---> Spring crashes <---

---> Spring crashes <---

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Pocus
Posts: 73
Joined: 14 Apr 2006, 09:40

---> Spring crashes <---

Post by Pocus »

Yesterday evening I loged-in as often to pass a good moment playing Spring.

Over the 3 hours I was in the lobby, I played 2 games (short ones, we won once, we lost once, total time ~~ 45 mn).

The rest was spent try to get games running. I would say that over several games, we crashed 15 times. Different host, different players (but me hu!), but each time on map with 6+ players (I like big games).

Sidenote: I seldomly crash myself (once in the evening in fact), but others do. I remember Squeegueez and xxx_Sandwich as players, Ray too, if you want some more names (not that they are the ones crashing, I'm just citing people who were in the same games as me).

Before going to the point, I would like to say that I'm speaking with a lot of humility and thanks to the ones who are developping, without being paid, Spring. I also would like to say that I'm a professional coder myself (with a game published, but I won't speak more as this is not the aim of this topic).
This is just to point out that I'm not your average 12' old kid who knows nothing about coding and just bitch using words that I have difficulty to understand given my old age...

Well to the point now:

The biggest failure of Spring is his instability in MP (of 4+ people...). It serves few purpose to add features to a project, if the said project is not debugged of the serious bugs plaguing it.

Don't misunderstand me, bugs are acceptable, we are all humans after all (well most of us) but at least when a crashing bug happen, it should serve a purpose: to provide a report or an account of why it occured, so that it can be fixed.
When the game crashes and everyone returns to the lobby, a message should appears saying who crashed and why (the name of the latest function called with some important parameters for example...), so that the log can be forwarded to the developpers.

If its the map fault, then it must be noted and the map tagged as buggy. If a player as an out of date config (memory, video driver) then he (and all) must know what happened. If its in the game code, we have to know that too. For now, I feel like playing russian roulette when we start a game. It can works, it can crashes. Nobody knows and nobody has a clue why it crashed. Some restart the lobby, some restart the computer, and soon we will chant and pray?

That's all. I really do think that the only urgent matter in spring is to not have anymore these frequents crashes. I can wait for new & cool gameplay features

Now fire away. I'm sure the subject has been debated to death. It is also certain that I'll get flamethrowed, but hey, that does not matter
:wink:
User avatar
Min3mat
Posts: 3455
Joined: 17 Nov 2004, 20:19

Post by Min3mat »

thank god games over 3v3 are instable. otherwise we would never have a skillful game >.> everyone hosts for 8 bleeding players O,o
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Zenka
Posts: 1235
Joined: 05 Oct 2005, 15:29

Post by Zenka »

Min3mat wrote:thank god games over 3v3 are instable. otherwise we would never have a skillful game >.> everyone hosts for 8 bleeding players O,o
I should happily in form you non of my hosted games crashed. And they are mostly 6-8 players.
Though, the more players the bigger the cahnge is something goes wrong.

Pocus, take in account Spring is in Beta and WE are the testers.
Tobi
Spring Developer
Posts: 4598
Joined: 01 Jun 2005, 11:36

Post by Tobi »

Pocus, you're right in that this release seems to be a lot less stable then previous ones, concerning both random crashes and sync errors. I'm guessing some errors must have slipt in with the new shield code and/or the explosion generator.

Als note that we have something which ought to pop up if spring crashes, giving you the chance to send a backtrace to an e-mail address some of us can read. With proper debugging data we can then figure out where the crash happened and hopefully fix it.

Unfortunately this code is bugged this release. It doesn't seem to trigger at all. (you can normally test it by doing .cheat .crash.) I already filed a bug report about it (don't know how to fix it myself, as I'm more a linux dev).

Also, remember that it's very hard to properly debug the multiplayer aspect of spring. You don't go online with a slow as hell debugging executable to stop the game at random times to put breakpoints in the code and stuff.

Last but not least, many of the bugs currently experienced are probably memory bugs, which as you should know as dev, are very hard to debug.

Anyway, that said, I'll try to find some time to test some uber big random enemies games in gdb (GNU debugger) and see if anything turns up.

Min3mat, you know you're talking bullshit.

EDIT: owh, and I know how frustrating it can be. A little before 0.72 I was trying to get a game going on DeltaSiegeDuo or Rev, and some other map, but none of the 10-15 tries succeeded. Few times people sync errored out after a few minutes, several times two or more people dropped before the game even started, two times for me and some other guy the upper half of DeltaSiege was without tiles (solid wine red with just detailtex).
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Pocus
Posts: 73
Joined: 14 Apr 2006, 09:40

Post by Pocus »

Thank you for your informative comments.

I have no problem being a tester, in fact I'm testing my code every day, so why not the code of a fine game like Spring. (edit: as long as you give me a tool to report back the error, with a glimpse, for me, about the supposed reason of the crash ;) ).

Aside from the needed fix in the bug report, perhaps a message can be issued in the lobby giving the putative cause of the crash, to all people in the current game, at least we can blame someone (being the map maker or a player with a defaulting config ;) ).

That being said, I'm happy to realize that you know this is a major issue and that you will work at this. I know this is boring. I don't like to trace back bug myself, especially when I can't trace line by line in the code, so I applaude even more your will and commitment to do so anyway.
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knorke
Posts: 7971
Joined: 22 Feb 2006, 01:02

Post by knorke »

Sidenote: I seldomly crash myself (once in the evening in fact), but others do.
Its always the other fault :lol:
But compared to other RTS games, Spring has so far proven to be the most stable on our LANs, beside Starcraft.
Look at Command&Conquer-Zero Hour as an example, 8 players are nearly impossible because after some minutes F16-jets move with the speed of Overlord-tanks...And then even C&C crashs and de-syncs!

I think when we first played Spring, everybody was just waiting for it to crash but -what a nice surprise!- it didnt!
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