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Modding, Mission Design, and Coding => FS2 Open Coding - The Source Code Project (SCP) => Topic started by: Trivial Psychic on April 22, 2004, 07:02:59 pm

Title: I call it CoMT, and I HATE IT!!
Post by: Trivial Psychic on April 22, 2004, 07:02:59 pm
Howdy all:

I'd like to express my irritation with a certain SCP bug that seems to be getting more prevalent with each successive test build, since about early February.  The bug has already been posted on Mantis by Goober as bug 165.  For me, the irritation factor is now exceeding that of the old dreaded "Y-targetting" bug.  In my experience, it results when a player is flying a mission with multiple events and sequences, and that mission has been played through most of these events.  After this, once the player tries to replay the mission (either after dying or pressing escape), or completes the mission and enters subspace, the game will crash to desktop, with no error messages.  I call it CTD on Mission Termination, or CoMT for short... although its also known as "Aw CRAP!"  This is more anoying than the "Y" bug, since it prevents the player from advancing to the next mission.  Once, I even had the CTD occur as soon as I saw my ship dying, and it never even loaded the options window.  At first I thought it was my missions, but I just encountered it when playing an Inferno mission for the first time in months (see Inferno forum for more info on that).  I have had occasions when a mission such as this didn't crash, but I had only played the first few seconds before choosing to abort, so that's why a requirement is that some of the mission events be completed before it will trigger.

The first and most obvious suggestion one would make to me, would be to use a debug build and find the error message, but debugs always crash if I try to do anything beyond the lobby (if I even make it THAT far), so that is not an option for me.

I ask that since the coder team is in "Bug Hunt" mode, that you make this particular bug a priority.

In case it matters:

AMD Athlon 800
A7V 100Mhz.
256MB SDRAM-133
ASUS V7100 GF2-MX 32MB AGP
WinME
Latest nVidia drivers for WinME

Build:  Any build for the past month at least.
Command flags:  -glow -spec -jpgtga -fps

Later!
Title: Re: I call it CoMT, and I HATE IT!!
Post by: redsniper on April 22, 2004, 07:31:57 pm
Quote
Originally posted by Trivial Psychic
WinME

Problem found.
Title: I call it CoMT, and I HATE IT!!
Post by: ChronoReverse on April 22, 2004, 07:42:27 pm
Does it happen with the retail missions?
Title: I call it CoMT, and I HATE IT!!
Post by: Bobboau on April 22, 2004, 07:53:36 pm
reading the info in mantis, I'm thinking this might be sort of mine, it said that the error was in message_mission_shutdown, I added the following code to that function
Code: [Select]
   for (i=0; i            if (Message_avis[i].anim_data != NULL) {
                    for (j=0; jref_count; j++) {
                            anim_free(Message_avis[i].anim_data);
                    }
            }
            Message_avis[i].anim_data = NULL;
    }



to fix a memory leak, however this is not my code, this was taylor's sudgestion, and code (and I mentioned this in the function), perhaps I copied it incorectly or missed some sort of subtle thing. this was just before Taylor became a member wich is why I added it and not him.
and to make it clear, I'm not placeing blame or anything, more likely than not it was something I didn't do corectly as I just blindly copied the changes.
Title: Re: Re: I call it CoMT, and I HATE IT!!
Post by: StratComm on April 22, 2004, 08:29:12 pm
Quote
Originally posted by redsniper

Problem found.


While I can surely sympathize with the suckyness of ME, it's not the problem.  Happens on my XP box too.
Title: I call it CoMT, and I HATE IT!!
Post by: ShadowDrakken on April 22, 2004, 08:38:24 pm
Funny, ME was the most stable of the Win9x series for me, but that's unimportant.  I've had this same crash problem in FS2 and FSO both in WinXP.  And it gets worse the more missions played in a single session until some event all of a sudden just dumps the game.  Sometimes when a menu is pulled up (like the death menu, or trying to restart the mission) and other times such as a new ship warping in

As a side note, with FS2 (not FSO) this also happened to me in Win95, Win98, Win98SE and WinME... so don't try and blame it on XP either

Current System Config:
AMD Athlon XP 1800+ (1.533gHz)
1gb PC2100 DDR
VisionTek GF4 Ti4600 128mb AGP 4x
Turtle Beach SantaCruz

The only thing that's remained the same all this time, is that I've always had an AMD CPU.
Title: I call it CoMT, and I HATE IT!!
Post by: Slasher on April 22, 2004, 09:28:12 pm
Odd, I've encountered something similar in The Babyon Project.  Starting with the mid-March build, I think.  In my version, though, some missions will spontaneously crash while loading while other times they load just fine and I can play them through without error.  Similarly, this event seems to have grown more frequent over the past month so that the majority of the time certain missions crash.  Maybe 1 out of 3 times it will load and play flawlessly.
Title: I call it CoMT, and I HATE IT!!
Post by: WMCoolmon on April 22, 2004, 10:00:49 pm
I've run into this bug playing the vanilla main campaign + current mediapack using the fs2_openT-20040405 build. (More info in the Recent builds thread for it).
Title: I call it CoMT, and I HATE IT!!
Post by: Goober5000 on April 22, 2004, 11:53:49 pm
It happens all the time, but taylor said he couldn't reproduce it.  He's working on putting a fix together.
Title: I call it CoMT, and I HATE IT!!
Post by: Bobboau on April 23, 2004, 12:07:30 am
you know I think I remember getting this while traceing through the code once, wich means it probly won't be too hard to fix (as opposed to the 'Y' bug)
Title: I call it CoMT, and I HATE IT!!
Post by: Trivial Psychic on April 23, 2004, 02:45:31 am
I just started playing through the Port again under SCP.  I made it as far as the 3rd mission with the supply depot attack, and was able to do a successful mission restart after losing an objective.  I completed all objectives the 2nd time around, and just as the screen went black after I entered subspace, BANG... CoMT!  As I said in my first post, the mission needs to have some guts to it, and the player needs to be most of the way though for this to occur.
Title: I call it CoMT, and I HATE IT!!
Post by: Col. Fishguts on April 23, 2004, 03:46:42 am
I get this error with the 2nd mission from TBP R1, as soon as I end the mission...CoMT.
I get a error message that says somthing along the lines of "FS2_open caused blablabla......while trying to acces Register FFFFFFFF...blablabla" in case that helps.
Isn't FFFFFFFF the highest memory adress there is ?
Title: I call it CoMT, and I HATE IT!!
Post by: taylor on April 23, 2004, 04:09:02 am
Everybody with this problem try this new build: 20040423-win32.zip (http://icculus.org/~taylor/fso/testing/20040423-win32.zip)

There is a last minute Windows OpenGL thing I have to fix but it won't cause any crashes, just be aware of some wierd screen updates if you use OGL.  Bobboau did copy the code correctly so this one's all on me.  This same code has been in icculus.org CVS for over a year so I don't know why it's only causing problems in FSO.  Please let me know pretty quickly if this fixes it or doesn't.  If this doesn't fix the bug then I'm going to remove the code in question.  That would open up a bad memory leak but it's better than a CTD.
Title: I call it CoMT, and I HATE IT!!
Post by: Trivial Psychic on April 23, 2004, 11:40:01 pm
Well Taylor, I tried your build on the same mission as I posted above, and it did make a difference... this time it crashed with an error message:


Ddhelp

Ddhelp has caused an error in
Ddhelp will now close

If you continue to experience problems,
try restarting your computer.


I doubt that'll help much... sorry.
Title: I call it CoMT, and I HATE IT!!
Post by: Slasher on April 23, 2004, 11:51:10 pm
I didn't even get the error message.  But since my problems almost always spring up during loading I'm wondering if I have a different problem entirely...
Title: I call it CoMT, and I HATE IT!!
Post by: ShadowDrakken on April 24, 2004, 08:14:22 am
you mention OpenGL users, but OpenGL isn't even usable... in Nebula missions all you get is a black screen and all you see is glow maps flying around... it's not much fun ;)
Title: I call it CoMT, and I HATE IT!!
Post by: taylor on April 24, 2004, 08:36:32 am
Trivial Psychic: I played that mission 17 times without a crash.  I'll keep working on it but misbehaving computers tend to work perfectly when I walk into a room so maybe it's some wierd karma thing.  Anyway, I have a debug build (http://icculus.org/~taylor/fso/testing/fs2_open_d.zip) that will save out some info that I need if you want to try that.  When it crashes, just send me (taylor AT icculus.org) your errorlog.txt and the newest DBUG*.txt file.  Hopefully that will be all I need to figure out what is going on.

ShadowDrakken:  Hmm, Neb missions in OGL should work fine with this build.  What video card do you have?

Also, I don't suppose anyone has noticed a change in load times with this build...
Title: I call it CoMT, and I HATE IT!!
Post by: ShadowDrakken on April 24, 2004, 03:21:17 pm
Taylor: the same one listed in my first post of this thread :)
I haven't tried this build yet, but the 4/05 build had the nebula problems
Title: I call it CoMT, and I HATE IT!!
Post by: Slasher on April 24, 2004, 03:41:02 pm
I've downloaded the debug build and will send you the two text files later today, if I can get that far.
Title: I call it CoMT, and I HATE IT!!
Post by: taylor on April 24, 2004, 04:15:05 pm
D'oh! < hand abruptly stops against forehead >  I should have remembered that ShadowDrakken, sorry 'bout that.  I've got a Ti4200 and it works pretty good for me with the 04/05 build.  I have made a few fixes since then to make it better but I doubt it's anything that would fix the problem you're describing.

I really don't want to keep dumping builds on all of you but I'm down to my 2nd to last option (the last option opens a memory leak).  I still need the bebug info to try and figure out what the real problem is but if someone wants to test a pretty hack send me an e-mail and I'll get you a link to the build.  I'm not going to post the build here and if this last one doesn't fix it then I'm going to open up the memory leak again.  If no one responds within about 6 hours of this post then I'll release a true test build (new lightning arcs(!) and some major OGL bugs fixed) in the recent builds forum with this code removed.  It's the lesser of two evils in this case and I need this bug resolved in order to get the rest of my fixes in CVS for 3.6.
Title: I call it CoMT, and I HATE IT!!
Post by: ShadowDrakken on April 24, 2004, 07:51:29 pm
Played with the test build from this thread today.  Nebula missions work great now in OGL, and the crashing also stopped, quite nice :) However, I did find there was noticably slower startup time at the pilot selection screen, and it ignored my AA settings in OGL mode

However, 2 nebula problems remain as follows:

In DX mode, ships dont' fade in and out as you near them, they simply materialize from the orf

In OGL mode, the subspace warp in/out has a horrible solarized outline making it visible as far away as 10 klicks
Title: I call it CoMT, and I HATE IT!!
Post by: Slasher on April 26, 2004, 02:16:02 am
Sorry, couldn't get the debug build to work.  Apparently I'm missing some textures that the tables are calling for and I don't have the time to sort it all out now.  My /data folder is a big mess now anyways.
Title: I call it CoMT, and I HATE IT!!
Post by: Trivial Psychic on April 26, 2004, 06:51:40 pm
Thanks to Goob's latest build (and the alterations added by many coders therein), CoMT is no-more!  Now if only we can convince PhReAk to compile us an Inferno build from this. ;7

Thanks to all your work Taylor & co.!

Later!
Title: I call it CoMT, and I HATE IT!!
Post by: Goober5000 on April 26, 2004, 06:55:07 pm
FYI: This bug has not, repeat not been fixed.  We just used an ugly workaround to make it playable.  More work will be needed here.