Attention MilkShape Users/ Importer Crashing Problems

[Vodhin]

I've just spent the past hour trying to find out why one of my new models was crashing when I tried to open it in the importer. Here's the symptom:

The Importer takes a long time to load a New Model or a Scenery File that imports a newly modified model, and once you click Save OVL the importer seems to hang indefinately, sometimes coming back with an "Unhandled Exception" error.


Cause: check your Material List for textures that have Duplicate Names or Materials that are not used by any meshes, typically something that MilkShape will do if you have merged similar models.

Possible Alternate Cause: You have placed an unknown element, like a Joint


Hopefully folks will add this to the various tips, tricks, and FAQs that are out there. This might also apply to other modeling programs.

[Belgabor]

Could you please put some example files of those issues for me for download? The importer should not crash due to those things, they warrant examination.

[Vodhin]

OK. Took a little bit to reproduce, as I had fixed the files. I had to retrace my steps to get the error again: just deleting the meshes does not cause an error. It came after merging another MS file, and that file had meshes deleted before it was saved.

Here is a raw MS3D file that has both unused and duplicate material (texture) names. It definately crashes the importer.

http://www.vodhin.net/tests/VodhinsMaterialError.ms3d

it turn out that is is duplicate material names that are the culprit here, and I will adjust my initial post accordingly.

The Joint issue is a hit and miss, most of the time the importer just ignores it, leaving it out of the mesh list, but once in a while it hangs and then reports that exception error. removing the joint (and no other modifications) makes it OK again (So far)- though once I got a vertex in the mesh list, where none were...

[Belgabor]

Ok, I'll investigate.

Note to all: The Create OVL part of the importer is not supposed to crash any more! It has gone beyond the "experimental/beta" state of older importer versions. One exemption are crashes when loading ASE files as those are the fault of the ase reading library I use which would take me more time to fix than I currently think it's worth. If it crashes in any other way, that's a bug to report. That also means to keep a copy of offending files if applicable =)

[GH2Freak]

THANK YOU!! That's what's been happening to me all this time! THANK YOU!

[coinich]

I'll keep this stuff in mind. Any noted errors with Blender and this sort of thing?

[Belgabor]

Not that I know of. As noted above there are some things in ASE files that make it crash, but I'm pretty sure the Blender export plugin doesn't write those (Only heard about such from 3DSmax users).

Vodhin: I started to investigate but couldn't get it to crash (neither loading it nor creating the ovl). Please give me a step by step guide how to reproduce it starting from your uploaded file.