I probably found the bug with ships trying to dock on the buoy. I just put the player on autopilot and at the end I noticed it was trying to dock the buoy. When looking with player.ship.target.isStation at the buoy, I noticed this was set to true. Anything with station in its rolelist is seen as station. Somehow the code sees xxx_station_buoy also as station.
This means that if anywhere in the role set it encounters "station" it is seen as station. Is does not need to be a separate word.
By renaming into cataclysmStationBuoy it was not seen as station anymore. Note that "Station" is not "station".
It might also be a reason of the crash mentioned above? Because one of the two crashes happened while docking at the station on auto pilot.
interesting developments...since I've found out what horrible things Vista does, I have been able to get my installation to run for two hours non-stop battle and jumping out without any (out of memory) crash! My scanner was full with ships...and I did fly until the framerate made it almost impossible to hit anything. In that case, the game would sometimes respond to throttle zero by reducing the throttle noticeably below zero (approx. 10-20% of full throttle reverserd, depending upon the case). The absence of crashes also accounts for "normal" playing, like jumping from planet to planet and having nothing more than little firefights.
Still, it's only the absence of a crash, not the sure knowledge that the problem is gone for real. Guess I'll have to play a bit more to know.
However, shortly after you wrote about your docking problems, I had a similar one with a station type that doesn't have buoys! The DC flies to the point where a buoy would be and then stops still. Nothing happens anymore until I switch that stupid computer off and dock manually. At least I don't have a crash like you had. Sadly, the bug doesn't always appear, but it did appear more often than not. Sometimes the DC is able to dock normally. I haven't been able to figure out what triggers the bad behaviour. The log didn't reveal anything.
The stations are those military stations from assassins.
When trying to dock on carriers, I sometimes had similar experiences in the past, but did attribute this to the fact that I tried to dock on a moving target which then has to slow down and wait...
Oh, and my RAM usage has been pretty constant over those playing sessions! 500 megs which grow up to 900 and then drop back to 500 as soon as I jump to another system.
The sad point is, that I still have some of my previous OXPs to add...and see if that changes anything.
I still get the shader-bug, though. Sometimes the game starts with it and sometimes it appears after docking and launching again. While previous versions had black ships, this is now almost completely exchanged for white ships. I've got the impression that this might have to do with some bug concerning the textures: if this bug appears, it is often happening that many ships, asteroids, cargo canisters, stations, ... do use the same texture for everything. The type of texture changes, it's not always the same. My current workaround is to ignore it until I can dock, save and restart the game.
