[Chancellor23]

Thanks for all the info here.

Originally Posted by Gniarf

Boy, I do love my 1024.
Boy, the devs used 1024.
Boy, don't say "scruffy" until you have tried putting Cfg.GraphicsQuality=0 in config.ini. xD

I didn’t mean to insult you. When I considered playing this game, I read a couple of reviews, which said that the graphics were dated and didn’t look great. That didn’t deter me because I believe that game developers have the right to choose whatever graphics style they want. Video games are an art form. And if the designers choose an older style instead of cell-shading or hyper-realism, there’s nothing wrong with that. It would be like saying that Impressionism is dated because it’s Old School. Maybe it is, but that doesn’t invalidate Impressionism. NecroVisioN looks just right to me. I still like Undying and Painkiller. I like Impressionism, too.

However, while trying to solve this crash issue, I implemented Ztorm’s FOV fix and had the opportunity to see the game with Ultra High video settings, at 1920x1200 resolution, in 16:10 aspect ratio. Compared to the Standard 1024x768 settings, the game looked terrific. NVN’s visual style may be older, but that doesn’t mean that its rendering can’t be crisp and clean. Thus, my “scruffy” comment.

Originally Posted by Gniarf

2-Or you could simply avoid the gew98 and find&use the other rifle (smle). But that would be admitting defeat.

I’ve considered this, although the GEW98 makes the opening of Chapter 3 much easier. I’m open to a spoiler here. Is the SMLE rifle available later in this level? If so, I could be careful using the GEW98 (no zooming) until I get the other rifle. Or, is one of the other variations of the GEW98 (with Grenade or with Sight) available later in this level? I could switch to one of those because they don’t crash the game.

I played further into Chapter 3 to see if the crash was associated only with the starting location. Nope. Zooming the GEW continues to crash the game.

Originally Posted by Gniarf

Apparently you seem to have some coding experience, so you can try downloading a tool named "Painfull" by xentax to extract the .pak files. Extract lscripts.pak in data\lscripts and you can strat editting the code with notepad. No need to compile or repack the data. (ie: you can delete lscript.pak once its content is extracted, the game directly reads the extracted content)

I’m not really a programmer, although good with logic. Played around with BASIC and 6502 Machine Language in the 1980s, and DOS and Postscript in the 1990s. My only experience with class-based code comprises CSS coding for HTML—and not much of that. Since I don’t know Lua, I looked it up at Wikipedia. Apparently, it’s used to script other languages, often C/C++ (which I also don’t know).

However, I decided to take a look at the LScripts.pak file anyway. Doesn’t look like this is going to happen. Downloaded and unzipped the XeNTaX Tool Pack. Painfull wouldn’t launch (run-time error). Its ReadMe told me I should install MultiEx Commander to be sure I’d have all the appropriate DLLs. So, I did that. Painfull still produced the same run-time error. MultiEx Commander itself wouldn’t launch. Said I was missing a file, MSINET.OCX, which is not true. However, it’s in one of my 64-bit Windows folders, which might explain why the software couldn’t find it (it’s not 64-bit software). Additionally, within a minute of installing Commander, Norton AV reported two viruses on my machine: “Suspicious.MH69.A” and “Trojan Horse”. It stopped them and successfully removed them. Odd, since I scanned both Commander and the XeNTaX Tool Pack before I executed the files. Plus Commander was trying to set up an open Internet connection for some reason. I uninstalled all of the XeNTaX applications and deleted the files from my computer. I don’t trust those people.

Originally Posted by Gniarf

Put the following CWeapon.lua in NecroVisioN\Data\lscripts\Classes. It will not solve your problem, but it'll log all calls from a CWeapon to CVector:Set into a GniarfLog.txt, which should be in the same directory than script_error.log.

Report the latest (bottom) number.

Done. Twice. I started Chapter 3 and crashed the game. For comparison purposes, I started Chapter 2, loaded all weapons, scrolled to the GEW98 with Bayonet (Mouse3), zoomed the GEW successfully (Mouse2), and then exited the game. The last action before exiting (or crashing) the game in both cases was pressing Mouse2. In both cases, the latest number in the file was 1470. I thought there might be a difference between a successful and an unsuccessful use of Mouse2. There wasn’t.

Another option that I considered, had I been able to edit the PAK files… I assume that each level contains data that determines its startup weapons load-in. I might have been able to change the Chapter 3 opening rifle from the GEW to the SMLE and still have a rifle—it just wouldn’t be the game’s default rifle for Chapter 3. Semi-cheating; but at this point, I could enjoy the game and still sleep at night.