I would have loved to post this in the LB2 forums, but alas they are now Read-only. For what it is worth, I discovered something exciting that I can find no mention of elsewhere. Contained in Flyboy's site was a perfect and simple workaround to the dreaded LB2 Debrief Crash. It was staring me right in the face and I never realized it!
LB2 Debrief Crash WorkaroundI felt as others had that the Debrief CTD basically killed the game. There would be no way to develop a character, play a campaign, build a squad (online or AI) or even just enjoy your magnificence after an epic mission. The crash was infuriatingly intermittent so I never knew when it would ruin a game.
After reading about the Debrief Crash on the forums it seemed as though many people had come to believe it was the USB joysticks causing the problem. So I disabled the
Saitek software, I tried just running the joystick without even the profiler, I unplugged the joystick before mission end, I uninstalled
Saitek Magic Bus in device manager before mission end (by Alt-Tabbing out of the game which is dangerous), still nothing completely prevented the crash. 1 out of 5 missions would fail. Even worse, the more awesome I performed in-game, the more kills I had, the more likely was the crash! In fact if I had a particularly successful kick-a$$ game, I was guaranteed to get a crash-to-desktop right before I was to see my awesome stats!
Upon further inspection (in Event Viewer), it was always 'wrapdll.dle' that would crash. This got me thinking as discussed elsewhere that it was a memory issue (would explain the intermittent occurrence . So I tried all the simple memory fixes: +G's WAC-LB2 fix and Phoenix's LB2 database fixes. I realized that the more kills accrued in-game the more the mission ending 'wrapdll.dle' would have to process and thus overstep into protected memory -- memory that might be allocated to USB joysticks hence the anecdotal evidence that these are related. Lb2 is thus unable to 'wrap-up' the mission and give a pilot his or her mission summary.
What is a pilot to do? You have the best mission of your life and it wont even be recorded or acknowledged!
SOLUTION:RELOAD THE LAST MISSION SUMMARY PAGE -- as outlined in the Debug info/Yaw fix!
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You can find the Tweak here at the bottom )
Note: Do this before flying any other missions, ideally right after the crash brings you back to your desktop.
1.) Open up the CA.INI file in the LB2 folder and at the top of the file, add the text below:
[Backdoors]
FullOnFlightModel=1
env=c
2.) Then start LB2.
3.) Afterwards comment-out these commands by adding semi-colons, thus you may leave the commands in the CA.ini file and must only remove the semi-colons whenever the crash happens:
[Backdoors]
;FullOnFlightModel=1
;env=c
*** Important: Sometimes the game will still continue to crash when restarting this way, but eventually you will get to the Debrief Screen if you are patient and just keep trying to restart the game.
Each time 'wrapdll.dle' is invoked it takes your mission status and creates the mission debrief screen. The file 'Temp.$$$' is created when the debrief screen is active and then is deleted once the pilot clicks Accept to leave the debrief tent. Upon clicking Accept, the mission results are now added to your Campaign file, '<CampaignName>.SGM' and the 'player<#>.dat' file is updated with all of the mission stats. Even when you Alt-X to Windows mid-game, your progress up to that point is stored and can now be accessed. By adding the above commands to the CA.ini file, you can not only get your stats, but can also re-fly the mission! This is especially important if you took time designing waypoints, strike targets and complex missions, since the debrief CTD used to destroy the ability of re-flying a mission!
Note: If you intend to re-fly a mission, then you must do it before moving on to another mission or clicking Accept. If you enter the mission tent (which starts a new mission), the details of the previous mission (ATOs, waypoints, tasking, etc) are lost. Your mission results will still be available, but you wont be able to re-fly the mission using this method. This also occurs if you click 'Accept' at the Debrief Screen, since you then must pass through the mission tent to get back to the Base screen -- and this wipes out the mission, overwriting it with a new one. Don't click Accept if you want to re-fly at a later point in time. Simply Alt-X out of the Debrief Screen and when ready make sure the commands are active in the CA.ini file, then start the game. You will be brought back to the Debrief Screen (and provided you didn't click accept nor enter the mission tent) then you can re-fly the last mission.
An interesting side note: using this method and accessing the debrief screen, each time clicking "Accept" causes the player.dat file to be updated as though you have just completed the mission. All the AI pilots also have their stats (kills/flight time/etc) updated. This method could be used to artificially boost pilot scores and AI Rating, potentially giving one a stellar squad of lethal AI pilots. (I did not test this possibility, but noticed the stat increase each time I re-ran the debrief screen and clicked "Accept")
~Victor1_9er
P.S. A
HUGE Thank You is due Flyboy for keeping his site alive! I never would have been able to play this sim again if not for site!