Farnham's Legacy freezing at a specific in game time

[Wing2137]

Hello all.

First off, I want to say that this is the best X3 expansion I've ever played. I've accumulated over 300 hours and I'm still not bored. You guys have an awesome concept here, and I'm really appreciative of the continued support with the new patch. Thank you for all your hard work!

Now down to business. I've been having some serious freezing issues with my game. It keeps freezing around 19 days, 9 hours, and 27 minutes. I've tried troubleshooting it with everything I can. I am running some mods, however I disabled them one after another to no avail. I then did a complete reinstall of X3TC, AP, and FL through Steam, and tested my file again. It still does it even on vanilla. I read the FAQ about common problems with X3, and I came across the post about Manual Traders causing the game to freeze at a specific point. I disabled my traders and set them to "none" under the command menu. Unfortunately, this did not fix the issue either. I've tried loading older saves, and it still persists with the freezing at that exact point. I'm convinced it must be some kind of script, but I'm not sure what. The thing too, is I actually didn't have this problem until after 1.3. Perhaps it was an incompatibility with some mods I was using? However if that were the case, would it not be fixed after a complete reinstall and running vanilla? Unless there is some kind of "ghost" code left over from a mod... I am not using a lot of mods, and I can list them if anyone is curious.

Since the game is freezing and not actually crashing to desktop, I don't believe it has anything to do with my computer's hardware or software. The continued "on cue" freezing has led me to believe it has to be some kind of scripting problem. Am I out of luck? I would love to be able to salvage my game, as even after 300 hours I'm still having an absolute blast. It would be a shame to have to start over again so soon, my game time spanned the course of about 3 months in real-time. :/

Any kind of help or advice would be greatly appreciated. I've been quite down about this for the last day or so, and would love to continue playing my file if at all possible. If there's anymore information I can provide that would be of assistance, please let me know!

[alexalsp]

Indicate the mods that you are using.
mod data may be saved to a save file and reinstalling the game won't fix this problem

You may need to start a new game without mods and check how the game will behave.

[Wing2137]

Thanks for the quick reply.

I am using these mods:

No-Potato-Asteroids: viewtopic.php?f=201&t=438830

NPC Bailing Addon: viewtopic.php?t=219440

New Gate Effect Pack: viewtopic.php?f=201&t=440390

Anarkis Crystal Free Solar Power Plant: viewtopic.php?t=284036

Tubeless Complex Mod: viewtopic.php?f=201&t=440059

I am also using a mod that removes reputation loss when shooting at gates. I couldn't find the topic for that one again though.

Here are the SPK's I was using as well: https://imgur.com/q1uiy6L

I found the Titan Mk. I Mod on another thread posted long ago. I extracted it and turned it into an SPK mod after making a few changes myself. I didn't put any scripts in it that I can recall. I just added it to the game by putting it in Argon Shipyards. My save doesn't have any of them flying around yet, and I haven't yet acquired one myself. So as far as I can tell, it shouldn't be affecting the game with freezing.

A lot of the mods I was using were based on referencing this thread in the last few posts: viewtopic.php?f=201&t=440275

I never had any issues until 1.3, so if it is mod incompatibility (which I think it is), some of these mods probably don't work anymore.

I kind of figured it was a bit of a Russian Roulette to use some of these mods on my save file, as some of them may not technically be fully supported by FL. :/

The most likely culprit to me is the "PlayerHunt" mod. It sends a raiding party after you at certain intervals if your reputation is really low. The game freezes before they load in (assuming it is that mod), so I can't be 100% sure. It's one of the mods to have been suggested to be working in that thread I linked, but that was back in FL 1.2.

[Wing2137]

Making a new post for an update:

So I did some fiddling around. I am still testing on my new vanilla install. Upon running a new game, I didn't have any issues after running SETA for about an hour straight.

I loaded a much earlier save from my old game and ran SETA for about an hour. It was well before the 19 day mark in my game time. It still managed to freeze after about an hour. There's certainly some left over code from a previous script that is causing this problem. I'm still inclined to believe that it is the PlayerHunt mod. It scripts enemies to attack about every hour or so. My theory is that if I kill this script with the in-game script editor, it might fix the issue entirely. This is, of course, assuming that it is the PlayerHunt Mod. Hopefully I can find out which script(s) they are. There must be something about the new 1.3 update that's causing the two to not get along. I'm going to be somewhat disappointed if it turns out to be that mod, as it's my favorite of the group of mods I installed. If it means getting my save file back however, then it'll be well worth all this trouble of debugging. I'll try some more testing later and post the results.

Again, if anyone has any information that could prove helpful, I'm completely open to it. I appreciate any assistance.

[DanKara]

@Wing2137 are you sure your freezes are MOD/fighting-related? Don't you do other stuff like (vanilla) exploring or trading? Appear the freezes in the same location/sector? How much time do you spend on AFK-SETA and why?
The way RoverXT described his "PlayerHunt" back in 2014 in the thread you linked, I would not think "any leftover code" in your savefile running in an clean vanilla install is the cause. If I were you, I would look somewhere else...


I am aware of the following situations that may cause a freeze (in vanilla games):

something with UT/ST - solved?
Back in spring/summer there were discussions about Tradeships that use the TradeSoftware Mk3 causing a freeze after some/extended time. I think that was fixed? I don't use UT/ST's.

something with LFL-scanning on AMD graphic cards
Here it seems high-settings for shaders on AMD graphic cards may cause a freeze when the LFL-scanner should show something on screen.

something with BestBuy- or BestSell-Locator
This one I encounter a lot - but only if I used these Locators beforehand. It happend in all patch versions (even 1.3).
While blueprint-hunting I minimize every action I don't control myself. I rely heavily on manual trading through remote controlled ships. For these MORT's I like to use the Locators (Hotkey [5] or [6] in menus).
Sometimes these freezes happens while I am still in the Locator-menu, but more often they appear at random times while I fly, fight, search for or do missions. I can't reproduce them at will.
But I am fairly sure the Locator-scripts are the reason. As soon as I stopped using those I played several hundreds hours (now at 700h/total) without any technical issue. Don't think I had anything like that in TC or AP.
I suspect, that my ships selling at a station conflicts some npc-trader trying to do the same - but that should have caused problems in my "no use"-time too.

[Wing2137]

I'm back with another update.

I think it was the mod. I only had two manual traders. They were keeping my starting station stocked in The Void that the story makes you build early on. Otherwise, I always build complexes and don't really deal with A.I. trading much. I actually do a lot of things manually myself and minimize too many A.I. commands at once. For me, it's more of a preference thing, as I prefer having more direct control over everything. I guess I like to micro-manage more, haha.

Anywho, I tried everything I could think of, and it would always crash in SETA after about an hour. If I tried to circumvent it with more saves, it would just crash again right on the mark like the "19 days 9 hours and 27 minutes" point I mentioned in my OP. I have a maxed out negative ranking with the Yaki, which results in them attacking me about every hour. I'd always save after a huge fight with them, which was why a lot of my saves were an hour before the freeze.

Thankfully, I backed up my older X3FL directory that was 1.2, and rolled back to it. I loaded a save that was still on 1.2, and let SETA run for approximately 1 hour. Lo and behold, a Yaki raiding party came after me, and the game never froze. I haven't had any issues since then. I've already finished the Terran Plot, so I need not worry about that huge plot-breaking bug with HSAP. A lot of the other fixes seem quite useful, but I suppose I can live without them for now. Whenever I decide to start a new save file, I'll likely update to the latest version of X3FL. For now, I just wanted to save this playthrough since I am still enjoying it.

It's a real shame though. I noticed in 1.3 that the performance seemed to be much smoother. I was getting higher overall FPS, and more consistent FPS at that. It seems like they really streamlined the performance with this update. I'll try it someday, lol.

I wanna take the time to thank you both for assisting me in this matter. The EGOSOFT forums seem to be one the nicer ones I've been on, as I usually just lurk or look up information on others. I never feel hesitant to post on here because of the amazing community we have. You guys are all awesome! Thank you so much for trying to help me!

[Cycrow]

Simply removing the mods won't actually remove them from the save game. As the currently running scripts are cached and will continue to run even after you have removed them.

If you have a save game that demonstrates the freeze I can take a look and identify what script is causing it.

[Wing2137]

Oh! Hi Cycrow!

Yeah, I tried finding the script myself with the in-game editor but gave up. I probably don't know what to actually look for, lol.

Here's two save files. One is about an hour before it'll freeze. The second save slot is just a few minutes before it'll happen if that makes it easier to find in some way. I saved them in a 7zip file.

https://www.sendspace.com/file/nd7toa

Thanks!

Edit: Oh, you'll have to type "Thereshallbewings" when you load the game. I believe those saves are before I ever activated that. I had to do it when I loaded mine.