Having trouble starting up Spring 1944

[Darrien]

Well whenever I start it says that Spring has crashed, and that they have sent a infolog. Yeah I need some help, I'm bad with computers.

[Neddie]

It looks like you are trying to play against AAI. AAI is not supported by Spring 1944 and does not work. I recommend the C.R.A.I.G. AI included with 1944.

[Darrien]

Thanks that explains it, man I feel dumb now.

[FLOZi]

Not at all - it's a pretty common problem. In future versions of the S44 specific installer we are going to remove the incompatible AIs. Of course most people probably download just the game files and use the main spring installer.

[Pxtl]

Sounds like an engine problem, really - Spring needs to do some more graceful handling of AI failures. A bad AI should _not_ crash the engine.

[imbaczek]

as long as ais will be made in c/c++, crashing the engine will be a bit hard to avoid. theoretically doable, but in practice won't protect against many things that can go wrong (memory corruption, etc).

[Tobi]

Only theoretically doable when using SEH, which would mean (at least part of) the engine would _have_ to be compiled using MSVC. (AFAIK)

And as baczek suggest, that still doesn't cover memory corruption etc.

[Auswaschbar]

It might be a good start to make AIs not crash when playing on mods they don't support. It could do some log-spam instead.

[Tobi]

Definitely.

(Actually I get epic amount of unchecked return value warnings when compiling AAI, at least some of those should be fixed sometime, so it doesn't crash so badly on unknown mod.)

[Darrien]

Hey now I got it again except for a multiplayer game!

[FLOZi]

The infolog indicates you were still loading an AAI as a player in the game. The problem remains the same.

[Darrien]

How can that be possible, when I wasn't the host? And the game was also full of human players in all slots and the other guys game worked just fine.

[FLOZi]

AI's run locally, so if the AI player was yours, it was only running on your machine (and sending commands over the network to other players like a normal player), so only you would crash.

[hoijui]

this error might be a threading issue, but that is a very vague guess.

an other problem i just discovered is that legacy C++ AIs are not able to gracefully die, as they have no way to report an error to the engine.
so when AAI does not find a config file for example, it spits out an error message, but then continues to receive events and all form the engine, though in an uninitialized state. i think this is not the problem here, but it is a general error, and it crashes on my machine with AAI and S44.
i solved it with exceptions (was easiest to implement).