OOTP crashing with an "Application Error"

[Nutlaw]

I'm fairly sure that you can work past the crash and simply sub in your copy of faces.dat. Try it out and let me know.

I believe that you are right and that there is something in your files that will cause this problem regardless of setting.

With the final patch already released, there's no work being done on bug fixes for now. I don't have anyone to send your files to. That said, I've sent in similar files in the past and it didn't seem to lead to anything. That said, I know that they are interested in doing work to root out some of these issues for the next release, so I wouldn't worry about it at this stage.

[Corsairs]

I'll definitely give the swap out idea a test run as soon I get a chance. I guess this is something I'll have to deal with going forward, but with any luck it'll be manageable.

Nutlaw, thanks a million for spending the time to troubleshoot my problem! Your efforts are greatly appreciated.

[Corsairs]

Originally Posted by Nutlaw

I'm fairly sure that you can work past the crash and simply sub in your copy of faces.dat. Try it out and let me know.

I've had a chance to test this out, copying a previously saved "working" faces.dat over the corrupted one. Unfortunately it doesn't work any better than just deleting/renaming the corrupted faces.dat. All these solutions allow me to get back into the league file, but they also all cause the player picture connections to be lost. Every picture has to be regenerated.

So I've got a problem: it appears my league is on a crash course towards losing all our player pictures about two seasons from now. Especially at a time when I'm looking into paying someone to design logos/jerseys/caps for all our teams, this is very troubling.

I understand there won't be another patch released that fixes this problem in OOTP 2007. Still, I wouldn't be doing my league fair service if I don't press the issue a bit and see if there's anything further that can be done in terms of examining my league files to determine what the problem may be.

[Nutlaw]

I just tried it out on a test league and it works fine for me. I did get tripped up once because I didn't save the game before copying the faces.dat file, which I assume/hope was your issue as well.

Try again, please. Save your game, then copy your faces.dat file right before the turn of the year. After it crashes, sub in the copy.

[Corsairs]

Good news/bad news to report. The good news is you were right: I did make that error, and upon retrying it I was able to make the transition to '09 by copying the "good" faces.dat over the newly corrupted one. The picture links were retained and I was able to move forward.

The bad news is the crashes continue beyond this point and seemingly become more frequent. Rather than just happening at the turn of the season, they occur at times during a normal mid-season save. So I can't reliably save my file and then copy the faces.dat file since any save could generate a crash.

Where it stands right now, I have to be extremely careful going forward to keep a backup copy of files.dat because any save from the start of '09 on could bring on a crash. However, it does at least seem that copying over a "good" faces.dat after a crash will restore the picture links. So it looks like I'm down from "full-blown crisis" to "major irritation". Hey, it's a start.

Again, major thanks to you Nutlaw for the outstanding suport on this issue. Cheers, mate!

[Nutlaw]

Well, I'm glad that you and your league have a workable solution! It's frustrating that the crashes still occur, however, especially as they may make your player histories and other text log files look strange. Let me see if I can get ahold of somebody. This is a very busy time of year, so please don't count on any help outside of my own meager efforts.

[Corsairs]

I can't ask for anything more. Thanks again for all your efforts!

[Andreas Raht]

Please zip and upload ( How to FTP Files to Us) all the .dat files of that league. I need to debug this, hopefully it helps fixing that crash bug which happens when saving the faces.dat.

Thanks!

[Nutlaw]

Corsairs, was this ever figured out? Are you and Andreas speaking outside of this thread?

[Corsairs]

Andreas is looking over my files. I'm crossing my fingers that he can find the source of the problem and fix it! Another person reported having the same problem recently, so it's certainly something that would be great to have solved for everyone.

[Andreas Raht]

It seems to be the old "save faces" bug. I found that after some simming there are several faces records in the faces table which are invalid pointers, but I didn't yet find out why they became invalid
This will need some more time. But it's #1 on my OOTP list.

[Corsairs]

Thanks so much for the update Andreas! My league at least has some time before our first expected crash from this problem, so I'll keep my fingers crossed that you beat it before we get there.

[Nutlaw]

In the meantime, this is BZ 233.