Greetings, adventurers, mercenaries, cutthroats, wizards, bards, vampire lords and orcish chieftains of Aejdaria!
I would like to announce that I'm going to be publishing a new update (1.13) in a few days. It's not a major update like the Desert Expansion but it features some things that have been requested/suggested by the community very often in the past. Such as aligning the banners so the amblems show on the middle of the shield (should've done it long time ago), Aslanians, Baegerians and Tomuzian troops wearing their national colours in their garments more than before and like. Also there is a new optional side quest to the epic quest which rewards the player with new legendary items, I added new mounts, armors, weapons and some other minor updates.
Also some old timers in the community asked me to create a discord server, here's the invite: Discord.gg
Common Crashes and Linux/Mac Compatibility
Many players are aware that Legacy of the Dragon doesn't work on Linux and Mac. Also it sometimes crashes when you start a new game, or load and there is less common "leaving a scene" crash. When I first started creating the mod, I didn't know anything about these operating systems and as you know the early phase of the development process was rushed because of my approaching military service. So when I first realized these problems, I decided to pay attention to them after the release. But if I were to try to narrow down the problem early in the development phase, it would've been easier.
If you check my posts on taleworlds forums, you would see that I'm actively looking for solutions to these problems. Also I asked more experienced modders for help and thankfully Swyter pointed out how I could find the source of these crashes. And I think I'm close. It's something in the troops file or some of the models/textures are corrupted. Finding the source of the problem requires a lot of grunt work and it's quite stressful, so I'm sorry to announce I postponed this process to this summer as with work, school and all that I'm not sure I'm ready to take on the struggle. But, sooner or later, I will fix these problems.
EDIT 06/13/2021: Legacy of the Dragon now works on Linux and Mac.
Suggestions
I value all your suggestions. Seeing that there are other people who love this mod and wanting to make it better is the greatest compliment of them all. I apply many suggestions made by the community and I don't apply some. There are two main reasons why some suggestions, some suggested more than a few times are not applied:
The first reason is, I don't like them. For example, I understand that some people have a favorite high fantasy race, be it elves, dwarves, dark elves/drows (mind you, they are not called drows in Legacy of the Dragon) and they'd like a major faction/kingdom of the said race. But in the lore of the Legacy of the Dragon, when the Saviour has united the warring human tribes and slayed the dragons, the age of humans began. All the other races (other than goblinoids) have been declining in numbers for the last thousand year or so. Elves and dwarves simply do not have the numbers to have their own kingdom.
The other reason is, when some players making suggestions, they presume I'm some sort of programming wizard. I am not. This is my first project, it took me a lot of time figuring it out even the simplest concepts. Yes, it'd be awesome if I could make dragons fly and pour fire on towns during sieges but I just can't do it. And this is a one man project (although I get help from cherralily with proofreading, making sure my color blind ass not paint the orcs red and stuff like that. And the soundtrack was made by Orctimus Prime).
But please don't let these prevent you from making suggestions.
Soundtrack
As you may already know, Legacy of the Dragon is one of the few mods to feature an original soundtrack. And this is thanks to Orctimus Prime, a great musician who composed all those awesome little tracks you hear when playing Legacy of the Dragon. So please, check his soundcloud profile for more of his music:
Always nice to see that you are continuing your work! Don't feel pressured to have a discord, sometimes it's better to have none :D
Regarding your crashes: Are you using a special shader pack or Native shaders?
Hey :)
I'm using native shaders.
Are you sure that it's a troop or could it also be specific scenes?
For troops:
Make a save copy of your module_items.py. Then empty out the meshes of all items and replace them with a simple stick from Native. That will take a bit time to do but you need anyway the time to find the bug.
Check then in-game if crashes are still happening. If yes, it's most probably none of the troop items but a sceneprop/scene causing it. If you cannot reproduce crashes, you put back in the top half of all item meshes (make a savecopy of your empty item_entries, you perhaps need them again!).
Then again, try to reproduce the crashes. If it doesn't crash, the item is in the second half of the item list. Implement again half of the remaining items in that case. If it does crash, remove the last half of your reimplemented items.
It's a search method with which you can relatively quickly find the items which might cause your crashes. It's still time intensive though, so make sure to take one day just doing this. If you find out that it's not an item, do the same with scene props.
The same does also work with scenes: Save copy all your scenes, then use a scene at which nothing crashes and use it as placeholder for every other scene to find out which scene might be causing it. At scenes you however need to do it one by one.
Thanks for the reply. I keep every version of the mod backed up.
This is how I know it's either troops, items, or item models.
When starting the game, it crashes right after when you click start new game on "loading map file", this is right before the game loads troops. This happens on linux and mac every time, and sometimes on windows.
So I added every item, items file and troops file to the native (and nothing else) and it crashed. I kept the item files the same and used native troops file and it didn't.
I also tried replacing troops file in the mod with the native one, although it gave **** ton of other errors, it didn't crash.
Also when you debug the game on linux, you get this:
Thread 1 "mb_warband_linu" received signal SIGSEGV, Segmentation fault.
0x0000000000edfc4f in Troop::equip_slot(int, int, unsigned long long, unsigned long long, int, int, int, bool) ()
(gdb) backtrace
#0 0x0000000000edfc4f in Troop::equip_slot(int, int, unsigned long long, unsigned long long, int, int, int, bool) ()
#1 0x0000000000ee0587 in Troop::equip_slots(int, int, bool, bool) ()
#2 0x0000000000f470c3 in Game::start_new() ()
#3 0x0000000000fad394 in Loading_window::do_load(int&, int&, rglString&) ()
#4 0x0000000000fcac24 in Loading_window::check(float) ()
#5 0x0000000000f3666b in Application::FrameMove() ()
#6 0x0000000000ec8ae6 in CMyD3DApplication::FrameMove() ()
#7 0x00000000010e1e0f in CD3DApplication::Render3DEnvironment() ()
#8 0x00000000010e1efa in CD3DApplication::Run() ()
#9 0x00000000009dfacf in main ()
I know that this trial and error method will take me between a day and a week, that's why I postponed it to the summer.
Ah, sounds far more complicated than I expected. Wish you good luck and success at finding the faulty troop or item!
Thanks, it's a dragon to kill for sure.