A mod that I am modding has started to crash the app immediately after the first human player completes their buying. The message sent to stderr says:


That dang ellipsis is in exactly the wrong place, isn't it? I've gone through every xml sound tag in the mod and all of them point to properly formatted WAVs.

Suggestions, please? It's the binary download 41.3 Mac PPC running on MBP, if that matters.

Looks like a bug in the code. (null) should be the name of a sound file, but obviously isn't. Was this the download from this site? I seem to rememeber some sort of patch for it.

If you are still trying to alter leatherwolf's mod without his permission, then
it may be a file-name..
scorched\data\globalmods\superheros\data\wav\misc\null.wav
We used it to nullify the default back-ground music. As well as a few other
places where it asked for a sound but we wanted none.

However, you still may want to consider asking leatherwolf if he wants
his mod changed, or start your own..

GCamp, thanks for the reply. Yes, I am using the Mac download from your site.

I suspected that the error message was being truncated for length, so I shortened the pathname and got this result:
The error only occurs in a Custom game, right before the player's buy window in a single player game, or right before the SECOND player's buy window in a hotseat multiplayer. (I have not tried it in server mode). But the mod loads just find in the preset single player options.

I hope that helps narrow down what is going on.

Thrax, yes, this is a rearranged version of Superhero. I wrote to Leatherwolf about it but he has not replied yet. I have created quite a few new weapons. And the (null) above is not related to null.wav, which I renamed & relinked to blank.wav. The joys of multi-file directory-traversing find & replace.

I havent seen LW for long time but i dont play very often anymore, are his servers still online at any time?

He sure made some ridiculously big weapons that would wipe nearly everyting in one shot.

Leather has been busy with life stuff. rarely online, and his servers are up
even less. I've loaded Superheroes mod for a few fans, and to keep it's
pure unaltered form in circulation.

If fans want another of his mods online, i'll add them to the rotation. Just ask.

Gavin, I have read through the source, and see:
* the message comes from SoundBufferFactory::createBuffer()
* which is only called by Sound::createBuffer()
* which is only called by Sound::fetchOrCreateBuffer()
* which is used in many places, containing (char *) getDataFile(OBJECT_->Sound())

So perhaps the culprit is a ->Sound() that is empty when it shouldn't be. Any suggestions where to look?

Happened to me once with a WeaponExplosion, the wiki about it said including the <explosionsound> was optional but when I didn't it crashed with this message, so I included it and set to "none". Not sure this helps though.

I'd probably suggest just leaving it for the moment if that doesn't sounds like a cop out, the code in this area has changed drastically for v42 which should be out soon.

Thanks, that's good to hear.

I was unclear. What I meant to ask was "Any suggestions where to look in the mod files that I'm working on?" Since other mods still work, it means that I mucked something up, but I can't find it.

I double-checked the accessories file, and every instance of WeaponExplosion, WeaponLightning, and WeaponNapalm has a valid sound tag (either a filepath or "none"). It's entirely possible that a global replace messed up a landscape file, but the error message doesn't give me anything to go on.

Oh I see. The only places where this type of sound path occurs is:-

Explosion Sounds
Shield Collision Sounds
Weapon Activation Sounds
Shield Hit Sounds
Napalm Sounds
Battery/Shield/Parachute activation sounds

I'm guessing that since it happens after the buy it's the bots raising shields/defenses, so I'd probably check the shield/parachute sounds.

Yeah that looks right, I've just checked the game code. The shield/parachute/battery sounds are marked as optional in the accessories file but the game will crash (with this error) without them in the file if someone uses them. I've now fixed this for v42 sorry for the trouble.

Thank you, that was it exactly. I had removed the activations sounds from parachute & battery. Looking forward to v42 and beyond.