version and installed it again. Since then I didn't have any crashes again, hope it stays that way :)
Edit: It ain't on the C drive at all
 
Another thing I noticed in "compile.log" is that you've used the latest installer but not the update archive. You can get that from here:
http://piratesahoy.bowengames.com/potc/Grey Roger/post_25May_updates.zip
However, you'd then need to start a new game as it's incompatible with your current savegames. So if you've made much progress, you may want to hold off downloading that until you've finished your current campaign.
 
Thanks for that, certainly will, after this playthrough. I think it's mindblowing what the comunity has accomplished with all the mods for the various storm engine games and how active it is even after all these years. Thanks for that as well.
Edit: Concerning the duplicate of the RadeonSea.sha, is it save to delete one of them, if yes which one?
 
If the game is working now, I'd leave it alone.

If you want to experiment, rename one of the "RadeonSea.sha" files rather than deleting it. It probably doesn't matter what you call it, as the idea is just to prevent the game from finding it. Or delete it, since both files are the same anyway. Either way, if the game then fails to work, rename the file back to "RadeonSea.sha", or copy the one you didn't delete into the place of the one you did delete. As to which one, your guess is as good as mine!
 
Grey Roger said:
If you want to experiment, rename one of the "RadeonSea.sha" files rather than deleting it. It probably doesn't matter what you call it, as the idea is just to prevent the game from finding it.
Click to expand...
With those module files, I can't rule out that EVERYTHING in that folder gets loaded.
Regardless of its filename.

Safest to move the file completely somewhere else then.
 
I removed the older one. One was from 2004, the other from 2017. Figured that the more recent one is from the mod and the other one got moved there somehow when installing the base game.
Since I also experimented a bit with both files, I am pretty sure that everything in the modules folder gets loaded when starting the game, which checks for duplicates. The game will also start if a crucial file is missing, but will crash as soon as the file is needed.
 
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