Crashing on loading Custom Faction in-game

[OFFLINECHARACTER258]

Just went through the abilities and apparently the "Traders" Ability is what's causing the CTD'S

[Raa00]

Hi, this doesn't seem to be a general problem with any custom faction with a "Traders" ability, if you mean "loading custom faction in-game" means either starting a new game with that faction, or trying to load a save file made while playing that faction. Could you upload the .faction file from My Games\GC3Crusade\Factions for the faction that is causing a crash for you? My guess would be, if a faction is causing a crash on starting a new game with the Traders ability, it is because the freighter ship class that you get a ship from for free at the start of the game is missing or invalid in some way.

I did find some crash reports associated with your SteamID from the day you posted this, however the crashes you were getting were caused by a missing specialization def in the faction's tech tree. The debug logs suggests that you were running mods; if you disable mods, do you still get the crash? Is this crash separate from the custom Traders faction crash you were getting, or is that faction using a modded tech tree?

[OFFLINECHARACTER258]

Disabling mods fixed it. Launched with traders ability (and every other one as well) no problem.

I've made general modifications to the tech tree, however I don't recall anything changed/ removed/ added to the trade techs. Mostly it was adding in bonuses to the leftover weapon techs for, well, everything that had been taken out from the branches (range, cost, mass, etc) with the update (3.6??) that had removed the 3 choice specializations.
Did the bug report say which techs were broken, and perhaps where/ what line?? Also, ......do I upload the faction file through steam or....??? (Never uploaded anything previously).

Much gratitude.

[Raa00]

Hi, my explanation was a little confusing, but the reason why your game was crashing was because of a missing/invalidly-named tech specialization def ANYWHERE in the tree, not because of one specifically related to the Trader trait, unless that trait was used as a prereq for some tech specializations.

Unfortunately, the way that the debug messages were coded, I don't have access to the name of the tech specialization def that is missing. However, if you added any TechDefs, or removed any TechSpecializationDefs from a TechSpecializationDefs.xml file, I would expect that is where the problem is. If you added a tech def, make sure that any strings in a <Specialization> tag are matched by the <InternalName> of some <TechSpecialization>. If you removed any specializations, make sure they are not referred to in any TechDef.

In an upcoming patch, we will update the debug message to give the name of the expected TechSpecializationDef that can't be found, and the game will no longer crash. Instead, the dependent tech and any further techs along the tree will be snipped off until the data problem is addressed. That way tech tree modders can hopefully get fewer crashes while working things out, and will get more useful feedback.

[Raa00]

As for uploading a faction file, hopefully you shouldn't need to, since it sounds like the tech tree mods were what was causing the crash, and that info would be in the mod folder, not the faction files. In the future though, if anyone asks for a file, we usually ask that they upload the file to a third-party cloud service like Dropbox, Google Drive, or Onedrive, then post a link to the file here.

[Shaupat]

We have a fix for this problem that will be part of our next patch.

[Shaupat]

Can you try the opt-in to see if that addresses your crash:
https://steamcommunity.com/app/226860/discussions/1/3557193237111136366/