The published version of a game is a little different to your development version, the latter one has a few more things for debugging active and so on. This is why errors can appear (immediately) in either one of those versions while not appearing in the other, although the faulty line of code or damaged file is in both of them.

It was an old/ faulty *.wad file I think which caused the problem. The error appeared first in the published version but after changing and adding stuff (in code) it appeared in the development version, too.

Thanks,
I'm planning to break up my project into different pieces in order to help narrow down the cause of these issues. One thing that occurred to me right off, all my global variables, strings, bmaps and pointers are being called though the main script, I mean, not within a function, not sure what the word for this is.

Is there a way to call global pointers like these from within a function, so they are only called upon when needed? For instance, if I have a level with certain textures, but those textures will not be used on any other levels, can I call them within a function, so they do not get accessed on other levels?

I hope this makes sense. This way, I could break up my program, and only those features being used would be called in the level they are being used on. That way, if there is a faulty bitmap, or model, etc... it would only cause problems in the level it is used on, and I could narrow down the cause much faster.

In a related question, how does the engine know which action/function to call first after loading a level? Does it start the top of the "level" list in WED and work its way down?

That way, the first entity on the list could call all the bitmaps, pointers, strings and variables used by the things on that level only. Is it possible?

@Lemming - your post made me laugh, by the way Thanks for that!

Okay,
I've found an old build of my game on my laptop. I'm going to load it back up, publish it and see if the same errors occur. That way, I'll know whether the problem was there early on or whether it came in later.

I don't understand what you mean with "call all the bitmaps" and similar.
When you level_load a map, I think the blocks as well as their textures - which get freed on the next level_load call so you don't have to purge them manually - get loaded first, then entities and then the actions are executed, starting with the entity which you placed in your level first.

Going back to an older version where the error does not appear can be helpful but it is no guarantee that that version does not have a faulty file - still assuming it's not an error in your code or simply a missing file in your published folder.

BMAP* cursor_pcx = "cursor.pcx"; << this is what I'm talking about

Oh I see. In such a case an entity function which creates the bitmaps can indeed be useful, I do something similar for a few big textures which I only need in one cutscene too.
You can do that for instance as follows:

BMAP* bmp_big_texture1 = NULL;

void create_big_textures()
{
if(!bmp_big_texture1) bmp_big_texture1 = bmap_create(...);
...
}

Then, when you exit the level you have two options, that is either destroy the bitmaps

ptr_remove(bmp_big_texture1);
bmp_big_texture1 = NULL;

or bmap_purge() (or whatever it is called) the allocated memory. Then you do not have to create the bitmap more than once but still can free unused memory.

Great, I will try this.
Also, I don't know if this might be the cause or not, but I get warnings that I have undefined materials on some of my objects. The thing is, even when I assign a material to them, it still gives me the warning. It never seemed to cause any problems, at least not any immediate crashes. Could this be the cause, or just another symptom?

Any advice on assigning materials?

Is this enough?
my.material = metal_mtl;

Or is there some other process one must use?

For the record, I know you also have to define the MATERIAL* before assigning it.

like so...

MATERIAL* metal_mtl =
{
effect="metal.fx";
skin1 = skycube;
}

Woooooohoooooo!

Okay, I hope this was really the problem. I re-installed GameStudio A7 along with the latest patch, and recompiled all my levels, and now the published version doesn't crash anymore

I figured it might be a problem with my installation when the debugger in SED wasn't working.

Now it seems to run smoothly and does not crash in the place it was crashing before. I am going to do a lot of testing now, to make sure it's stable, and make a backup copy before making any further changes.

I guess I should have figured this out sooner, but here it is for anyone else to benefit from my troubles.