A particleLifetime bug crashing my games?

[Peter5930]

My game crashed last night when I gated into Charon and then gated back to the previous system, and I'd noticed in the previous system that there were lots of little light-blue fizzy streamer gas animation thingies littering the place; some were floating freely in space, some were in the same location as wrecked ships and three of them were attached to my ship. I decided to try to replicate it today, so I went to the same system/system level as before (the one before Charon) and parked on a friendly station on autopilot for a while and let the Dynamic Systems guys fight it out with each other. Once I saw the fizzy streamer gas thingies again, I took some screenshots and then gated out and gated back in again, which crashed the game like before.

http://paste.alterecco.net/view/YJqQa/

I was wondering if it was one of the less common weapons in Weapons Extended that has a problem, since it looks a little bit like the effect in the second row from the top of the smallprojectiles bitmap in WE. A problem with Visible Damage also occurred to me. I had WE on hard mode last night and today.

[RPC]

Actually, I've seen those streamers as well on the Succession. I have absolutely no idea what they are. Did you try and save and then reload the game?
I think that cleared the streamers. Sounds like WE, although I'm not sure.

[digdug]

Looks like the tau cannon in WE is the culprit.

The effect uses a smoketrail into a hiteffect in a way that shoudn't be used probably.

Code: Select all

<hiteffect>
					<Flare
							style=				"fadingBlast"
							lifetime=			"30"
							radius=				"150"
							primaryColor=		"0xaa, 0xff, 0xf0"
						/>
					<SmokeTrail
									spread=			"15-20"
									particleLifetime="3"
									emitDuration=	"1"
									emitRate=		"2-3"
									emitSpeed=		"5-20"
									>
								<ParticleEffect>
									<Flare
								    	style=				"fadingBlast"
								    	lifetime=			"3"
								       	radius=				"5"
								       	primaryColor=		"0xaa, 0xff, 0xf0"
									/>
								</ParticleEffect>
							</SmokeTrail>
						
				</hiteffect>

It never managed to crash one of my games, but all those particles are probably not good.

I'll change it to a Flare for now.

Please download again WE. I'll fix it right away.
http://xelerus.de/index.php?s=mod&id=1155

[Peter5930]

Thanks for fixing it so quickly. It only crashed my games if I gated into a system where the streamers had previously been generated; it was fine if I didn't backtrack.

[Peter5930]

I wonder also if this was why my Network games were crashing, since I'd often revisit old systems when exploring the Network. I'll give The Network another go and see if the update has resolved it.

[RPC]

I'm pretty sure Network is broken. We kept getting crashes during the Succession, and WillytheSquid was getting them as well. The mods that we both had in common were PSD and Network.
G made several changes to topology code which is why I'm working on a replacement before I go forward with Succession.