How do you determine cause of crashing?

I've been testing with a lot of stuff lately and crashing happens frequently from modding.

How do you determine the cause of crash? I would like to know what went wrong instead of digging through sooooooo much code to find it. For example; I've modded a the nuke and when the fabber goes to build the actual model, the game crashes.

Well first you validate your jsons

hehe that's the first thing I did

I got the model to build... but why does it look like this?

If you run your own server on the terminal, sometimes it will output a message before it dies.

Do you use rescale PA? if yes that is how it looks when you forgot to put the ...X textures next to the modified papa (or you have the client texture mod not enabled)

That's a new one...

I just deleted the entire nuke folder and replaced it because the ammo icons on the bottom were missing too. I was trying to make it build another kind of nuke but I guess that failed. And no, I didn't use rescalePA for this.

hmm then all I can say is: that looks exactly like what happened when I renamed models for rescale pa but did not rename the textures. Basically PA failed to find the textures for that unit. If no textures are available at all it does what you see in that screenshot. If some of them are available, but not all of them it crashes.

Textures have to be in the same directory as the model and have to have the same name except for an "_mask/material/diffuse" at the end.

I've been able to reproduce a new crash in my Dox4Lyf mod. I made the holkins twice as big in rescalepa and added it to everything (this new holkins is a giant one that takes 54400 metal to build and 100k power to maintain, the other holkins is still build-able), and that's about it for new things I did.

When I try to skirmish the AI with the mod enabled, the only thing that loads are the planets. It looks like it crashes right when the spawn icons are about to show up (numbers 1 and 2). In fact, the entire UI for that matter.

Anyone know what this could be from? I'm running on windows 7 so I can't use terminal.

EDIT: i already verified game cache in steam

Well, i renamed the folder to something crazy (so it would not be loaded in the game) for the giant holkins and now it doesn't crash.

That doesn't really make sense though...

EDIT: When I renamed it back to the original (the giant holkins folder, not the normal holkins folder) "artillery_Xlong" it crashed.

Check the PA log, if you've made an error in your unit json, it should pick it up.