major crash bug

[NYJuggalo45]

posted this on the "temp" forums but got no response, hoping someone can answer me now that we seem to be up and running again
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I'm hoping someone can help me out here...I am having a fairly major crash problem. I spoke to Shane Orr via e-mail about the problem and he suggested I post the problem here, so here are the copies of the e-mails I sent to him and his response. Since it will be asked, I am on Windows NT, running Ootp 6.01 patch, and have a Pent III with plenty of ram. The problem only exists in my Historical League and not in all my OOTP leagues, so I am fairly certain it's not the game, but the league itself. Here are the e-mails, any help will be greatly appreciated.

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Shane,

I know your a seasoned vet with ootp, and i'm hoping you might be able to help me.

First here's my problem. I'm running a historical league and for the 2nd time now I've gotten the same problem. The league starts up fine (using Ankit's DB) and I get thru a number of seasons with no problem. I started both leagues in 1901, but did it differently than real life history, creating 30 teams (ala current day MLB) and held a fantasy draft. Then everything proceeds as normal, with rookie drafts rather than assigning players to real teams. The 1st time I got thru 1908, the 2nd time thru 1911. Both times, for some unexplainable reason, the game crashes. It happens right after spring training, when the league goes back to the standings page with all teams being 0-0. The crash occurs when you click on any of the teams. I can go to league setup, almanac, etc...but clicking on any team either from the league standings page or from the teams pulldown menu causes a fatal error and a game crash. I do nothing different from the previous seasons (from 1901 up until the game crashes), so this is why I am so confused, because everything ran fine for a number of seasons. The other odditiy is that it only affects the historical league, my 3 other leagues (maelstrom, fbbl, and a fictional solo league) all run fine. And, before you ask, I backup my league every season, and even the backup suffers from the same crashing problem. Also, I tried creating a new league and copying all the files from the historical league to the new league and same problem persists.

Now, normally I would post this problem on the ootp forums, but they have been down for quite awhile and i'm getting fed up losing my historical league and all the many hours of work I have put into it.

So, I'm hoping you can help me out by answering one or more of the following questions.

1. Any idea what the problem is and how to correct it?
2. Any idea if the servers are still up so I can re-download ootp, a patch, something?
3. Do you have the address of the servers if they are up, as both the forums and main site are both down?
4. Any idea how I can get in contact with the technical service dept, Steve Kuffrey, Henry, etc?

Really hope you can help me out here, and any help would be greatly appreciated. Not sure if you ever check out the dynasty forums on the ootp site, but I put a ton of work into my dynasties, and twice now all that hard work, all the reports I've typed up, etc, have all basically gone to waste. Thanks in advance

Mike
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I checked out all the files and found another oddity, maybe this will help in the "fix". The players.dat, messages.dat and trade.dat files all still exist, but all are blank (0 kb). No idea why or how this happened.

mike

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I've been brainstorming on your problems, but I dont' really have an answer. I only know of a few things that will cause OOTP to crash, but none of them result in 0 KB or even corrupted files like you have. Unfortunately, the servers are still down. Hopefully they will be back up sometime this weekend. You can find a temporary/test board here: http://www.ootp-online.com/board/ to post your question on though. Once the new board is up the info will be lost, but until then maybe someone will answer your question.

[NYJuggalo45]

any thoughts on this? anyone from tech support?

i'd really like to restart my historical league but don't want to suffer thru this again. any help would be appreciated

[Steve Kuffrey]

I've not had the problem nor do I know of any solutions other than making a backup copy of the league often. Make sure and keep plenty (atleast 1 gig) of free HD space on your system, run scan disk, defrag regularly.

[SSG Troyer]

It sounds like something is happening to the files once they get to be a certain size. This could be a hardware issue, or a software issue. If others are not able to duplicate historical leagues crashing after 8-11 years with ... what settings on game logs and box scores, and what almanac settings are you using? These would need to be duplicated as well, as would your schedule and league and financial structure. IF exactly duplicate leagues (aside from player names) fail to produce a duplicate response from others, then you need to look at your machine. Possible issues:

* Is NT up to date? Run Windows Update or whatever NT has that's equivilent.
* RAID failure. Is your system set up with RAID 0? With a P3, I'm betting not.
* Hardrive space. I'm assuming you have plenty.
* Virtual Memory running dry. With "plenty of RAM", I wouldn't think this would be an issue, unless VM is set to 0.
* Lost files chains. The information's there, the FATs just don't know where to look for it. Scandisk will fix this to some degree ...

I sure there's a thing or two I'm not thinking of ATM ...

[NYJuggalo45]

Steve:
I backup prior to off-season and prior to regular season starting every year. But in the process from ending spring training to going to the start of next season is where the problem occured, so even if i restored the backup, re-did off-season, after spring the problem still happened. I've never run scandisk or defrag on the files though, so I will definitely try that.

SSG:
I was thinking along the same lines, that when the league gets to a certain size, it reaches a "max" and erases the files. But I did a 120 year league on OOTP5 without the problem and running the same league, once I got thru 8 seasons, the next 11, so i didn't think that was valid. I was wondering if it could be that I am running a 30 team league in 1901, which when you import, is only set up with 16 teams. But to answer your questions
- Game logs and box scores are both generated, in almanac, just player files are generated, the other 2 options are set to no.
- Yes NT is up to date
- I don't even know what RAID is (like I said, dense when it comes to computers)
- I have over 10 gig free HD space
- RAM is 256, but I don't know how to check the VM
- Like I said above, never ran scandisk which I will start doing now.
Can you tell me how to check RAID and VM? I know this is an OOTP tech forum, not a PC tech forum, but maybe that's the problem.

Thanks for your help guys, very much appreciated

[SSG Troyer]

Originally Posted by NYJuggalo45

Steve:
Can you tell me how to check RAID and VM?

Sorry abouth the delay ... My Ethernet card fried. Just installed a new one.

Okay. For educational purposes only, RAID is a modern method of handling two identical hard drives. If you don't have twin hard drives, you don't have RAID. And even if you do, you might not. There are two flavors of RAID, RAID 0 or Striping, and RAID 1, or Mirroring. RAID 0 speeds up hard drive access by splitting files into multiple chunks, and writing the chunks to each drive in succession. Chunk 1 goes to disk 1 at the same time chuck 2 goes to disk 2. Then chunk 3 goes to disk 1 at the same time chunk 4 goes to disk 2, and so forth. This effectively doubles your hard drive performance, but at a risk. Failure of one drive means both are gone.

RAID 1, or Mirroring, is a security standard. Files written to drive 1 are copied on drive 2, effectively providing an automatic backup at the expense of performance.

I have yet to see a P3 computer with RAID unless it was installed by the user. If after all this, you still have doubts about whether or not you have RAID, lemme know.

VM. Go Start>Control Panel>System>Advanced and click Settings in the Performance box. Click the Advanced tab and look to the bottom. Your VM settings are displayed there. If it's anything less than 512MB, lemme know.