v1.7.3 — Crash Shield

The big one: capture/overlay software can no longer crash the game

Third-party capture and overlay tools — NVIDIA Share / ShadowPlay, Steam and Discord overlays, RivaTuner/RTSS, OBS game-capture hooks, Parsec, and similar — inject themselves into the game's process. When one of those faults, it used to take the whole game down with it (crash to desktop / kick to menu), through no fault of the game or mod.

The engine now installs a first-chance exception guard at startup. If a fault comes from injected overlay/capture code, that one thread is safely parked and the game keeps running. Faults in the game's own code are left untouched, so real bugs still surface and still write a crash report.

This directly addresses the "begin full campaign / map load" crashes some players hit while streaming or recording. It runs on the NVIDIA GPU as normal; nothing about your graphics changes.

• Off-switch if ever needed: com_overlayGuard 0 in the console (default is on).

Also

• The problem reporter now records which overlay/capture DLLs were injected at the time of a crash — so if something does slip through, we can pinpoint it fast.

(Everything from v1.7.2 — the coop AI-loop crash fix, allied Colt-on-disarm, Build-a-Base / Base Assault / Demolition fixes, and the MP progression fixes — is included.)