Update as of mid-December 2013:
Many of the prior posts in this thread refer to my old website at TechVideoReview.com/FlightSimMovies. That web site no longer exists, but its content has been copied to my main web site AskMisterWizard.com/FlightSimMovies. Accordingly, in any of the links above, please replace "TechVideoReview" with "AskMisterWizard" and leave the remainder of any URLs unchanged.
As of this date, the current version of Aces High is V2.31.3. The Mission Editor for this version includes some new and powerful diagnostic aids that automatically report any mission segments that are designed beyond the the capability of the aircraft assigned to fly it. For example, if I design a mission with a segment demanding a rate of climb that is too steep for a P38 assigned to fly it, I am alerted when I try to compile the mission. I find it is then very easy to make minor changes to the route, speed, or altitude of the segment to compensate.
Mission developers are reporting a lot of "crashes" when missions are run offline with this version 2.31.3, even after correcting segments as described in the prior paragraph. I find that I can successfully compile any of my old missions to the complete satisfaction of the Mission Editor for V2.31.3, but only a few of them will actually run to completion offline. Most of them crash after a few minutes of flight. When this happens, the video image freezes, and a brief snippet of sound (generally engine noise) repeats over and over again and again for about 20 seconds before Windows intervenes with a diagnostic frame declaring that the program is not responding, and offering to terminate it. All of my experience of this nature has been derived from missions that are known to compile and run correctly with old Version 2.12.4.
I have tried to determine the cause of these crashes by methodically eliminating optional features from my missions. I chose my "PeabodySimple" mission as the basis for this work because it's my simplest published mission. It is documented here:
http://askmisterwizard.com/FlightSimMovies/AcesHigh/Ah2Missions/PeabodySimple/PeabodySimpleMissionPage01Full.htmAfter eliminating every reference to optional media files (.wav and .bmp) I found that this "crashing" problem is still unchanged. Accordingly, I am convinced that the problem is not related to the optional sound and image files that mission editors can put into mission briefings or mission "events".
In a more complex mission I vastly cut down the number of simulated aircraft. Decreasing the number of aircraft participating in the mission from about 100 down to about 15 did not affect the crashes either. I was surprised to find that if I flew the mission in the same way, it crashed at exactly the same point whether the mission was compiled with 100 airplanes, or with only 15.
I was also wondering if the error was related to the terrain in use. As an experiment, I used a very old version of the ndisles terrain with my Peabody Simple Terrain. It crashed in the same manner and at the same point as when I used the current version of ndisles.
Some developers report more success getting missions to run offline than online in the "Staged" arena. Other developers report the opposite. As of this writing, mission developers are searching for patterns to help localize the problem.
I now suspect that the developers at HiTechCreations are currently consumed with other features of Aces High that are more important to their business goals than offline or "staged" missions. I have confidence that at some point these issues will get their attention and will be fixed. In the meantime, although I will use newer versions of the Mission Editor to detect "impossible segments" in my missions as described above, I continue to use old version 2.12.4 as the basis for my mission development, and all of my missions are always compiled and optimized for that version.
