Constant Crashing - Spires of Death

[Victor]

Game keeps crashing while playing Spires of Death right after day 35. What could be going wrong? This is the first time the game crashes on me and it has crashed several times already on this map.

[Reality]

Using -gpldebug as a launch option should among other things, give you the specific error when you crash (I know it does for me when I get the Ranger traveling to distant lands crash)

I've never crashed on this level, but there are parts of its Quest Script I have never put to the test.

The Spires track both their number alive 1-5 and your total hero levels (Under 40, between 40-70, and above 70)

My theory is that having high hero levels with all 5 spires during a spire level check / monster spawn might be your problem, because I found it unusual that above 70 with 4-5 was given a seperate command line to above 70 (and spire count)

[Victor]

Well, that rendered the game unplayable with back to back error messages. I kept pressing enter as the log file grew to 1 MB and this are the top errors:

$Guard_Find_Target( (), Dwarven_Settlement#262 ) - line 145 : Tried to access non-existent attribute Home in agent#262, ().Script error:
Call Sequence was:
$Guard_Find_Target( (), Ballista_Tower#326 ) - line 145 : Tried to access non-existent attribute Home in agent#326, ().Script error:
Call Sequence was:
$Release_Guards( (), Guardhouse2#10 )
$IsHidden( false, ??#26 ) - line 117 : Function $InsideBuilding( agent#26 ) failed: unit no longer exists..FRAME 1 TOOK 13299 ms to execute (13299 ms processing). Floating average=13299
Frame 0: Autosave successful
Script error:
Call Sequence was:
$Release_Guards( (), Palace3#19 ) - line 115 : foreach list contains a NULL value in function $Release_Guards().FRAME 2 TOOK 459 ms to execute (459 ms processing). Floating average=12015

Any ideas what might be going on?

[Reality]

that's going to need someone better at the open source than me.

I'll go and beat the quest a few times on the weekend when I don't have job related stuff to do.

[Dwarfownsu]

It's a bug with guardhouses and it's directly in the game's code. You must build a lot of guardhouses because your guard would have to die at the perfect time for it to happen. I ran across it myself, but sadly it requires a mod to fix it. I don't have the time to release a mod to fix only this bug, but if anyone else does here's what needs to be updated.

File: mx_Building_Guard.gpl

Fix: Updating the foreach statement on line 115 to below - a check for isValidGamePiece would probably suffice, but that is also checked in isDead

	Foreach Guard in ThisAgent's "Waiting_Guards" do
		begin
			if ($isDead(Guard) == false)
				begin
					If ($IsHidden (Guard))
						begin
							$DebugOut ("Guardhouse releases a Hidden Guard!");
							//Guard's "Type" = "Hero";
							$UnHide (Guard);
						end
					$DebugOut ("Guardhouse is setting Guard's ActiveScript to Guard Find Target.");
					Guard's "ActiveScript" = $Guard_Find_Target;
					$DebugOut ("Resuming Guard's ActiveScript");
					$ResumeThread (Guard's "ActiveScript");
					thisagent's "waiting_guards" -= guard;				
				end
		end

[Victor]

I went the easier way, restarted the map and was victorious with no bugs and crashes. Last one, feels good. :)
Thank you very much @Reality and @Dwarfownsu!

[Matkatamiba]

Yeah, some kind of wild bug. Seems autosave related, as it happens at 35 days every time (probably 5 day autosave interval)