50/50 Method Phails (and phails, and phails...)

[akatonbo]

I recently went on a downloading spree, and now my game is crashing when I go into Windows and Doors. Okay, so, first things first, make sure the problem is in the Objects directory -- take out everything BUT Objects, load game, CRASH! Put in everything but Objects, load game, no crash. Step two, remove everything but Objects for load time, put half of Objects folder into game. Load. No crash. Take that half out, put the other half in. No crash. WTF, says I. Okay, must be a conflict between two objects? But neither Clean Installer nor DDO found any duplicates related to walls, and removing the duplicates they did find didn't help (in fact I ran a Clean Installer check for duplicates before I even got started, but DDO found some additional ones).

So I started a more complex tactic, adding subfolders of Objects in two and three at a time until I got a crash. When I finally got the crash, then I tried loading the game with just the batch of directories I had just added in when I got the crash. No crash. Then, those directories + the two that are heaviest on windows and doors. No crash. Then, the new batch plus everything else I'd already had in there EXCEPT the two with the most windows and doors. STILL NO CRASH.

So, basically, I cannot isolate the cause of this crash to any specific place. I'm about to load up the game with all the stuff that I had NOT previously tested during the process described in the second paragraph in, and all the stuff I had tested already out, to see if it's maybe volume-related? (I do have way too many windows and doors. -.-) Any suggestions?

ETA: Put the other half of the stuff in, no crash.

ETA2: Yanked the largest (in KB size) directory of the batch that was reproducing the crash. Loaded the game. No crash. Put the directory back in, removed approximately 50% of content. Loaded the game. No crash. Took that half out, put the other half in. Loaded the game. No crash.

WTF.

ETA3: Oh, and yes, it is SPECIFICALLY Build Mode -> Windows and Doors that causes the issue, and it's just going into that category at all (which suggests it's actually... I think it's single-story doors that comes up at first?) that causes the crash.

When I had an actual problem item in decorative the game wouldn't crash until it tried to load the thumbnail for that specific item, and I was able to locate it because it happened to be an item that was actually /in/ my decorative folder, so a combination of seeing what price range I was at in the deco catalogue before the crash and using Sims 2 categorizor to spot subfolders with items that hadn't had thumbnails generated yet helped me find it without too much hassle.

Am currently going through and deleting unwanted items from a portion of total downloads, since the only theory I can come up with is that it's just, well, too much crap.

[Inge]

That sounds annoying   Would you like a cup of tea?

[akatonbo]

Sounds good to me. I'm currently busy with going through stuff and deleting, and I sure hope it works. -.-

[Process Denied]

I went through that and it was driving me crazy.  It ended up fixing itself.  I guess something prefered to be loaded in a different order?

[spaceface]

I had that exact same thing. The game crashed immediately if I went into the windows or doors menu, after I took some DLs out it still crashed but only from the second menu page. It also crashed if I used the "eyedropper" on any build mode item.

Purging my DLs folder was the only thing that worked. Now, I try to be more careful because I think it was some CC that had come with a lot. Any package that I do not recognize because I did not extract it to a specific folder gets deleted asap.

[jolrei]

I generally save any new cc objects, meshes, etc. to a test folder in Downloads, and leave it there for a while until I've played a bit.  That way if any new glitches come up, I can easily remove the latest additions and hopefully get rid of the problem.

[talysman]

The part about the eyedropper sounds familiar; I remember someone talking about a problem like this. I suggest careful forum searching. Also, what does the Hack Conflict Detector say? If you've split your downloads into two halves and the game works with either half in, but not both, it's probably two objects with the same GUID, or some other conflict. Probably a door, since when you select Windows and Doors, doors are usually the first group displayed. Can you remove just the doors, verify it doesn't crash, and then do fifty/fifty on the doors?

[akatonbo]

I may give that a shot if I continue to have trouble; I've been focusing on other things (deleting stuff I can delete without having to have had everything in and sorted it all) and run into a few other blips that make my suspect that my downloads folder might just be, um, too big. (It is FRIGGING HUGE.)