Anyone else still need a SUR generator?

Hi guys

No I’m not doing shield bubbles, just ensuring there are enough vertices in each cmp group so that the Builder can form sur parts for all of them.

Sur Builder is a MAGIC tool - that’s why I got so pissed that it isn’t going to be perfected with the *** …. well you know the rest. Hope LS sees me in his sleep now! And if I find him in the Ghostly Directory I’ll haunt him for a few years when I go. rofl.

OK - have you all tried extended testing? Give your ship and sur to NPCs attacking a base and let them be killed in waves until you get a crash. Or hopefully not.

All my attempts fail, some take up to 20-30 minutes but they all fail, testing them one at a time.

When I change the same ship’s sur to a vanilla one (not even resizing), the game runs for over 12 hours without problems.

I’ve not tried single-part surs, I would like to get to the bottom of this problem.

Here are a couple of the surs that fail, you can try them on one of your small ships and let me know if you also crash - then maybe we can diagnose together, or if you don’t get a failure for several hours, then it has to be my laptop environment…

Thanks in advance.

Well I need some help to find out why, and I attached two of my faulty surs, if anyone can try them out and confim that they are not failing in your machines, it would be helpful.

Don’t forget it’s multi-part surs I am making, I haven’t yet tried single-part surs.

And as I said, vanilla surs on the same ships are fine for over 12 hours - I can’t explain that.

LS - I am shooting in the dark with the two Sort settings in Sur Builder, I haven’t found your explanation as to what they affect. And secondary sort, and what happens when it is disabled?

So I just tried all combinations until I got sur parts for all groups.

By the way some surs I made manually using Sur Splicer failed immediately, so have some confidence in Sur Builder as a superior tool. Just wish …!!!

Any help appreciated.

LancerSolurus wrote:
The model’s points are sorted twice to attempt to reduce the ‘lines inside of the model’ problem. The first one is to get the first 3 farthest points. The second one sorts the rest according to the distance from the first 3 points. It didn’t always work though since the inside/outside of the mesh checking would occasionally fail.

Ah, OK that gives a clue then - this problem was also in the two exporters, v1.1 and more in v1.2 - and in surs generated badly by those, the surs fail.

Bejaymac advised importing the sur files into MilkShape, hiding the top of each sur part and looking inside for these problems.

StarTrader wrote:
OK - have you all tried extended testing? Give your ship and sur to NPCs attacking a base and let them be killed in waves until you get a crash. Or hopefully not.

All my attempts fail, some take up to 20-30 minutes but they all fail, testing them one at a time.

When I change the same ship’s sur to a vanilla one (not even resizing), the game runs for over 12 hours without problems.

I’ve not tried single-part surs, I would like to get to the bottom of this problem.

Here are a couple of the surs that fail, you can try them on one of your small ships and let me know if you also crash - then maybe we can diagnose together, or if you don’t get a failure for several hours, then it has to be my laptop environment…

Thanks in advance.

Am I being ostracised or did this request just slip by unnoticed?

If anyone would be kind enough to test these two surs in the zip below for at least overnight I would be very grateful? They fail for me within 30 minutes.

Yes you’re right BBalazs - slipped my mind.

They should still work on the root part, because the vanilla surs obviously only attach the root part, all I did was to rename the vanilla sur.

Anyway here are the ship cmps, surs and mat files too.

The intention as you say is to understand why a sur made with Sur Builder might fail so we can prevent it.

It could be something else on my PC, and this is why I would appreciate someone testing these surs for several hours for me.

Many thanks.

I can now confirm that single-part surs for the same two ships also fail within 30 minutes.

Sad.

Retested yet again with vanilla surs - all runs well for over 3 hours.

Here are the single-part surs if anyone would please test these and the multi-part ones (the ship cmps are the same) I would appreciate the help, it would tell me if the crashes are genuine or if it is indeed my setup.

The only thing I can think to cause this type of crash after a certain amount of time is perhaps large numbers of error messages accumulating in a hidden FL Server log or buffer?

Does anyone know where there is such a log/buffer? I don’t mean C:\FL-Server-errors.log, I know about that one and there is nothing in it.

Very many thanks, Quarks, much appreciated.

Yes you see, this is my point - I don’t think people are testing their new surs long enough.

If someone else can also do the same testing and get back to me then we can see if it is just me and you that have the problems.

Also if anyone can please generate their own new surs for the two ships and test them successfully (at least 4 hours please guys), then I can test them again, and if they are good on my machine too, then we might be able to see the problems that Sur Builder might cause and avoid them.

Can anyone tell me if such a hidden error log or error buffer exists where sur errors might be accumulating and causing the FL Server crashes?

And how to expose it?

Or is there another way to get the same result and see what is failing?

That might give us all a big help to find the causes of problems (not only sur-related) more quickly.