Freelancer crashes..

emdeesee

Man… I hate it when stuff like this happens. Will try to make this short. Had Freelancer up and running with mods & FLMM just fine on my PC before it cr*pped out (my PC… not the game).

Replaced mobo… also discovered bad RAM in the process. My friend donates me his old Q6600 Quad core in the process (because new mobo will take it… an upgrade for me) and his two old 8800 GTs (SLi). At least my hard drives were OK.

Before all of this grief I saved the Freelancer install directory, Like my huge modded Freespace 2 install… it seemed to have worked in the past that that was all that was needed. But this time the game wouldn’t start after a fresh OS install as well.

So here’s where I stand:

2.4 Ghz quad core CPU
6 Gb 666 RAM in dual channel config (XP only sees 3)
2 Nvidia 8800 GTs in SLi
onboard Realtek hi-def sound
Windows XP home w/SP3 (very clean, new install)
fresh, clean install of Freelancer (no mods… 1.1 patch applied)

My problem is I can’t get into the game. The videos start and play… then the Freelancer logo comes up and it exits to the desktop. The game seemingly stays minimized to the taskbar (it didn’t do that the first couple of tries but now it does). If I click the taskbar to try and open it back up… my only option is to Close… whereafter a dialog also pops up telling me the game has “stopped responding”… closes… and then wants to send a report to Microsoft. My problem is exactly the same as this fellows: http://the-starport.net/freelancer/forum/viewtopic.php?topic_id=2249&forum=21 …but he had no solution.

I have tried:

Installing FLMM 1.4b4 and launching the vanilla game from it

Deleting the saved games folder (new install nothing there but the profile)

Editing the perfoptions.ini and disabling 3D sound (since I can’t get into the in-game menu) by setting it to 0.00 instead of 1.00

Disabling SLi and running on 1 card

The game defaults to 1024 X 768 anyway and I have never had any problems in SLi before anyway (previously had 2 9800 GSOs in SLi).

Any suggestions would be appreciated. I finally got broadband back as well after a 3 year hiatus and was able to download the huge Crossfire & Nightstalker mods and can’t wait to try them out!

Thanks to all for your time & attention.

FriendlyFire

I would have suggested downloading the updated GPU definitions, but apparently the EOA site is once more down. You’ll have to wait until somebody comes in this thread with something relatively up to date for that.

Otherwise, have you tried deactivating any antivirus or firewall you might have? We’ve seen a resurgence of issues related to a bad a/v causing crashes with FL, such as Microsoft Security Essentials. If deactivating does not work, uninstalling might. It’s a long shot but you’ve already done a lot of the general debugging steps so who knows.

Otherwise, I know it will sound weird, but you should really upgrade to Windows 7. XP is now 10 year old and it does show; you may get better compatibility and drivers with a newer OS.

Bas

You can try installing the game in a different location, but I doubt that this one will work out.

emdeesee

Thanks for your suggestions gents but I think I figured it out. I dinked around a bit more with some of the savegame files. In perfoptions.ini I simply deleted the 1.00 option for 3D sound and left it blank. I also left the dir structure intact but deleted Restart.fl file and it started right up! So everything’s running OK but now I have another problem…

I installed FLMM 1.4 b4 and loaded up all of my new shiny mods. I installed Crossfire and wanted to try it out first, but of course it protested because I was using v 1.4 and I decided to try it anyway… it was “no go”. So then… because I was a bit afraid to mess with a good thing… I decided to install v 1.31 right over 1.4 thinking that would be OK… and it was. Only thing is when I start up FLMM 1.31 now it says it can,t load two of the mods I already installed. From the log:

Unable to load mod!
Parsing error on line 25: No found (in ‘C:\Games\Freelancer\FLMM\mods\freshstart\script.xml’)
Parsing mod script…
Found mod: C:\Games\Freelancer\FLMM\mods\freshstart

and…

Unable to load mod!
Parsing error on line 23: unable to find ‘=’ (in ‘C:\Games\Freelancer\FLMM\mods\Backup content.dll v1.0\script.xml’)
Parsing mod script…
Found mod: C:\Games\Freelancer\FLMM\mods\Backup content.dll v1.0

I probably don’t need the Backup content mod (from ModDB) because don’t the newer versions of FLMM do that anyway now? And as for the freshstart mod… it’s probably not needed as well for the mods that allow SP play anyway.

I’m concentrating on SP right now but since I have broadband back… hope to get on some servers in the future. A few months ago when I was still on dial-up I experimented with IonCross, flhook and such just to try and set up my own servers because some mods (Itano or Flak’s as I recall…) said that was the route to take to play SP in their mods but that was a total PITA for me and I never got it to work correctly.

So now I loaded up Crossfire and checked it out a bit but when I exited and tried to deactivate it I got errors so now I’m gonna’ just do a fresh clean install all over again <sigh>and go with FLMM 1.31 right from the get go.

One last question though… I seemed to have run across a FLMM v 1.5 somewhere in my archives. Anybody ever hear of that? Me thinks my best bet is to stick with 1.31 though, especially if all the mods will work in it anyways.</sigh>

Bas

The crash problem most likely came from the restart.fl file.

AFAIR crossfire is known for having problems after deactivating the mod. It was at least for 1.7 the case, not sure about 1.8.

Sometimes FLMM 1.4 or 1.5Beta can cause problems, so I guess the safest solution is to stick to 1.31. You can’t use* mods which are compressed by 7Zip (or was it just for the ultra compression).

You can’t “install” them to FLMM with double-click, but you can still extract them with winrar or 7-zip into your “mods” archive of FLMM and activate them then.

For the problems for the two mods I suggest you install FLMM 1.3 into a different directory.

If you have problems with Freelancer, try this:
Deactivate all mods.
Tools -> Restore backups

For SP you surely want to try out adoxa’s single-player console and maybe also FLHack - You need FL v 1.1 (it will still be shown ingame as v 1.0)

Also, I recommend that you make a backup copy of Freelancer after you installed it, if there are any problems with it (which can occur a lot with that game) you can simple copy your backup folder.