Just a status update: The increased nexus really seems to help. I still have to perform some more thorough testing on other machines, but so far Kartoffel and me had no more random crashes.

@jcl: Of course we've already checked all these functions related to the <P>/Pause feature (UI scripts, control scripts, sounds, graphics, entities, pointers, etc.) and we can rule out errors in these areas. Of course, we also investigated other loops running at the same time. The problem was that the crash occurred not only in connection with the pause function, but also when loading levels and playing larger sound files. I don't know if I'm telling the symptoms correctly, but for me personally this indicates a possible lack of memory.

I could imagine that at a certain point in time the reserved virtual memory was too full and therefore memory areas might have been overwritten, resulting in script malfunctions, error messages in "clean" code parts and, ultimately, crashes. This is also supported by the fact that the crashes have changed their behaviour or occurred later/less often after we excluded particularly large model files from the game's code. However, that's only a speculation due to the absence of an actual, reliable error source.

@jumpman: You might be right about that. I also think there may still be a problem in the source code and I'll make sure to analyze the whole code again. Last week I did what you suggested: Setting the Nexus very low and reducing the code until the engine ran stable. The whole thing was very tedious and time-consuming. Unfortunately, I could not detect any errors in the excluded code areas. I was able to fix some other bugs on the way though - some of these fixes definitely helped to make the version more stable, so all of this wasn't in vain.

Anway, at the moment I am very happy that the game is running without crashes, so now I'm going to invest my time into actual content polishing. I'll also give my partners green light so they can continue their work.

Thanks so far to all of you. In case the crash reoccurs, I'll let you know by posting here... Fingers crossed!