For the over 2 years I’ve played Call of Duty 4, I’ve never once successfully been able to load/play the map “Winter Crash”. Every single time iw3mp.exe crashes to the desktop about 1/3 of the way through loading the map.
Well, tonight I’d finally had enough (no idea why it took over 2 years for that to happen) and I went on a Google rampage. Apparently while this issue isn’t entirely unknown, it’s not common enough that anyone has posted a clear reason why it occurs, or a fix. I tried re-extracting the original .ff files from the patch where they originated from, but they’re “touched” by later patches, and I’m guessing this is where the corruption occurs. Restoring the original versions merely makes cod4 cry about them not matching the ones on the server, and deleting them altogether has the same result. I thought maybe the game client would try to dl them from the server, but no dice.
After digging about some more, I found a random location online that had a copy of all the usermaps from the zone directory. I dl’d the two files relevant to “Winter Crash”, which are:
mp_crash_snow.ff
and
mp_crash_snow_load.ff
and replaced my copies under:
C:\Program Files\Activision\Call of Duty 4 – Modern Warfare\zone\english
It worked! For the first time ever I managed to successfully join a server running this map.
I’ve zipped up the two required files and placed them here for download:
http://web2.netmagi.com/cod4/winter_crash.zip
Unzip the files and overwrite your copies under the directory above. Happy gaming!!!