Greetings Hrnchamd, I'd like to report a source of crashes that I think is very significant and would be really super if it could be fixed. Not sure if this has been reported before, but I do have a test case that exhibits the problem 100% of the time, so I do think it is worth bringing up.
The problem occurs when a spell is cast from a script attached to an object that is non-persistant, and the player leaves the cell while the spell is still active. 72 game hours later, the game will crash. Any savegame will be be polluted and will crash.
Here's a http://www.gamesas.com/bgsforums/index.php?showtopic=1055604 about this in the Construction Set forum. And a http://sites.google.com/site/johnmoonsugar/downloads/cast_test.7z?attredirects=0&d=1 that illustrates the problem.
The way I've found to work around it is to make the object (NPCs in the cases I've seen) that has the spell casting script on it to be persistent (for NPCs this is to set the "corpses persist" flag). Or you can go to your savegame and remove those object from their cells. Or you can attempt to find and remove the SPLM.SPDT (spell data) record in the savegame that records the active spell originated from this non-persistent object.
I suspect that this is also related to crashes that come from leaving cells where creatures have been summoned under certain circumstances. In the cases I've seen, if you equip a piece of clothing that's been enchanted with a CE spell to summon a critter, then equip it, summon the critter leave the critter in a cell while still wearing the item, then 72 hours later, perhaps depending on circumstances, if you unequip the enchanted item, the game crashes.
So, sorry to make yet another request, but I do believe that this is an important stability issue, and at least it's good to have it noted here.
I've discovered where this bug comes from finally. The game creates a spell entity at the start of an NPC casting animation, then (if ranged) attaches a projectile after the casting animation finishes. If you leave the cell while the casting animation is still playing, the spell entity never gets cleaned up. The spell is waiting for the NPC to finish the animation, 72 hours later the NPC goes away and it crashes.
It's not so simple to fix, you can't clear the list on any cell change, because spells shouldn't disappear when you cross an exterior cell boundary, just when the NPC is no longer active. There's no reliable way to detect this, that I have found so far. If the test goes wrong then NPCs would fail to cast spells. There's probably something somewhere.
» Mon Mar 08, 2010 2:19 pm 
:facepalm:
