Anyone else still need a SUR generator?

Thanks Sushi.

To speed things up a bit for me…

Would anyone please make me a pair of surs for the two ships in my zip using Sur Builder and let me have them back so I can test them?

Thanks.

Many thanks, Quarks! Phew, you’re a fast one on a good day!

Quarks -

I am sad (but also glad) to say that…

Sadly both surs fail within 3 to 10 minutes in the same way mine do!

I tried them one at a time, and ran the test 3 times for each sur. Same system, same encounter, just changed difficulty to select the right ship and sur.

Very many thanks for making them.

Hopefully Sushi can also confirm that mine fail on his machine, and I’ll see what I can do to take it on from there.

Many thanks in advance guys.

Forsaken wrote:
ST, no offense to your abilities or anything… but are you absolutely sure it isn’t just a SUR issue?

No offence taken at all, I need all the help I can get to find the cause of this problem. If it’s a method problem then I need to find it.

I’ve been struggling with surs for a long time, and many work right away when I use the Sur Splicer method. Others crash right away on launch and are easy to remake. That can be strange, as remaking the same sur from the same parts often works!

I don’t have the problem others have with some parts of a sur not registering hits, this I think is naming problems that I solve by careful naming during the process.

Other methods and also some of my efforts with Sur Splicer run for a while but just refuse to run clean for a long period no matter how many times I optimise the ship groups and remake them.

By optimise I mean I remove thin bits and booms from ships to ensure only the big chunky sections remain for sur building.

So I have been doubting myself, and this is why I have asked others to test the same surs, and Quarks made a new set for me which also failed in the same way mine did - so either we both have bad environments or there is a problem with sur generation.

I have used two PCs for sur building and testing, one is my laptop and the other is a desktop. Same results, a good sur is good on both and a bad one is bad on both.

This particular problem is odd because it takes a long time for a sur to fail, the FLServer.exe crashes. I test them one at a time, there are only these test ships used by NPCs (DevilRay and Manta) and a base ship that kills them. I have some other Nephilim ships that I have made surs for (Moray, Lamprey, TripleSkate) and those fail in the same way, so I am just using these two for testing now.

When I put vanilla surs on the test ships too then the game runs for 12 hours plus with no crashes.

If we can isolate the cause of the problem between us then I’m hoping LS might melt a little and fix it for us, or another expert might generate a new tool or exporter.

But without isolating the precise cause of the problems, if it was me I would not be interested either.

LS hinted at internal lines in the sur, and Bejaymac many years ago fiound the same problem when using the exporter v1.1 (and v1.2 was worse). This is connections between lower-order vertices, which causes the sur shape to be concave and not convex throughout as it should be.

So - if a couple of others would please test the same two surs that I attached and confirm they are clean or crash, and perhaps if you would also test the new surs that Quarks made for me, we can take it from there.

I have used the manual method with Sur Splicer with the best success, other methods are faulty including Sur Builder, which is so close that it is a sad thing.

What is my ultimate goal? A guaranteed method or utility that everyone can use to make good surs quickly without the sweat and tears that I have to go through each time.

All testing and confirmation of good/bad is very welcome, fixing these difficulties will benefit all modders.

Sushi’s 1.5 hours looks promising that the surs are in fact good and it might be my PCs and Quarks’ PC setups.

Sushi, many thanks.

There is another angle I am trying to isolate if you have the time please:-

My crashes happen by a single NPC faction attacking the base ship, and adoxa has narrowed the crash to a possible munition collision.

This doesn’t sound completely convincing to me.

My theory is hull to hull collision, maybe when an NPC with the sur crashes into the base ship hull. It does not crash when I use the same base ship and use any vanilla sur for the NPC faction with the same DevilRay or Manta ship.

Could you please use one faction with the DevilRay or Manta, one at a time, and make them hostile to your base, let them attack it and be killed by the base please?

I really would appreciate you testing this method, it is such an intermittent problem - if it fails for you in this way then we can be almost certain it is a ship to ship collision problem that happens so rarely.

By the way - I am assuming you are not using any error-preventer hack?

Thank you.

Thanks adoxa, will do asap.

Sushi - I ran it your way last night, I set the test-sur NPCs wth the DevilRay to neutral to the base so it would not attack them, and had my Lib Navy (vanilla ships and surs) attacking them.

Guess what - it ran clean for 2 hours! I didn’t have time to test longer, but normally it will fail within 10-20 minutes every time when they are attacking the base ship.

So I think to be conclusive I would like to see what happens on your machine when you set them up (one faction only) to attack the base ship/station so it kills them.

A base ship with a custom sur would be more accurate, as that is what I’m using, but mine is huge - 1800 metres long, so if it is a hull collision it may still not happen on yours if your base ship is small.

I will set up adoxa’s traps to see what collisions we catch in any case.

Thanks again.

Quarks wrote:
Since I have this problem, too…I just jeplaced the li_fighter’s model with Startrader’s ship and edited the loadouts, then edited the manhattan pop zone, nothing else. So usually there should not be any problem.

Thanks Quarks.

So you get the same problem just by having the two factions kill each other?

Not by attacking a base, right?

So my hull to hull collision theory is wrong, I will do more extended combat testing too.

Many thanks guys, it will be great to identify the cause of yet another rare crash problem.