Soldier Equip Screen Crash

[Chris]

So this is probably the most annoying crash left in the game. I imagine it has affected many people on the forum at least once during Release 1.0, so if we can share experiences here it may help us work out what is causing it.

My personal experience is that it occurs almost immediately after a ground combat mission. Obviously, loading the autosave after the mission fixes the issue and allows me to play on normally, so it's clearly caused by something unusual going wrong in the combat and carrying over to the Geoscape.

I'm wondering if the bug has something to do with injured / wounded soldiers, or manufactured weapons. If you get the crash, please let us know what happened on the previous mission.

• Were any soldiers injured or wounded in the battle?
  
• Were you using manufactured weapons or was everyone armed with standard Ballistics?
  
• The same for armour - did your soldiers have at least Jackal armour?
  

[SoftwareSimian]

It has happened to me without any manufactured equipment (weapons or armour).

It's quite possible one or more soldiers was wounded, but I can neither confirm nor deny at this point in relation to the crashing.

[gorfou]

It just happened to me after a ground mission: after the mission, the Chinook got home safely but a UFO was spotted. I intercepted it and then went to equip soldiers when the crash occurred.

During the mission:

*1 soldier died and 1 soldier injured

*several manufactured weapons. The injured soldier was using a laser weapon.

*some soldiers had jackal armor. The injured soldier was wearing armor.

[BaronM]

I've had this crash a few times. No manufactured weapons, had Jackal sometimes but pretty sure i had this crash before i had any tech.

I know at least twice i had injured on the previous mission, can't say for sure whether the other times i had injured or not.

Most recent i had just one very lightly injured soldier that had lost 10hp or something; no deaths, got the crash.

Oh also on most recent my hunter had been destroyed.

[Belmakor]

I lost 3 soldiers in one mission and two of them came back from the dead.

Ok, Ok, let me put this out there.

It my experience you lose laser weapons when your guys die...

When you guy comes back to life, does he get that laser weapon back? Or is he suddenly weaponless and how does the equipment screen manage that?

[b_ace]

I had this crash soon after a mission. I had no manufactured weapons or armor, just the standard equipment. I had one or two deaths, but not sure if anyone else was injured.

[Chris]

Right, a question for the old-timers here. I was under the impression that this bug seemed fixed for quite a while. Did people experience it in V21 Stable or in the early V22 Experimental builds? Has it reappeared relatively recently, or is it something that has been around at a consistent level for pretty much the whole time?

[kabill]

I don't remember there ever being a time when I didn't think it was a risk. But it's so random that it could have disappeared and then come back and I'd never have noticed.

There's probably nothing useful in me writing this, but for what it's worth I've played ~10-15 hours proper play over the last few days and not had it happen once (or indeed any other CTDs).

[Skitso]

...for what's it worth, I've NEVER had a equipment screen CTD on my own computer, but when playing with my friends house, we had a crash within few hours of play.

[Chris]

Do you two have relatively powerful computers? And does your friend have a less powerful computer, Skitso?

My work machine is mid-weight and it crashes for me occasionally (but the machine also isn't really powerful enough to run the debug build for long), whereas all our programmers have relatively meaty machines and they hardly ever see the crash.

EDIT - yeah, looking back through bug reports, it seems it never really went away. It's probably just that I wasn't playing the game for long enough in any one session to get it until the last month or so.

[Skitso]

My rig is relatively low powered desktop (i3, 4Gb, Radeon HD 5670), my friend has a few years old laptop with an integrated GPU). We both play 1920p.

[SoftwareSimian]

Do you two have relatively powerful computers?

I don't think it's an issue related to system prowess. My system is an i7-3930K, 64GB RAM and a GTX 670 (two actually, but SLI isn't enabled right now) and I CTD at least once an hour.

I do think it's related to having injured soldiers assigned to the dropship that's in the base. I'm 95% certain that I've only ever experienced a CTD when clicking on the Equip Soldiers button when there's injured soldiers in the dropship in the base. (I don't think injured soldiers on the Unassigned list contribute to the problem, probably because they weren't involved in the most recent ground mission). This happens usually when I just come back from a mission and sustained some injuries and want to reassign my squad. CTD nearly every time. For what it's worth, however, the problem goes away after loading a savegame at the same point. Or, at least, after relaunching Xenonauts and loading the savegame it works fine. So there's something floating in memory after coming back from a ground mission to the geoscape with injured soldiers that triggers the CTD.

[kabill]

Do you two have relatively powerful computers?

Midish range. In between Skitso's and SoftwareSimian's.

I do think it's related to having injured soldiers assigned to the dropship that's in the base.

I don't know. I have recollections of the bug happening before I've done any ground missions at all. Although that was months ago.

[thixotrop]

I have never experienced that, playing since V19 and still in V21 (currently in operation endgame with insane psi powers...yes I know ).

My system: i5-3450, 16GB RAM, GTX 560Ti, Win7-64bit, screen size 1920x1200 fullscreen

[Skitso]

Thixotrop, do you by any chance auto resolve all air combats?

[thixotrop]

Lol, just have read your other post and thought, I might mention that here too.

In the beginning of the game I did a lot of manual air combats, later I almost ever do autoresolve.

So for the late game a manual air combat only when...

...there is a slow "victim" UFO and I am game for that.

...my jets are intersepted by air superior UFO fighters.

...I want to do more than one UFO encounter with one flight. Because then you can control the ammunition better and save some for the next UFO.

[kabill]

Hmm, just managed to get a crash out of it.

1 soldier dead

1 soldier - I think - knocked unconcious

All the rest injured.

CTD happened right after the aborted the ground mission; I immediately clicked on the equipment tab.

Going to play around and see if I can get it to happen again.

EDIT: Reproducing more or less the same situation (same dead/stunned/injured) as above - using the same save game no less - doesn't seem to produce the crash. Random bug is random, apparently.

EDIT 2: I should add that the time this happened, I'd simply loaded from an existing save. There was utterly no further context - aside from some specific details pertaining to which soldiers shot, how many hitpoints they might have had left and small stuff like that, there was no reason for anything to be different compared with the times that everything worked fine.

Edited June 5, 2014 by kabill

[SoftwareSimian]

...using the same save game no less - doesn't seem to produce the crash. Random bug is random, apparently.

My theory is that something gets set when your soldiers do the ground mission, come back to the geoscape and then you click the button. Loading the savegame doesn't reproduce that unwanted <whatever it is> from the ground combat so all is well.

[kabill]

I'd have assumed that too, but when I got the crash it was from a save game that I'd made at the beginning of a mission. I'd already loaded and done the similar tests several times without an issue.

Basically, what I did was save at the beginning of a mission, then mess around with some stuff, then abort and go to the equipment screen. Assuming no crash, I then reloaded from the save and tried again. It took me about six goes to produce the crash, and subsequently I've not been able to produce it again doing the same thing.

In other words, if it's related to something that's being done - as opposed to being completely random - it's something specific about the combination of things I did before aborting. But it's looking like if that's the case, it's something very specific like a a particular amount of damage, or equipment slot being used, or something like that.

(Ignoring the fact that there might be multiple causes of the same bug, of course!).

EDIT: Agh, thought I had it for a moment. Managed to get it to crash twice in a row doing more or less the same thing. Haven't been able to make it happen again, though, so it might have been a fluke.

EDIT 2: So, it doesn't seem to be related to soldier deaths, stunning or injury level.

- I've reproduced the situation I posted about above and had no CTD.

- I've tried injuring someone, healing them, then stunning them*. This produces non-CTDs.

- I've tried injuring someone, healing them, injuring them again*, healing them, and stunning them. This produces non-CTDs.

- I've tried the above two situations but also killing a soldier. This produces non-CTDs.

There might be some other combination of things, but it's pretty hard to produce these situations artificially, let alone in a proper game environment. I wouldn't have thought that it would be so common while having a difficult-to-reproduce cause.

*In these instances, I did enough damage to ensure that when the soldier was healed the first time, they'd be on less than half hitpoints.

Edited June 5, 2014 by kabill

[kabill]

Ok, I've managed to repeat the CTD three times in a row using the same savegame. What I did, each time:

- Soldier shoots the middle soldier in the dropship (number 5) with a rifle.

- Soldier directly behind the wounded soldier heals with a medikit.

- I throw flashbangs on the ground until the wounded soldier falls unconscious.

- I burst fire the soldier that healed the other one to death.

- Abort mission. Wait a few seconds on the debrief screen and click done.

- On geoscape screen, click the equipment screen button.

- CTD.

I'm going to keep playing around with this to check it's not just a fluke, and if not to try and pin it down further. (Though I should probably also go to sleep soon.

EDIT: Yup, fourth time now.

EDIT 2: Might have it. It's got nothing to do with the injured soldier; instead it seems to be something to do with the *healing soldier* getting killed.

Edited June 5, 2014 by kabill

[kabill]

Ugh, sorry for spam posting but I've got it (or at least one version of it!), and I want it to be clear:

The bug is 100% reproducible if a soldier who heals another soldier is killed

I've only found this in 'laboratory conditions' so there could be all other kinds of complexities involved. But here's a sure way to cause the bug:

- Start a ground mission.

- Get one of your soldiers to shoot another.

- Heal that soldier with a medikit.

- Kill the soldier who did the healing.

- Abort mission.

- Click on the equipment tab.

I've done this at least half a dozen times now and it's produced the same result every time. I just tried it on a completely different mission to the one I'd been doing the tests on and it worked like clockwork

Oddly, it seems very specific.

- If you place a partially used medikit on the corpse of another soldier (who didn't do any healing), then there's no CTD.

- If you simply drop a partially used medikit, there's no CTD.

- If you pick up the medikit off the body of the soldier who did the healing, there's no CTD.

- If you reload a savegame after everything has happened but before you end the mission, there's no CTD.

- If you leave it some time after the mission ends (I tried ~15 seconds), no CTD.

- If you don't kill the healing soldier in one go, no CTD (at least sometimes).

So it seems there's some relationship between the medikit and the dead soldier that matters in some way.

All this said, it seems a fairly uncommon occurrence for a soldier who healed another to die, so I'm surprised it's happening so much. Maybe there are other issues, too?

Edited June 6, 2014 by kabill

[KevinHann]

I'm certain no soldiers need to die for the crash to occur (unless there are multiple ways to trigger it) - although it is very likely using medikit is involved somehow.

Maybe the simplest solution is disabling heal

[SoftwareSimian]

It's got nothing to do with the injured soldier; instead it seems to be something to do with the *healing soldier* getting killed.

I've not had anything related to a dead soldier causing CTD, however it could have something to do with using the medkit, since I've certainly done that prior to a CTD.

[kabill]

I can very much believe it. As I said, it can't be that common that healers are getting killed. But it's one definitely cause.

EDIT: It might be useful if someone can check this on a different version. I *should* be running a mod-free game, but there's always a chance of there being something lingering that could be making a difference.

Also, just tried simply wounding, rather than killing, a soldier who had healed and that didn't cause a CTD.

Edited June 5, 2014 by kabill

[Chris]

That doesn't crash for me. Can anyone else reproduce it using the steps Kabill has listed above?

EDIT - or, Kabill, do you have a mission save you're using to cause the crash each time?