Strange World in UT99

[Lightning Hunter]

I decided to play through Strange World again, but in UT99 this time. I think the last time I played it was in '01 or '02 if I remember correctly, so that was 15 years ago! The experience went pretty well, but I had a few issues. In particular, "Strange4.unr" was crashing constantly at the very beginning in the first hallways (inside the Mercenary base after teleporting in to the pool in the hallways with the reflective floors). The crash would give me no message; just a generic windows crash error. Sometimes the game would freeze completely and I had to ctrl + alt + delete. Has anyone else experienced this? I tried opening the map in UED and rebuilding everything, removing lights, reflective surfaces, pathnodes, fog, and more - but the crash still always occurred randomly in those hallways. I ruled out my drivers and settings, as I pretty much tried ALL of them. Does anyone have any clue why this crash happens? It's a very odd crash that I have never experienced in UT before... Is this a known Strange World bug?

Anyway, with a LOT of quicksaving, I managed to get past that part and beat all of Strange World. I have to say, this pack is still a blast to play all these years later! I had forgotten a lot of it over time. There are definitely some glaring BSP problems in this pack, but once you get by those - the visuals are not all that bad even today. I can't believe no mapper to date has used the idea of a sunset/sunrise... It really is a cool idea. I know that UB recently said that the skytown map "looks like ass" over in the MOTW thread, but I actually think it still holds up pretty well. Sure, there are far better looking town maps out there today (even in ONP), but there are also so few SkyTown maps to speak of. This one is actually pretty big, and the visuals hold up better than some other older map packs out there... For fun, I also changed the music to "SkyCity.umx" (the beta music), and it fits perfectly! It is much more refreshing to hear than the standard SkyTown.umx.

By the way, if anyone wants an HD Railgun skin with a much better firing sound effect, download this and overwrite the old file from Strange World (may break coop support). The skin was so simple that it took me less than an hour to create (The skin isn't perfect due to an incredibly low-poly model):
https://www.mediafire.com/file/zsnpewrn ... ailgun.zip

[UBerserker]

That is probably rendering-related, I never had any crashing bugs in Strangeworld ever, both in U1 and UT.

[Buff Skeleton]

Yeah this sounds like a light rendering crash. I get it sometimes during intense firefights in EXU when lots of dynamic light actors are being generated all at the same time in small spaces with complex geometry -- the light renders onto so many surfaces the renderer shits itself. This engine does not handle dynamic lighting well!

Strange4 isn't one with the day/night transition effect, is it? Because that's allllllllllll dynamic light throughout the entire map, so it wouldn't surprise me if that level was prone to seizing up too.

[UBerserker]

Strange4 isn't one with the day/night transition effect, is it? Because that's allllllllllll dynamic light throughout the entire map, so it wouldn't surprise me if that level was prone to seizing up too.

It isn't one with dynamic skybox lights, not to mention it's mostly inside the Merc base with reflective floor surfaces.

[Buff Skeleton]

Ahhhh, that would likely do it. Reflective floors basically double the amount of rendering the engine is doing. As an experiment, you could try turning off reflection on those surfaces (or disable it outright in your renderer settings) and see how things shake out.

[Lightning Hunter]

Actually, dynamic lights were the first culprit on my list (you guys must have missed the list of things I tried in the first post). I deleted all light actors and made all surfaces non-reflective, yet the engine STILL crashed in that merc base for some reason. I really couldn't explain it... I even deleted all pathnodes, all scripted pawns, and all triggers (thinking there was some recursive loop going on) - yet the problem persisted. I tried both the UTGLR drivers and EXU drivers. Do you guys experience any crash if you run around those merc base hallways? It's really easy to have happen if you turn on god mode, and use "slomo 3.0" or something, so you can run around quicker. Just run in and out of some of those doors, and look around all corridors.

Edit: I just now removed EVERYTHING except for brushes, playerstarts, skyzoneinfo, and teleporters - and there were STILL crashes. I wonder what the heck could cause this issue? I'm not using any mods/mutators, either. I am thinking it has something to do with portals, texture flags, or some really corrupt brushes here.

[Buff Skeleton]

Lights placed in the level aren't the only sources of dynamic light. Most weapons cast light from projectiles, or from the weapons themselves when fired. Pawns do the same (Merc MGs for example). It could be some corrupt geometry that fucks up hardcore when dynamic lighting (from in-game actors, not level actors) crosses bad surfaces. I've had similar issues before in one of my own maps where the terrain was iffy in terms of technical stability.

That said, it's still odd that you're getting these crashes in a map pack that has been widely available for years, and are apparently the first and only one to have specific, repeatable problems in a specific area in a specific map. Whatever it is, it's either something in your UT config not liking the map, or hardware fuckery in your machine.

[Lightning Hunter]

lmao, I figured it out. Like an idiot, I changed the music of Strange4.unr to "Quotes_Music.umx", otherwise known as Conspiravision from Deus Ex (which is just like k_vision.umx for those who haven't heard it), and I just now discovered that this music seems to randomly crash the galaxy drivers. The last suspect on my list was a faulty UMX file! The reason I could not track it down was because UT99 gave me no hint that the Galaxy drivers were the issue (I got a generic windows crash message).

Does anyone have any clue why this track crashes UT99?
https://www.mediafire.com/file/riakbdpv ... _Music.zip

This is actually one of my favorite tracks by Alexander Brandon, and I think it's basically just a much better version of "K_Vision".

[UBerserker]

It can happen, one of my Unreal installation had a corrupted Guardian.umx that crashed the game (something like a graphic renderer crash) somewhere during the song.