Recently I decided to retry putting particle effects on blaster bolts like I'd done in the past. I decided to change the effects I'd been using to nicer-looking, lower-particle count ones. I also simplified the blaster impact effects so that I could have more of them without everything in my game blinking out of existence.
I'd joked to myself that it'd be really bad if such a minor change were to result in disaster. I thought it was funny, but I told myself that even in the unlikely event that the game did crash, my bf2 log from the modtools.exe would save me.
Anyway, I went to munge. No problems there, the munge log didn't even show up. Next, I moved my new ingame.lvl to where it goes, and went into the game. Once I had selected the map I intended to test the effects on, I clicked launch and prepared to be blown away.
...
But something was wrong.
The game began loading. But suddenly, out of the blue, the red loading dots stopped flashing about 1/3 of the way through. Assuming my laptop was just having a temporary hiccup, I let it go. Except it wouldn't go. It stayed there for several minutes, and then I lost patience and stopped the process.
Next, I opened up the bf2modtools.
The same thing happened, but then I looked into the log.
At some point in the log, there's just the beginning of the particle transform severity 2 errors that we're told can safely be ignored. Except...
They extended into infinity (probably multiple thousands of lines before I shut down my game).
I tried so hard to find errors other than those, and only found things mentioning duplicate effects (without referencing anything I'd actually be able to do anything about) and the lightningball model being mentioned saying that it'd already loaded it (I haven't touched the lightningball model in many months).
I can't post the log because it's several hundred thousand characters too long for the forum.
EDIT: Have a load of these in the middle, too:
Code: Select all
...
Message Severity: 2
C:\Battlefront2\main\Battlefront2\Source\SoldierAnimationData.cpp(900)
SoldierAnimationData[5f0ce10d]::Animation: animation data 'thrown_tumblefront_upper' was already read
Message Severity: 2
C:\Battlefront2\main\Battlefront2\Source\SoldierAnimationData.cpp(900)
SoldierAnimationData[5f0ce10d]::Animation: animation data 'thrown_tumbleback_upper' was already read
Message Severity: 2
C:\Battlefront2\main\Battlefront2\Source\SoldierAnimationData.cpp(900)
SoldierAnimationData[5f0ce10d]::Animation: animation data 'thrown_bouncefrontsoft_upper' was already read
Message Severity: 2
C:\Battlefront2\main\Battlefront2\Source\SoldierAnimationData.cpp(900)
SoldierAnimationData[5f0ce10d]::Animation: animation data 'thrown_bouncebacksoft_upper' was already read
Message Severity: 2
C:\Battlefront2\main\Battlefront2\Source\SoldierAnimationData.cpp(900)
SoldierAnimationData[5f0ce10d]::Animation: animation data 'thrown_landfrontsoft_upper' was already read
Message Severity: 2
C:\Battlefront2\main\Battlefront2\Source\SoldierAnimationData.cpp(900)
SoldierAnimationData[5f0ce10d]::Animation: animation data 'thrown_landbacksoft_upper' was already read
...EDIT2:
When I removed the ~10 new particle effects I added, the game ran normally. When i added back in the blaster bolt impacts, it ran fine. I added in one trail effect, and it worked fine. Then I added in the rest (they're identical files save for the colors), it would do the hangup. But it shouldn't be due to the sheer number of effects, because I actually have fewer effects now than ever before (I had more effects just before this change - I got rid of all the colorful bolt impacts for a generic one, for example, and removed those old ones from the .lvl). Any ideas?