Hey @Chthon,

Just installed the patch and I tested the skirmish save bug. I did the following:

1. Started a new skirmish, built one power station, and saved.
2. I loaded the save. No crash.
3. Coming from step 2, still in the skirmish after loading the save, I then loaded a save file of the first campaign mission of GDI (a save file that I had just created from scratch seconds before step 1). No crash.
4. From the campaign save file, I then loaded the skirmish file. No crash.
5. I exited the skirmish, and from the main menu, loaded the skirmish save file. No crash.
6. I exited the game entirely. Started it anew. From the main menu, I loaded the skirmish save file. No crash.

So, yeah, good news? lol. If you're still getting crashes on your end, it might be your computer, maybe? Something unrelated to the mod. Maybe you're missing some drivers or middleware? I don't know why you are getting crashes, but I didn't get a single one.

Hope this helps.

Couple of things I noted as I am playing through the Nod campaign:

1. the repair icon (the wrench) is shown without the red negative sign on it when hovering over a building that is full health. The player can even "click" on a building to repair it despite the building being at full health.

2. There were times when a mission would start and some of my units were not at full health. The health bar would show up next to the units, indicating that the unit was not at full health, but rather at like at 99%. I also noticed that some enemy harvesters would be at 50% health when I first encountered them.

3. When a vehicle is build when playing as Nod, EVA will utter two lines: "construction complete" and "reinforcements have arrived". I dunno if this is a bug or if it is default behavior as I can't remember, but in case it's not a bug, could you mod "reinforcements have arrived" out of the game for airstrip vehicles? It feels overkill to have two lines for every vehicles built. Not only is it redundant with "construction complete", but I feel like "reinforcements have arrived" should be reserved for when the game sends you actual reinforcements and not when the plane delivered a tank that I purchased myself. Moreover, when GDI builds a vehicle in its factory, there isn't a "reinforcements have arrived" line that plays. I feel that GDI and Nod should be the same in how the UI works. I get that narratively, Nod gets their tanks through planes, but I don't think that this should matter. The reinforcements line feels wrong here.

Thank you

Originally posted by WakizashiM:

3. When a vehicle is build when playing as Nod, EVA will utter two lines: "construction complete" and "reinforcements have arrived". I dunno if this is a bug or if it is default behavior as I can't remember, but in case it's not a bug, could you mod "reinforcements have arrived" out of the game for airstrip vehicles? It feels overkill to have two lines for every vehicles built. Not only is it redundant with "construction complete", but I feel like "reinforcements have arrived" should be reserved for when the game sends you actual reinforcements and not when the plane delivered a tank that I purchased myself. Moreover, when GDI builds a vehicle in its factory, there isn't a "reinforcements have arrived" line that plays. I feel that GDI and Nod should be the same in how the UI works. I get that narratively, Nod gets their tanks through planes, but I don't think that this should matter. The reinforcements line feels wrong here.

That's default behaviour. It's been in the game since the original TD.

By the way, I should mention that Harvester Optimization causes problems in one of the Nod missions - specifically, mission 11. You're meant to destroy the Guard Towers, then capture the buildings other than the Construction Yard (i.e. power plant, refinery, communications center, prison). The problem is that when the harvester has used up the small amount of Tiberium near the Nod base, it starts harvesting further away from the Nod base. With Harvester Optimization enabled, the harvester will usually then decide that the refinery in the GDI base is the refinery it should unload at. This effectively makes it impossible to capture the harvester upon capturing the refinery in the Nod base, since it will never unload there.

EDIT: The game crashed when I tried to load a saved game once, and every time after that it crashed when I tried to load that specific saved game, despite that saved game having been fine before that.

Originally posted by DrIgnispirus:

EDIT: The game crashed when I tried to load a saved game once, and every time after that it crashed when I tried to load that specific saved game, despite that saved game having been fine before that.

did you install any other mod? I had the game crash on me repeatedly on loading a save file after I installed the CABAL voice pack mod. I had even created the save file after installing the mod, but the game would still crash when trying to load it. I uninstalled the mod and restarted the mission (and deleted the former save file), and the game stopped crashing. So that new mod was the problem for me.

@ WakizashiM & DrIgnispirus: Thank you both!

The "no repair" wrench thing is now fixed. I messed with that to get the "scold" sound working and didn't realize it broke the icon. I'm afraid the way the GlyphX client works we can only have one or the other. The icon seems more important.

Units at less than full HP: This is probably working correctly. The mission's ini file specifies the HP fraction for each unit on the map, and I haven't touched the code that reads and sets that. Here's an example: The health fraction is the 256, which is measured in 256ths of maxHP, so this unit should start with full HP. You can read the mission files here[web.archive.org].

(After that's done, the balance fixes might change some maxHPs, so I come through and max out the HP on units whose maxHP was increased by the balance fixes, if their current HP is the old maxHP.)

Double Nod announcements: In the original game, having both announcements was meaningful. "Construction complete" told you that you could start building the next vehicle, while "reinforcements have arrived" told you you could start using that vehicle. Since we can queue things in Remastered, the former isn't really needed. So I could look into adding an option to silence it.

Harv problems in single player: I just fixed this so that "harv optimization," "harv load balancing," and "harv queue jumping" don't work for the CPU in single player. I would be worried about giving the player an unfair advantage, except that the bug that gives the CPU a bazillion credits per tiberium bail in single player more than balances things out.

Crash: Is this a new save file created with test build 5? Test build 5 isn't compatible with older saves. Is it a single player save or a skirmish save? Does the save load OK if you start a mission/skirmish first and then load it? If the answers are yes, SP, no, then please send me the save file to look at.

Another issue I found and fixed is that the bugs with helicopter loading some to manifest more frequently with the new pathfinding. I believe I now have helicopters loading every guy 100% of the time, and also fixed the doors not always opening/closing when they should.

Looks like there's going to be a test build 6.

Hey @Chthon,

Thank you for being on top of this.

Re: double Nod announcement lines, do you think that you could make it so that the one line that plays when a vehicle is ready is "unit ready" instead of either "construction complete" or "reinforcements have arrived"? Westwood had already changed "construction complete" for vehicles to "unit ready" as soon as Red Alert 1 because "construction complete" does indeed feel like it should be reserved for buildings. And I've already made my feelings known about "reinforcements have arrived".

I'd super appreciate it if you could make that change. Or at least put in the option in the .ini if you prefer that not being activated by default.

Okay, the game (Tib Dawn) just started crashing every time I load a save (currenty in mission 6c in Nod campaign).

The only thing new that I did just now was boot up Red Alert to test something in skirmish. I didn't save. Just played for like 5 minutes and exited the game. Then I booted TD again to continue my campaign, and the crashes started happening.

Until just now, I hadn't booted Red Alert since 2021. And I formatted my computer since, so right now is the first time that I have booted Red Alert with this current windows installation. Is it at all possible that the simple act of booting up Red Alert Remastered is what caused the crashes to start? It's really the only "new" thing that I did. I played some Tib Dawn missions this morning before my previous post in this thread, loaded some saves, and everything was going fine. But then I boot Red Alert, and bam, I now get crashes in Tib Dawn when loading my save files in the campaign.

Could having booted up RA have changed some line of code somewhere that, in conjuction with your mod, makes the game crash when trying to load up a save file?

Thoughts?

okay I did further tests. I managed to stop the crashes from happening.

Before, I was getting crashes from both loading the save from the main menu or from inside the mission, which meant that it wasn't possible to load a save file at all.

So what I did is delete the save files and create a brand new one from a new start of the mission (nod 6c). I successfully loaded that new save file from both inside the mission and from the main menu.

Here's a thought. The save files that were making the game crash were not brand new; they were saves that I had created by overwriting old save files. Essentially, when I play C&C, I only use around 5 or so save files, that I name "1", "2", "3", "4" and "5". When I start a new mission, the first save that I make will be named "1", meaning that I overwrite the previous save named "1". The save files that were crashing my game had been created (from scratch) yesterday when I started playing the Nod campaign.

Is there any difference in code between a save file created from scratch and one that is created by overwriting a previous file? Like, if I am at a given point in a mission and the timelines split, and in one timeline, I create a brand new save file, and in the other one, I save my game by overwriting a previous save file, will these two save files be identical in code or will there be small differences?

And going back to my booting up Red Alert, is it at all possible that there is a link between that and the save files? Like, for example, what if by booting up Red Alert, it made C&C Remastered think that my Tib Dawn save files were, in fact, Red Alert files, so when I went back to Tib Dawn and tried to load a save, it thought that I was trying to load a RA save inside Tib Dawn, leading to a crash?

I might be completely off base here. I am not a programmer. I'm just giving my thought in the chance that it might help you.

Cheers

Originally posted by Chthon:

Harv problems in single player: I just fixed this so that "harv optimization," "harv load balancing," and "harv queue jumping" don't work for the CPU in single player. I would be worried about giving the player an unfair advantage, except that the bug that gives the CPU a bazillion credits per tiberium bail in single player more than balances things out.

Thanks!

Originally posted by Chthon:

Crash: Is this a new save file created with test build 5? Test build 5 isn't compatible with older saves. Is it a single player save or a skirmish save? Does the save load OK if you start a mission/skirmish first and then load it? If the answers are yes, SP, no, then please send me the save file to look at.

Yes, it was created with test build 5. Single player. No, it crashed when I loaded it from the menu and when I loaded it from in-game.
EDIT: I have no idea what's going on now. I just checked that specific save file to confirm that it did, indeed, crash both from the menu and in-game, and it was fine both times. Yesterday it crashed whenever I tried to load it. Here's a link to it anyway: https://1drv.ms/u/s!AkuvnN836HOkmBkuT6Nq5wU2h4FU?e=p77yAo

For once I've got a solid lead on the crash bug, though it looks like much frustration lies ahead.

When I try to load DrIgnispirus's save file, I get some interesting stuff in InstanceLog_16000.txt. The crash is happening in InstanceServerG.exe at instruction corresponding to
and that's preceded by a bunch of "ChunkFileReaderClass::Close_Chunk inconsistent state! Probable corrupted/tampered file."

Question! DrIgnispirus, do you get the same thing in your log when attempting to load this file crashes?

So, this looks like the GlyphX client can't correctly parse this save file, and then crashes.

This is going to be absolutely miserable to fix because I don't have the source to InstanceServerG.exe, I don't know what it's supposed to be doing, and I can't modify it in any practical way. In a very rough sense, we can surmise that this parser is making some assumption about the save file that's not true with respect to the save files this mod produces. But I have no idea what.

For now I'm going to latch on to the inconsistency of the crashes and hope that it's a matter of alignment. So I'm going to go through and mess with the packing and padding try to make every structure the same size as vanilla, or bigger by a multiple of 8 bytes. This will take a long time, and may not even work.

If that doesn't work, the only other possible fix I can think of is to make an independent save system on the side and feed the dll API a fake file that won't crash it. That would also take a long time, and may not even work.

No, I don't get the same thing. I can't even get it to crash any more.
I did get this, though, from when it crashed before:

Got the crash again. The frustrating part is it's random when it comes. I was playing a Nod mission just fine, saving and loading. Then I get near the end when I start attacking the enemy base, reload a save after a battle gone wrong, and the save crashes the game. The only thing left to do is to restart the mission from the beginning.

Needless to say, this kills any playthrough. I can't continue on playing with this random factor. Hopefully the bug can be fixed eventually. In the meantime, if I want to continue playing, I'll have to revert back to 1.8.

It sucks that we just don't know what causes the crash. I would suggest to backport some 1.9 features to 1.8, one by one, but the testing that would need to be done to detect the bug would be a lot.

In any case, thank you for still working on this, @Chthon. You soldiered on despite the game being over three years old. I super appreciate it.

Oh, I have a request: could you add to the TD mod a feature that lets infantry units shoot two tiles far, just like the infantry units in Red Alert? As I was playing the campaign, I realized just how much it bothers me that infantry units have to be right next to a target to fire at them. It's honestly bothering me enough that I am considering just not playing TD anymore and going straight to RA.

I understand that this would be a big balance modification, so I have no issues with this feature being disabled by default. But I would super appreciate it if it was there at all so I could activate it for myself when playing the campaign.

Thank you

EDIT: I guess I'll make this request as well. In case you would consider adding this feature, could I ask that you add it to 1.8 so that I could use it without any fear of the game crashig on me? I'd understand if you don't want to do this, no worries; but I would super duper appreciate it. Thanks!

@Chthon
I've been following the FF7 mod scene for a while, and I asked the author of FFNx if he'd be willing to help you with this issue, and he kindly accepted! He wants to talk to you directly on Discord. Steam doesn't have a PM feature for some reason, so I can't send you his info (and I'd prefer to not put it here in the open). Is there any way that I can PM you somehow? I'm also on Discord; perhaps you could give me your Discord info here so that I could PM you? Or you could point me to one of your other socials.

Let me know the best way that I can connect you to him. He's a programmer; I'm sure he'd be a great help!

Cheers mate

i have played around with this with one of my missions, it was really good and fun, but i say the Tiberium Resurgence is a bit to powerfull, maybe make its timer the growth burst longer or maybe better make it customisable for players that use this mod so they can balance it them selfs on ther own taste, overal great work on this, this mod really makes this game better