Dateiliste

When a pilot riding the Black Pyro ship joins an in-game server, this can cause server crashes under the following circumstances:

• The player with the Black Pyro dies.

• The player with the Black Pyro leaves the game.

Sometimes, it happens very frequently (i.e. whenever a Black Pyro dies or leaves the game), and sometimes it doesn't happen at all.

When the same mission/level is hosted as a dedicated server, the problem miraculously goes away, but only for some time. Dedicated servers running for a few hours or longer suddenly crash under the same conditions and on the same events: When a Black Pyro dies or leaves the game.

If a hosted mission contains custom gam file entries for the black pyro, it always crashes for clients only.

The problem is due to Descent 3: Mercenary not being installed properly on the server and/or on the client (player computer). To be more precise, it is a combination of the Mercenary add-on and the Black Pyro Justice extension, although both can cause the crashes when used alone. Transferring a Descent 3 + Descent 3: Mercenary installation from one computer to another one without a re-installation is prone to those issues.

Solution

For in-game servers, the solution is to either re-install the game completely from scratch or to apply the uninstall registry entries for Mercenary. See Unable to load level file merc1d3l on how this can be done.

For dedicated servers, it helps to restart the server more often. If you restart the dedicated server at least once an hour, the Black Pyro should not crash the games. However, the recommended solution for dedicated servers is to apply the registry entries for Mercenary too or to re-install the game completely again.

This solution does not work if the mission contains custom gam entires for the black pyro. In that case, the required registry entires need to be applied and/or Mercenary needs to be installed properly on the clients.

Re-installing Descent 3 is a very simple task if you're using the Descent 3 version from Dateiliste.