Oh Blast!! It looks like my DataBase is in a state where I hang everytime I do a economics update (22 game years in). I just ran into the hang. After control-c'ing out, I tried again, and it hung again.
The only thing I can think of that was odd before the hang was that I had a couple of "bad property" errors thrown when I was putting ships in for refit (two times). It seemed like the error happened when I picked a ship other than the first one on the selection list. I just re-checked the event log, though, and it looks like that happened several updates before the hang.
If you can't solve it, you can send the database and I can try to fix it. I can't guarantee anything though because someone else sent a DB and I had real problems tryinn to use the current version of the code with the v4.0 database. I know it's a bit late to say this but you should back the database up occasionally in case something bad happens.
Steve
Thanks - I tried again last night, got through a single industrial update (which made me think yippee!!!!) then hung again. What's the best way to send the DB - through a private message on the board?
New hypothesis on the cause of the hang - I suspect it has something to do with maintenance failures that occur during a timestep that triggers an econ update.
I've been bulling through the hang by just existing out, restarting, and asking for another time increment. It looks like Aurora doesn't update the econ-update clock with time-elapsed in an update until the econ-update is completely finished, since I can take small steps after triggering an update, but not large steps. After one or two hangs, eventually I get an econ update and then am ok for varying lengths of time. I just noticed that I seem to get a lot of engine failure events on my (obsolete) jump ships that are just sitting out there on WP immediately after a restart - this leads me to think they're correlated (I just went back to the DB I'm trying to send you and played forward, and sure enough - there was an engine failures).
BTW, when I come back after exiting from the hang, all my sensor contacts re-establish themselves on the next increment (in case this info helps you understand where in the update time sequence it's happening).
[EDIT - LATER] Oh well, so much for that theory. I've hit several hangs since posting, and of course the maintenance failures stopped happening right after I posted. I did notice that mining and fuel production are being updated, but not construction when it hangs.
John