Okay thanks. It would have to be a vanilla issue if that were the case. I’m pretty sure I know what was doing it.

It’s my own personal mod so I am using some FX from the Disco mod, specifically a particle FX that they attach to some tradelane rings in nebulas. It replaces the lights with a particle FX, so 16 of them per ring. I added them to the first and last ring in each lane, and also added 12 of them to planetary docking rings.

I think what was happening, and why it was crashing at planets, is that with sometimes 3 tradelanes and a docking ring in that area, it was adding up to 50 or so of these particle FX and the game just can’t cope with it.

I thought it was fine when I used it in the past, but perhaps I was wrong about that, could have been one of the last things I was playing around with before I stopped a couple of years back.

NPC shields don’t recharge, player shields do. You’re going to have to think about the balance effect of them having rechargeable shields and not being able to fire all of their guns flat out if you change out power plants, because they will still keep firing a single gun rather than stop and recharge unless they’re evading.

Hey bud, Glock sent me a message a couple of years ago on the old starport site. We abused each other in the usual manner, as is custom, and that was the last I spoke to him.

He was still running Asylum51 a few years ago, but it wasn’t FL related. I think it was a forum for batshit crazies to voice their concerns about socialist trouser weasels, he was off his meds at that time I suspect.

I like to believe he and Deacon rode off into the sunset together on their bikes whistling Dixie, and lived happily ever after. The status of Lewis and the other horsemen is unknown.

Yeah cool, I’m wondering how the job board plugin works, is that something that only triggers when you open the job board itself, or would it cause something to happen on dock. The only other thing I have in mind, because it’s planets I’ve been seeing it on, is the scripts from this https://www.moddb.com/games/freelancer/addons/planetscapes-fixed-for-169-resolutions.

They’re all landing pad scripts, and it crashes as that would be loaded. That has a lot of downloads though and no mention of it.

That is what I’ve been doing so our thinking is aligned. I’m running around on base jflp and it seems to be fine, without a 1.1 patch. I’m testing now with just Adoxa’s plugins I’ve mentioned on 1.0, so I’ll see how that goes. It might just be a case of ditching my old files, no big deal.

I don’t expect a game of this age to be flawless on windows 11 and newer hardware anyway, 10th gen intel and a 4060ti, an odd crash here and there will happen.

I’ve been flying a loop of planets, Manhattan to New Tokyo, to New London, to New Berlin and back to Manhattan. If it crashes on a dock with one of those planets, the autosave has me back to the system jumpgate entry, and then it docks fine at said planet. So it doesn’t seem to be related to the planet itself, which is what makes it hard to fathom. FLSpew has nothing other than system exit for the dock crash.

How to pin it down.

I’m actually only using jflp.dll, hudshift.dll, mp3codec.dll, and the stuff you very kindly made for me, matchjob.dll, poststorydiff.dll, and if I’m not using the last one I use matchplayer.dll instead.

I can remember when you made matchplayer I said it doesn’t work, and you said are you using 1.0, which I was, so you changed it to work with 1.0, being the saint that you are! So am I in a pickle here with using a mix of some things that should be 1.0 and some that should be 1.1, and what should I do about that, move to 1.1 do you think.

I am using the difficulty modifiers on the HD mod as well if that might cause an issue.

This is all the different offsets I have this year, mostly not in the crash offsets list, anyone have any info on how I debug this?

-----My Files-----
Common.dll 0x000c21de
Common.dll 0x00091eb8
Common.dll 0x00010d61
Common.dll 0x000af6fc

Content.dll 0x000c458f (Possibly related to missing faction entries in an mbases.ini entry)
Content.dll 0x000d9021

EngBase.dll 0x0000eab5

alchemy.dll 0x0000701b (Rare crash, occurs inconsistently when creating an instant jump fx)

SERVER.dll 0x0006d276

KERNEL32.DLL 0x0005b37e

ntdll.dll 0x00049585
ntdll.dll 0x00049575

-----HD MOD-----
alchemy.dll 0x0000701b (Rare crash, occurs inconsistently when creating an instant jump fx)
ntdll.dll 0x00047418

-----DISCO------
Common.dll 0x00091f38 (ship_archetype = <blank> in players file)
Freelancer.exe 0x0001b061

HD mod saves in its own folder, still in docs though. Are you saying to move it out of docs somewhere else. HD mod is installed on a different drive as well, on an ssd, could move the save folder onto that drive as well.

Disco deletes single player saves when you start the launcher, so I only play it online, but what it does store is in the standard FL save folder.

I thought maybe it was jflp.dll because I’m not using much at all, HD mod uses it but Disco doesn’t, so I disabled it, but it still crashed on dock after a while.

It did catch a couple of other errors last night when it crashed, all 3 errors at the same time, but in this order.

Faulting application name: Freelancer.exe, version: 1.0.1223.11, time stamp: 0x3e401b79
Faulting module name: Common.dll, version: 1.0.1223.11, time stamp: 0x3e401cd3
Exception code: 0xc0000005
Fault offset: 0x000af6fc
Faulting process id: 0x0x13F0

Faulting application name: Freelancer.exe, version: 1.0.1223.11, time stamp: 0x3e401b79
Faulting module name: Common.dll, version: 1.0.1223.11, time stamp: 0x3e401cd3
Exception code: 0xc0000005
Fault offset: 0x000af6fc
Faulting process id: 0x0x28E4

Faulting application name: Freelancer.exe, version: 1.0.1223.11, time stamp: 0x3e401b79
Faulting module name: Common.dll, version: 1.0.1223.11, time stamp: 0x3e401cd3
Exception code: 0xc0000005
Fault offset: 0x000af6fc
Faulting process id: 0x0x2E10

Happens on Freelancer HD, interestingly doesn’t happen on Discovery. Can zip around online there no probs.

Good to know.

I installed FL from my old disc, do you think that’s an issue nowadays?

I wasn’t thinking that, grateful for any feedback. I dug out some files of my own I had backed up last used on windows 10 , it wasn’t an issue I was experiencing then, but it is a newer pc build, so it could be hardware related even if it seems unlikely to me. I built it a couple of years ago now so if there were any instability issues I should have caught them long ago.

I tried FLScan on the files and didn’t catch any errors, but I think what I’ll do is try the HD install and see if that runs stable. That should tell me something useful.

Thanks for pointing me in some kind of direction.

My system is good, it gets a hammering with modern games without issues, there’s nothing much else in there other than FL going back the whole year. The GOG launcher shows up a couple of times.

I’m not using anything here other than JFLP and a couple of Adoxa’s other DLL’s either, but windows 11 became a solid bitch to me for running FL.

I’ll run a few tests just in case, doesn’t hurt now and then. Thanks.

I keep getting crashes on docking in single player, usually after about 30 mins or so of playing, always on dock, but could be any base, anywhere. The process id changes but the rest remains the same. Weirding me out now, this game is getting hard to run stable as time goes on. Any of this mean anything to anyone please?

Faulting application name: Freelancer.exe, version: 1.0.1223.11
Faulting module name: ntdll.dll, version: 10.0.22621.4541
Faulting module path: C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\ntdll.dll

some examples

Exception code: 0xc0000005
Fault offset: 0x00049575
Faulting process id: 0x0x1D9C

Exception code: 0xc0000005
Fault offset: 0x00049575
Faulting process id: 0x0x2EE0

Exception code: 0xc0000005
Fault offset: 0x00049575
Faulting process id: 0x0x90

Exception code: 0xc0000005
Fault offset: 0x00049585
Faulting process id: 0x0x3C9C

Exception code: 0xc0000005
Fault offset: 0x00049585
Faulting process id: 0x0x39A8

Exception code: 0xc0000005
Fault offset: 0x00049585
Faulting process id: 0x0x367C

Exception code: 0xc0000005
Fault offset: 0x00049585
Faulting process id: 0x0x6B8

Exception code: 0xc0000005
Fault offset: 0x00049585
Faulting process id: 0x0x3F84

@CommanderArgelo Well done, it always feels nice when you start understanding which files relate to others. You just have to remember to keep testing as you go so you don’t do a lot of work that you don’t like afterwards.

I guess you know that placing ; before any line means the line won’t be read, so comment out all those destroy missions except the hardest and then see what happens when you take it. If it turns out that the hardest difficulty against liberty police that only have a single level 1 ship loadout isn’t what you hoped it would be then you’re going to have to fix the problem you just created for yourself.

How would you fix that, by creating more difficult npc ship loadouts for them, but then how do you make them spawn, by increasing the difficulty of in system encounter zones, if you do that what happens when you start a new game and you’re confronted by ships of a much higher level than you are in your starflier.

Missions might spawn several waves of lower difficulty npc’s, or they might just throw a single wave of 2 high level npc’s at you, it’s math based. You might find that a powerful support wing turns up that wipes out your inferior opponent, or vice versa. Weapon platforms could spawn you can’t deal with.

Outcasts and corsairs in particular have the potential to spawn in as very powerful ships that hardly anything in the settled systems can contend with.

I did go some ways down this chain of thought myself a long time ago and then asked Adoxa to help me out because it just didn’t work in single player storyline play. I resorted to waiting until the storyline was finished and then having the changes kick in, the post story difficulty file he made is great for that.

Test, test, test. Backup what works before you make too many changes. Some ideas seem great at the beginning, but at some point we’ve all gone off on a mad editing spree that we later regret. Hope you have fun creating your own version of Freelancer, it’s a really great game to mod.

@CommanderArgelo Adoxa made a few cool mods for me, they’re on his site, they’re called matchjob, matchplayer, and post story diff, get them and read the usage files. They can do a lot of the heavy lifting for you.

I asked for them because when you finish the story and return to New York it’s no challenge at all, you have to fly to Rheinland to take a mission worth doing. Guy’s a legendary wizard, don’t know what we’d have done without his help for all these years.

You have an awful lot of work to do if you want to try and go deep with manual editing of mission files, it’s a spiders web, and while we have all been down that road at some point, these days we’re not really around to walk people through it.

You’re still going to need to edit equipment files for each base, plus some npc loadouts for police if you want to make a system like New York suitable for a little more difficulty, but with a few little changes like that you can make it more like Kusari space.

@CommanderArgelo Rankdiff.ini and mbases.ini in the missions folder.

Good stuff. Looks nice in the video. Thanks for continuing to work on this, much appreciated.

@Schmackbolzen Always just nice now and then to see what names are still around doing stuff, happy to see you’re one of them. Take care man, look forward to checking this out sometime.

Well this is a surprise, still slaving away after all these years Schmack. Well done.