Spring RTS Engine

After about ten minutes of a LAN game Spring crashes, each and every time I tried it. I get a nice window with "Spring has encountered a problem and will have to be shutdown", and before I can submit a description of what happened Spring completely dies and I'm back at an empty desktop.

This happens *every* time. Very annoying ... I have no idea what's causing this, but I'll try to narrow the circumstances down.

Allright; when I start a game as server with the "Cmdrs 1000 res" script on Map 4, set the game speed to 8.0 when the other player joins and we do absolutely *nothing*, the game acting as server prints after a minute or so the following:
and following each other insanely fast. The other player's game then exits spontaneously to the desktop, with no message whatsoever. The hosting Spring game does not die, but gets stuck in printing the above messages.

I'll do some more testing; undoubtedly more strange situations will arise.

A few tips on narrowing:

-Try not building anything whatsoever. Does it crash ?

- Try building as much as possible. Does it crash faster ?

- Try setting the speed higher/lower. Does it crash according to the speed setting ?

It crashes when I do nothing (gamespeed 8.0, crash report http://ww.fmf.nl/~teake/spring.zip ), it crashes when I build normally (at gamespeed 1.0, no crash reports so far). In short, it has crashed everytime I've played.

At the moment of the crash of one Spring client, big grey clouds appear from out of nowhere in the other, and slowly ascend. I'm not imagining things; as strange as it may sound they are really there (for as long as the other Spring still runs). Has anybody got a clue?

And I'll run a few more tests ... sigh ....

I play on lan with a friend and we battle it out for hours without problems.

But we do hit a crash now and then.

One thing that seems to be different, what Operating systems are you using. It seems that my Windows 2000 machine is more prone to crash than my XP machine.

-Buggi

The lan games were played on XP sp2, so that's no big help.
Anyway, I've just compiled a new spring.exe from the CVS tree at Sourceforge and I'll give that one a go as soon as possible. Hopefully enough bugs have been fixed to make it stable enough on my configuration ...

yeah that happened to me once online on Azure Ramparts. the pathfinding shit so when i sent my jeffy to harass it ascended to the heavens i was like WTF SWEET a FLYING JEFFY ...then spring died

Save game from time to time, so when it crashes you can load "test script". It's one of the F keys to save game.

F8

Update: I don't experience any crashes with 0.50b2 on my LAN. Thank you SY ...

hey dude i feel your pain i get that aswell on single and multiplayer, i have found ways to stop it from doing that although not 100% successful
ive found that it is not crashing due to anything related to the game or a timer so i figured why dont we kill everything in the background and leave only my firewall standing along with TASpring sometimes this works and sometimes it doesnt but i managed to play it for 12 hours having 5 solid games so im sure its possible for you to do so

Just read that you dont experiece it, nooooo lol im iscolated with the problem.... the patch didnt help me

Two crashes yesterday evening during online games. Both happened on the PC hosting the game, even though the hosts were different in the two games. They happened after about half an hour of play. Also, we had lots of sync errors during the gameplay.

About the overflow errors, it seems like nothing consume the network data and it just builds up. Are you running some old window version (98 etc) where threads might not work ?

If you have sync errors during a game it means the games are out of sync (unless its the nosync/delayed sync variety which just indicates lag > 2 sec) and there really no reason to continue playing it. If you want to continue it anyway its probably better saving it and continue it single player since the commands the other player sends will look more or less random to your instance of spring. And since not all commands are completly error checked when they come in sooner or later one will crash your instance.

SJ wrote:About the overflow errors, it seems like nothing consume the network data and it just builds up. Are you running some old window version (98 etc) where threads might not work ?

Nope. Windows XP SP2. But on 0.50b2 I haven't had anymore lockups.

SJ wrote:If you have sync errors during a game it means the games are out of sync (unless its the nosync/delayed sync variety which just indicates lag > 2 sec) and there really no reason to continue playing it. If you want to continue it anyway its probably better saving it and continue it single player since the commands the other player sends will look more or less random to your instance of spring. And since not all commands are completly error checked when they come in sooner or later one will crash your instance.

Ok, someone had a stupid tool called Process Tamer running that managed to lower the priority of spring process, possibly leading to the desynchronization of the games, even though the games were synchronized at the beginning.

But even without it, it seems that after a while, the sync errors start to appear, even though we can still continue to play for a good while, usually.

I have to check, but I wonder if this has something to do with the fact that I am upload limited to 50 kb/s, which might be not enough to be server for 4 players, hence desynchronizations when I am server. That would mean I can't be server for 4 players, or I need to lower the speed of the game (I usually play at speed 1.5 at the beginning, and I forget to lower to 1.0 afterwards), or one would need some fast stream compression scheme