View Issue Details
| ID | Project | Category | Date Submitted | Last Update | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0004406 | Valley 1 | Crash/Exception | Sep 30, 2011 11:54 pm | Jan 27, 2012 1:07 pm | |
| Reporter | JamesMowery | Assigned To | Chris_McElligottPark | ||
| Severity | crash | ||||
| Status | resolved | Resolution | open | ||
| Product Version | 0.510 | ||||
| Summary | 0004406: 0.510 Possibly Causing Freezing & Forcing Reboot on Mac | ||||
| Description | I don't know why this is happening, but with the latest update, A Valley Without Wind has completely frozen up on me twice, forcing me to reboot my Macbook. This has never happened before, so I'm inclined to believe that a recent change with version 0.510 is causing this instability. In the first instance this happened, I was a few feet from entering a different area after crossing the entire surface area. I wasn't attacking anything, I was just moving to the next area and almost made it when it freezed on me. Nothing particularly noteworthy about the region and area. That was much earlier today. Now, unfortunately, the freezing occurred again. This time I entered an evil outpost area and about 5 to 10 seconds later after engaging with bosses, the game freezed up and the only thing that would respond was the mouse. This freezing forced me to reboot the system in both instances because I couldn't force quit or change focus back to the desktop, which, admittedly, was the most annoying part. Both times I immediately went back and reloaded the saves without any problem. That being said, now that this has happened twice in the same day after this latest patch, I'm lead to believe that version 0.510 is causing these crashes. | ||||
| Tags | No tags attached. | ||||
| Internal Weight | Fix ASAP | ||||
| has duplicate | 0004486 | closed | Chris_McElligottPark | Freeze/hang exploring new regions. |
| related to | 0004456 | resolved | keith.lamothe | Exception Exploring Evil Outpost |
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Hmm, that's something we'll have to keep an eye on, but I'd expect that on windows too if it were the game. Not a guarantee, but generally the code that could cause that is pretty identical across platforms. And this is the only report. Granted, you could just be the canary here, so it's something to keep an eye on, but right now there's not really enough for me to go on. If there's an issue, it sounds like something to do with saving to disk. You might look in the RuntimeData folder and see if there are any error logs, for one thing. |
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No error logs. I just checked. All I know is that it has happened twice in one day, and I haven't had a single problem with the game after putting many hours into on a daily basis of the past week. I don't know if it is a saving to disk problem because the first time it happened I still a little bit away before moving into the next area. This time, I went into the evil outpost, started casting spells, and it just stopped responding. My computer was still making sounds (the system "ding" when you attempt to do something your not supposed) when I was trying to do Command+M to switch to the desktop. So it felt as if the game itself was preventing me from doing anything instead of the system itself. I haven't tweaked with any settings or done anything crazy lately, so it's just awkward that these crashes would begin now after not having a single crash with many hours of playtime before. The crashing isn't the problem because reloading the game from where I was isn't that difficult (although I could see where it would get repetitive if this continued to happen). But the problem is that I'm forced to reboot my computer, which is never any fun as I'm sure you would imagine. To have to do it twice in the same day is just a bit concerning. But if there is anything I could send you as far as data or saves is concerned, I'd be happy to do so. I haven't started the game since this crash just happened. |
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I hear what you're saying -- this is just the sort of thing that I could spend hours and hours looking for, without anything in particular to go on. And with only one report from one computer, with lots of players playing on both OSes, I'm leery of doing that just yet. Not to mention that I don't really work the weekend too much (just bits in the evenings), so it would have to be something I'd look at on Monday anyhow. I think there is some sort of hotkey for being able to change the fullscreen status of the game, though, which would help -- I think it might be apple F? Something like that, which should get you out of there. If all else fails, surely apple+q would still be able to kill the program? If you have a reproducible freeze in a savegame, absolutely I want that. But if it's a random intermittent thing that seems to strike without reason... I don't know that I'd be able to do with that. There's also always the possibility that the program itself got munged up a bit. Reinstalling and then updating back to the latest version would solve that if that's what it is (make sure to hand onto your world folder!). Or, if you're using antivirus (unusual for a mac, but still) that the antivirus could be interfering. It's also possible that, like you suspect, there's a new bug. I just don't have much evidence to go on for that, because from my perspective I see computers misfire like this all the time with so many players on our stuff, and often it's a wild goose chase that wastes hours if only one player sees it. It's possible the OSX players just haven't been on as much since 0.510, if it's limited to OSX, but again the platform-specific lockups are so exceedingly rare that I can't recall the last time we had one, if ever. This clearly isn't a crash or there would be some sort of log; so it's got to be some sort of infinite loop, or the program waiting infinitely for access to some other process to finish with a file, or something. Anyway, I really do wish I had something more concrete I could tell you, but right now I have very little to go on. As more data appears on this, if this continues to persist for you or shows up for other players, hopefully we can get it figured out. Or, hopefully one of the other tricks will resolve it if there's a mild bit of corruption of the program here, or whatever other issue. |
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I'll probably just wait until the next patch (when I think it was mentioned bosses will be dropping loot, which is good because I was just about to take on my first evil outpost) and see if it fixes itself. If the issue continues, I'll try reinstalling. The only other thing I can add is that it almost certainly isn't a software issue. I just reinstalled Snow Leopard before I started playing — I do that for every software review I write (it's a habit). Anyways, I'll wait, see, and hope for the best! :) |
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Next patch just came out, so you're in luck! |
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I tried the new patch and no crashes to speak of yet, so maybe I'm in luck? (Unfortunately, my character wasn't as lucky; he died almost immediately when attempting to kill the lieutenant, and then my second character died after a stubborn attempt to kill the boss again following that.) |
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Well, that's a good sign -- although, not having fixed any such issues, it still really makes me wonder what was going on and I it will be back. But if it's working, hey, I guess I can't complain. ;) In a lot of respects this could mean that the prior file was slightly corrupt or something, and overwriting it with the new one fixed it. That would be... incredibly odd. But it's the only explanation I can think of at present. Sorry to hear about the loss of your character! :) |
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Apologies for all the typos, writing from my iPhone. |
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Unfortunately, I think I spoke too soon. I just entered another boss battle and the game crashed again. About 10 seconds after entering the level, it crashed, almost similarly to last time. This time, however, the music was still playing in the background, but everything else (besides the mouse pointer) was frozen. The previous times this happened it happened after playing the game for an extended amount of time (at least an hour and a half to two hours). This time it happened only 25 or so minutes of playing. And I never transformed into a bat, so that rules out a suspicion I had about it being related to that. Regardless, I'm going to go ahead and attempt to reinstall the game to see if that fixes it. |
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Okay, we now have a second report of this from another player on OSX. I will have to look into this in the morning and see what I can see -- thanks for your patience with this. It really sounds like this is some sort of issue with saving to disk, because you keep saying it's about 10 seconds after entering certain new chunks, and that's when it would be saving to disk give or take. A few questions that would help me narrow this down further, if you don't mind: 1. In OSX there is an odd limitation of 256 file handles OR program threads being open at once by a single program. This game saves a lot of files, but each file should be being closed as it is written. If you're able to get the game into windowed mode via hotkeys, or otherwise minimized, are you able to get a look at the game's process in process explorer (program monitor? I forget the exact name and am not sitting at my mac at the moment). That has a way of exporting all the file handles currently in use by a specific program, and I'd love to have that list from when the game locks up if at all possible. And if it's not possible, no big deal -- I suspect this is barking up the wrong tree, but having that list of files would let me confirm this one one way or the other. 2. You mentioned that this started happening in 0.510 only, and that you were playing the game regularly before that with no issues. Were you previously playing 0.509 quite a bit, or was it 0.508 or before? I'm trying to narrow down the selection of code diffs to look at a bit, and having a general idea of when you're sure it was last working well for you would be a help. Anyway, thanks again for your patience and the assisted sleuthing! |
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As for point 1, I will certainly attempt to access the Activity Monitor if/when a crash occurs. Unfortunately, every time the game locks up I seem to be in fullscreen mode because the small screen on my mac combined with the large minimap makes it difficult to play at times (also the performance on my Macbook is quite slower in windowed mode). But I've only just tried switching it to windowed mode after the latest patch. Either way, I'll try to play in windowed mode as much as possible and hope I can get it to crash and have my computer still give me access to everything else. One thing I should point out is that the very first time this issue happened it didn't happen while loading a level. I was actually flying through a surface dungeon without much issue trying to outrun some bats, and when I made it through 7/8ths of the way towards heading to the transport point (or whatever you call it) to enter the last surface area in the region, that was when it froze up for the first time. I think that might actually complicate things because I'm not sure at what point the game saves stuff. But I know it is worth considering. As for point 2: to tell you the truth, I think that there is a huge possibility that I upgraded from 0.508 directly to 0.510. I can't remember now because I've been reading the change log on a daily basis so it's difficult to distinguish between the changes that happened and when I upgraded, but I do remember that one day I upgraded and skipped a patch, and I think it might have been 0.509 that I skipped. But even if I didn't skip 0.509, I'm very certain that I didn't/wouldn't have put in much playing time on it. So it very well could have been a change with 0.509 that is causing this. (Apologies for not remembering perfectly, as I'm sure that could be helpful.) But I'm very sure I didn't put much playing time, if any, into 0.509 before upgrading to 0.510, so it's possible that these crashes could have started at 0.509, but I know they didn't happen while I was playing it (again, if I even played 0.509). But without question there were no crashes with 0.508 and earlier. Also, I just checked out the other report, and if it helps, I'm also running version Mac 10.6.8. I'm using a Macbook (the black model with the 2.4 GHz Core 2 Duo Penryn processor) and 2 GB of RAM. Just in case this information helps possibly make a correlation to the crashes. |
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Okay -- thanks. That's all good to know, and more or less what I expected on the 0.509 thing. I really wouldn't have expected a new issue of this sort from 0.510, but we made a number of changes in 0.509 to how the game saves, so that fits with the timing. For the first crash when you were later into a chunk, it may still have been background saving something that was queued up; the game throttles how fast things are saved during normal gameplay, to prevent lag from the saving. And very excellent to have 0.508 as a starting point, that helps a lot. Thanks also for the other info. I'm running a very similar Macbook, myself. All of this gives me at least something to go on, and the amount of code to review is vastly shrunk by the extra info here. Side note -- if you want to have the minimap smaller, there is a settings option for that in the settings window. But I wouldn't sweat the activity monitor on my account, it's up to you; there ought to be a hotkey that can kill the game from in a deadlocked state, and I guess the other player is doing so, but I'm not as up on OSX hotkeys as I could but and I don't know it myself. Thanks again for all the help on this; these sorts of issues are rare and extremely tricky, so we can always use all the help we can get when they do happen. |
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Okay, I had some extra time tonight and 0.512 is now out. I didn't find any obviously smoking gun, but: 1. There were several places where I made some changes to ensure that even if something insane happened during a while or for loop, that only a certain number of loops would happen. Normally we do that anyway, but there were a couple of places in 0.509 where we did not. These were not cases where I still would have expected an actual issue... but better safe than sorry, and it's possible that maybe just the OSX version was doing something funky in one of those cases and that's why it didn't show up on windows. 2. Additionally, there were a couple of crashes that we fixed. These were reported by players who I think are windows users, but there's a slight chance that these manifested as a hard-lock on OSX and you were actually running into the same issue just with a more severe result. I'm not completely sold that either of these definitely fixed it, but fingers crossed -- there's a good shot that one of them did, since the surface area of new code in 0.509-0.510 that could cause this was pretty low. |
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That's great news! Really happy with the progress you guys have been making on squashing bugs and adding features. It's above and beyond what I've come to expect from games as of late. I will give it a short test tonight and put some serious time into it tomorrow to see how it goes. |
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We appreciate the support in return! We try to do our best. |
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Just figured I'd ping you on here because it appears that jumping is broken in the newest version. It seems pretty serious: http://www.arcengames.com/mantisbt/view.php?id=4516 But since I'm the first one too notice, I'm quite concerned. |
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Apparently it only happens at certain framrates -- took me a lot of jumps to duplicate. But I've just pushed out a fix for that. Thanks for the report! Now off for some sleep for me, so hopefully that's the only thing in this one. Cheers! |
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I generally run windowed rather than fullscreen (which really helps when I'm beta-testing in two or three minute chunks between writing code for my day job) so the hang doesn't take down my whole machine. You can hit cmd+opt+esc to bring up the Force Kill dialog and shoot misbehaving apps in the head, but that isn't always reliable when running something fullscreen. |
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I only saw this happen twice, both times in 0.511 and both times while revealing new regions in the world map. In both cases, it hadn't saved the new regions I'd just revealed, which adds weight to the theory that it's related to writing to disk. I spent quite a lot of time playing 0.509/0.510 (mostly because of the new macrogame mechanics) and didn't have this problem, but I'd probably spent at least twice that long playing 0.511 before seeing this for the first time. It /might/ be significant, but I doubt it. (This is what you get for having such an awesomely short release cycle.) |
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Thanks for the added details! |
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I've been playing the game a bit (although I have been very busy these past few days) and I have not experienced a single crash. I, personally, am hesitant to call it fixed until I play some more, but for right now, things are looking great. I suppose since this thread has gone quiet that none of the others have had any issues. But I'll post in here in two or three days after playing with the game some more if everything checks out, and if that is the case, great work! If not, I'll post any other findings. |
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Thanks for the update -- that's promising, at least! Fingers crossed. :) |
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I'm going to assume this is fixed since I've not heard about any more crashes. Let me know if I'm incorrect. |
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No reports of this in months from any of our mac players, so that's a good sign to me. :) |
| Date Modified | Username | Field | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sep 30, 2011 11:54 pm | JamesMowery | New Issue | |
| Sep 30, 2011 11:59 pm | Chris_McElligottPark | Note Added: 0015104 | |
| Sep 30, 2011 11:59 pm | JamesMowery | Description Updated | |
| Oct 1, 2011 12:08 am | JamesMowery | Note Added: 0015106 | |
| Oct 1, 2011 12:22 am | Chris_McElligottPark | Note Added: 0015107 | |
| Oct 1, 2011 12:35 am | JamesMowery | Note Added: 0015112 | |
| Oct 1, 2011 12:37 am | Chris_McElligottPark | Note Added: 0015113 | |
| Oct 1, 2011 1:32 am | JamesMowery | Note Added: 0015118 | |
| Oct 1, 2011 7:48 am | Chris_McElligottPark | Note Added: 0015155 | |
| Oct 1, 2011 7:51 am | Chris_McElligottPark | Note Added: 0015157 | |
| Oct 1, 2011 10:03 pm | JamesMowery | Note Added: 0015254 | |
| Oct 1, 2011 10:04 pm | JamesMowery | Note Edited: 0015254 | |
| Oct 1, 2011 10:05 pm | JamesMowery | Note Edited: 0015254 | |
| Oct 2, 2011 7:05 pm | Chris_McElligottPark | Relationship added | has duplicate 0004486 |
| Oct 2, 2011 7:17 pm | Chris_McElligottPark | Note Added: 0015346 | |
| Oct 2, 2011 7:17 pm | Chris_McElligottPark | Internal Weight | => Fix ASAP |
| Oct 2, 2011 7:17 pm | Chris_McElligottPark | Assigned To | => Chris_McElligottPark |
| Oct 2, 2011 7:17 pm | Chris_McElligottPark | Status | new => confirmed |
| Oct 2, 2011 7:27 pm | Chris_McElligottPark | Relationship added | related to 0004456 |
| Oct 2, 2011 7:46 pm | JamesMowery | Note Added: 0015357 | |
| Oct 2, 2011 7:47 pm | JamesMowery | Note Edited: 0015357 | |
| Oct 2, 2011 7:51 pm | JamesMowery | Note Edited: 0015357 | |
| Oct 2, 2011 7:56 pm | JamesMowery | Note Edited: 0015357 | |
| Oct 2, 2011 9:20 pm | Chris_McElligottPark | Note Added: 0015359 | |
| Oct 2, 2011 10:22 pm | Chris_McElligottPark | Note Added: 0015368 | |
| Oct 2, 2011 10:22 pm | Chris_McElligottPark | Status | confirmed => feedback |
| Oct 2, 2011 10:25 pm | JamesMowery | Note Added: 0015369 | |
| Oct 2, 2011 10:25 pm | JamesMowery | Status | feedback => assigned |
| Oct 2, 2011 10:46 pm | Chris_McElligottPark | Note Added: 0015372 | |
| Oct 2, 2011 11:23 pm | JamesMowery | Note Added: 0015374 | |
| Oct 2, 2011 11:33 pm | Chris_McElligottPark | Note Added: 0015376 | |
| Oct 3, 2011 1:54 am | jerith | Note Added: 0015383 | |
| Oct 3, 2011 2:14 am | jerith | Note Added: 0015384 | |
| Oct 3, 2011 9:28 am | Chris_McElligottPark | Note Added: 0015410 | |
| Oct 4, 2011 10:25 am | Chris_McElligottPark | Status | assigned => feedback |
| Oct 4, 2011 5:20 pm | JamesMowery | Note Added: 0015663 | |
| Oct 4, 2011 5:20 pm | JamesMowery | Status | feedback => assigned |
| Oct 4, 2011 6:19 pm | Chris_McElligottPark | Note Added: 0015671 | |
| Oct 5, 2011 3:35 am | jerith | Relationship added | related to 0004591 |
| Oct 5, 2011 7:40 am | tigersfan | Relationship deleted | related to 0004591 |
| Oct 12, 2011 6:59 pm | Chris_McElligottPark | Status | assigned => feedback |
| Jan 27, 2012 1:06 pm | tigersfan | Note Added: 0018239 | |
| Jan 27, 2012 1:06 pm | tigersfan | Status | feedback => resolved |
| Jan 27, 2012 1:07 pm | Chris_McElligottPark | Note Added: 0018241 | |
| Apr 14, 2014 9:28 am | Chris_McElligottPark | Category | Bug - Crash or Exception => Crash/Exception |
