Crash on selecting ship of custom race

Hi all. A couple of patches ago me and my cousin made a custom race, and we were unable to play i. That issue has persisted, and now using 6.1 it still happens.

The issue is that right at the start of the game, as soon as we select any of our ships, the game stalls for a bi, the music stutters, and then it silently crashes to desktop, after about 10 seconds.

We're using a fancy looking reflective ship style, so it could be some sort of shader issue, but im sure my video card is up to scratch

 

Incase its relevant, here's he basic info, traits, etc

http://i.gyazo.com/430dba386cb69a17a2998c5bb88aa482.png

http://i.gyazo.com/fcb08647cd711a4cfbaed8d343e99293.png

 

we used the starmetal texture on our ships http://i.gyazo.com/88eab8e3686c1c915c04932e5df5098d.png

 

i have no idea what information is relevant for debugging, what i should send, etc. Please let me know and ill try o post  more info later (going to bed now)

27,417 views 23 replies
Reply #1 Top

come on guys :(

 

i know his report is incomplete, but i dont know how else to help

Reply #2 Top

Look for a pinned post in this support forum titled something like "General Troubleshooting Tips". There's a link there that will take you to some good debugging information, including how to open a support ticket. I'd post the link myself, but I'm on my phone atm and can't.

Reply #3 Top

Ok i'm troubleshooting this crash. But also i want to say that after galciv crashes, it frequently gets into a stuck state, and i cannot start it up again. I have to restart steam in order to fix this. which is very frustrating.

why is that happening?

Reply #4 Top

I also use those high reflective materials (I made them, our art lead hates them). And I'm not seeing your issue.

If you could PM me your custom faction I could try it out and see if thats the issue.

If you remake your custom faction does it also have the problem?

+1 Loading…
Reply #5 Top

i did my best to remake them, i got some things wrong, but at least the traits and ships were right. it still broke

 

 

how can i PM you the custom faction? where are they located in my drive?

Reply #6 Top

ok i made a barebones custom race, only edited the ships

 

Iconian ship style

Starmetal Texture in both texture slots

Literally zero other changes.

 

It crashes on selecting. So my suspicions are confirmed, it's definitely the ships. is this likely to be a problem with my hardware?

 

Here is my DxDiag

http://pastebin.com/BDLjbSJU

 

(btw  i did also try a custom race without these ship changes, and it functions fine)

Reply #7 Top

I'm having something of the same problem.  I have been pulling my hair out for two weeks on this.  I select a ship, and whammo, it dumps me out.   It will also dump me out if I select the shipyard.  I can select the planet, and research, but ships are right out.  Also, I do have a custom race, but nothing fancy in graphics however.....just a custom race amazingly like the Terrans.  I've submitted two tickets on it, one with the dedug.err attached, and I haven't heard a peep.  How do you delete your custom race?  Get rid of your Prefs file?


It seems that the beginning of the end in the debug file is the following line:


Dumping Stack Trace: SymInit: Symbol-SearchPath: '.;C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Galactic Civilizations III;C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Galactic Civilizations III;C:\Windows;C:\Windows\system32;SRV*C:\websymbols*http://msdl.microsoft.com/download/symbols;', symOptions: 530, UserName: 'ME'


I even rolled back one set of Windows OS updates I got on 4-15-15, but to no avail...


If any of you have any ideas, I'd be grateful to hear them.  I had to have an emergency appendectomy late Friday night, and It will be boring if I cannot play this normally excellent game for my recovery period.

Reply #8 Top

I Just tried it with a default race, small galaxy, mostly stock settings, and it still wigs out.  Again, any ideas on this?  I have a feeling that it may be occurring more than may be represented by the forums....


Thanks again.


Lyal

Reply #10 Top

@Darkchaser:

I do NOT get the crash with a custom race at mostly stock settings, i seems to be specifically the starmetal ship texture which is causing it for me. Any chance you could remember exactly which settings and i could test with those? which race, etc

Reply #11 Top

Quoting NanakoAC, reply 6

ok i made a barebones custom race, only edited the ships

Iconian ship style

Starmetal Texture in both texture slots

Literally zero other changes.

It crashes on selecting. So my suspicions are confirmed, it's definitely the ships. is this likely to be a problem with my hardware?

Here is my DxDiag

http://pastebin.com/BDLjbSJU

(btw  i did also try a custom race without these ship changes, and it functions fine)

I did the same. Created a custom faction using the iconian ship style with starmetal as both of the material types. No issues here.

http://screencast.com/t/vEu1LDhIm

We have similar systems and the same video cards. The only significant difference I noticed was that your video card driver is really old. I'd highly recommend getting that updated.

For Darkchaser, yikes on the emergency appendectomy. I hope you are recovering well from that. Your drivers are also out of date, but not by much. I would try updating them first. Assuming that doesn't work we will need a crash report from you.

Reply #12 Top

Is it possible you guys were double clicking on a stationed ship in the ship list (the list of ships on the right side of the screen). That can cause a crash, and we are fixing it now, but we havent been able to repro any case where double clicking a chip on the main map causes a crash.

Reply #13 Top

Quoting Derek, reply 12

Is it possible you guys were double clicking on a stationed ship in the ship list (the list of ships on the right side of the screen). That can cause a crash, and we are fixing it now, but we havent been able to repro any case where double clicking a chip on the main map causes a crash.
definitely not the case. The crash happens for me with single clicking a ship in the main map.

 

i will update video drivers and report back

Reply #14 Top

nope. Shiny new video drivers haven't changed. Still crashes when i select any ship with starmetal.  i'll mess around with settings and see what i can accomplish. if you have any advice please let mer know ASAP

Reply #15 Top

Ok, update, i've narrowed it down. It's not the starmetal

 

The crash is caused by the iconian ship style, and ONLY that.

If i use a different ship style, i'm able to use starmetal jus fine. If i use the iconian style withou the starmetal (or any fancy materials at all), it crashes on selecting a ship. This is consistent, repeatable, 100% reproducible.

 

A custom race with Iconian ship style as the one and only change from default settings, crashes the game on selecting them. It ALSO happens when playing the iconians,

 At this point it sounds like my game files are corrupted, i'm going to go ahead and reinstall the game.

Reply #16 Top

A little history which might be relevant. Before we tried to make the custom faction, we were playing a game as the iconians. We played hundreds of turns and it was pretty stable, eventually we got huge hulls, and designed a flagship

It was a drone hive. Just COVERED in tons of drone/fighter bays, at least 10 of them. We were looking forward to seeing it in action, and picked a fight with a little starbase.

At that point, the game crashed while loading the battle viewer. We never got to see it in action. It had been hours since we saved, but we had the two autosaves.

We tried loading them, and it failed. Both of the autosaves would crash while loading, before getting as far as rendering the galaxy/.

 

After that was when we tried to create the custom race (with iconian ship style) and that obviously didn't work. After that we tried a game as drengin, which was fine for about 80 turns but it crashed at some point too. I can't say for sure, but i have a feeling it was when we met the iconians.

 

now reinstalling, will be done by this time tomorrow. Wiped everything clean as per the knowledgebase guide: https://esupport.stardock.com/index.php?/default_import/Knowledgebase/Article/View/496/161/general-galactic-civilizations-iii-troubleshooting

here's hoping that fixes the issues.

Reply #17 Top

I updated my video drivers today and it still crashes...really love the game though.  Promises to be fantastic.  I also sent in a crash report to the tech support. ...

Reply #18 Top

ok that didn't fix it. the game still crashes with the iconians on version 0.90

now updating to the opt-in beta in hopes that'll solve it but i suspect it wont. Something is very wrong here. the iconians cant simply be broken, im sure someone else would notice that?

Reply #19 Top

Nope, thats not working either. in v 0.95 too, on a fresh install, the iconians are broken. Selecting their ship crashes the game.

 

i don't understand, how can this be possible?

Reply #20 Top

heeeeey

 

I've done another clean install. As clean is it can possibly be. I scoured my hard drive for every trace of galactic civilisations or stadock and wiped it all, then refreshed steam settings too as per the guide in the knowledgebase

 

IT IS NOT WORKING

The iconians still crash! i don't know what to do. My cousin is coming over to play later today and i have to tell him that the game is broken

Reply #21 Top

Ok, i've solved it at least for now.

I pieced it together from two other people who have the same issue

 

https://forums.galciv3.com/464505/page/1/#3544800

https://forums.galciv3.com/464194/page/1/#3544799

 

The issue seems to be custom ship designs becoming corrupted somehow

 

The solution is to delete the galciv3 folder in My games,BUT!!!!!

I'm well aware that the stardock knowledgebase already tells us to do this. And I DID. I'm 110% sure that i deleted the folder in BOTH reinstalls. It came back during the installation process.

The solution therefore was to manually delete it AGAIN after the reinstall

 

I can see only one logical answer here. Steam must be backing up the galciv data on custom ships/factions/etc to it's cloud, and then redownloading them during installation

Reply #22 Top

Great feedback, thanks nanakoAC. We will keep an eye out for that!

 

Reply #23 Top

Quoting NanakoAC, reply 21

I can see only one logical answer here. Steam must be backing up the galciv data on custom ships/factions/etc to it's cloud, and then redownloading them during installation

Right, turn off the Steam Cloud sync.  I had lots of saved games reappearing after I'd deleted them until I did that.