[Black Wolf]

The Y targetting bug is ****ing annoying. I use Y targetting constantly, and I know not to target debris with it because there's a good chance that it'll crash my game. But occasionally I go to Y target a fighter, miss, and get some debris, thereby causing the aforementioned crash. I know you guys have tried to fix it and can't find the cause, so, I propose a different solution.

Turn off Y targetting for debris. Make it impossible to trigger the single circumstance (AFAIK) that triggers this stupid, frustrating, annoying, unfixable bug. Just go around it.

*NB - I know I sound pissed off in this post, and I am, but at the game, not at you coder people.

[EDIT]Oh, already a topic on this. Erm, didn't know, my bad. Sorry.

[NeoStorm]

I agree with Black Wolf, I think it is a good idea to disable the feature to "Y" any debris, just until you come up with a solution. I encounter this bug many times, it is really frustrating when you made 2 objectives out of 3 in a difficult mission on Insane, then accidentally press "Y" and get this error. Then everything is from scratch. Anyway, who wants to target debris with "Y" ?

[taylor]

Already done this actually, it's just not in CVS yet.  I keep hoping to find the actual problem and doing this wouldn't help in that endeaver.  I'm going to wait until the last possible second before adding this code, and if I can't figure it out then debris targetting with "Y" will be disabled in 3.6.9.

[Colonol Dekker]

I use 3.67 and i got no probs with Y.Is it just in the later builds?

[Pnakotus]

Taylor, I don't know if you saw my post in the RC2 thread, but I've found the crash replicatable on all the machines I've tried in FEP-'Battlefield', where you start off pointing at the Arcadia that was destroyed before the mission started.  I'm going to see if it's consistent across other missions with the FREDded 'pre explode' thing.  I hope this helps.

[Flipside]

I suppose it's also to do with where in the code the bug is, after all, in order to know to ignore it, it still has to read what's under the hud when Y is pressed, but fingers crossed, nonetheless

[taylor]

There are several problems preventing a fix:

1) It only appears to happen in Windows builds only, Linux and OS X builds don't have this problem.  That makes it much harder for me to debug since I use Linux.  If it would just happen under Linux that I could hunt it down with a vengence.

2) Nothing in that code has changed between 3.6.7 and now.  We also have no real idea what the problem was in the first place.  The thought is that it was the asm timer code, which has since been replaced.  The other idea is that it is linked to filtering debris out of the reticle list but that doesn't appear to be it either (see next item...).

3) The -y_bug_fix cmdline option is there to switch between the original code and the previous fix for the Y-bug which changed how debris gets filtered out of the targetting list.  Numerous bug reports have indicated that the -y_bug_fix option no longer has any affect on the problem however.  That means that both the new fix, and the original fix, no longer work.


I'm working on a couple of ideas right now and will get test builds out to a couple of people later today via PM.  If we're lucky then these changes will sort it out.  If not then I still don't even know if not targetting debris at all will even work (since I can't recreate it either way).

[Shade]

It's like a virus, developing resistance to new fixes over time, then reappearing with a vengeance. We should be scared, it may eventually multiply and take over our whole code base

[Colonol Dekker]

Who'd have though skynet would be born from a tageting bug in a public release of a 3d space combat games source code.
wow!

[Prophet]

Woot!?!? What do my eyes see! Disable targetting for debris? It was my favourite past time to roll around after a battle and target pieces of debris floating around. It was somehow so hilarious to find a floating fighter cockpit flying towards the emptyness of space.

Oh well, I havent done that in ages. I guess I've grown out of it...

[taylor]

Don't have time to PM anyone individually, so here: http://icculus.org/~taylor/fso/testing/20060613-win32.rar

It's basically RC2 with a few more bug fixes, and changed targetting code regarding the Y-thing.  Don't know whether it actually fixes the crash or not though.  I did try to build it with speech and voice recognition support though so if you use those be sure to report if that acutally works or not.

[Kaine]

voice recognition appears to be broken. same problem as detailed in the thread in Recent Builds

[NeoStorm]

This build does not fix the "Y" crash. Just encountered it couple of minutes ago.

[taylor]

voice recognition appears to be broken. same problem as detailed in the thread in Recent Builds

Yeah, figured.  Unless RandomTiger comes back to fix the voice recognition feature you can pretty much consider it dead.  No one else knows how to fix it so if he doesn't do it then we might remove the code from CVS.

This build does not fix the "Y" crash. Just encountered it couple of minutes ago.

I updated the build at the same link with the second variation of the same fix I was working towards.  This one is specificially setup to figure out if the last remaining theory for the cause of the crash is correct.  If this doesn't work then we'll have pretty much nothing to go on to find a fix.

[NeoStorm]

Well ... just downloaded again and tested... it's still there 

[Goober5000]

Maybe we should just rewrite that whole section of code, from scratch, to emulate the original behavior.

[Colonol Dekker]

Glort, Why isn't possible to just copy the original Y targeting code?

[taylor]

Maybe we should just rewrite that whole section of code, from scratch, to emulate the original behavior.

I changed it up pretty good in those two builds actually.  But, it's only a problem under Windows.  That would seem to indicate that it's not just a generic code problem so even if we totally scrap that code and rewrite it, whatever is actually causing the problem could still be there.  We know it can't the asm timer code because that's been replaced.  It's probably not an issue with filtering out the targets for the reticle list, since I just rewrote how that works.

Also, this code is still 100% retail, just as wrote it.  That the problem seems to come and go, and only in FS2_Open builds, makes it highly unlikely that their original targetting code is actually at fault here.  It could be, but I'm leaning towards an SCP introduced issue.

[taylor]

Has anyone ever gotten this crash using a debug build?

If not then I might have just hit on something while testing on a Windows box.


EDIT:  See if this does anything different: http://icculus.org/~taylor/fso/testing/20060614-win32r.rar

[NeoStorm]

Man u did it !
Unless anyone says otherwise, everything regarding "Y" works just fine now.
Nice job