View Issue Details
| ID | Project | Category | Date Submitted | Last Update | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0004490 | AI War 1 / Classic | Crash/Exception | Oct 2, 2011 8:00 am | Oct 3, 2011 10:58 pm | |
| Reporter | indarien | Assigned To | tigersfan | ||
| Status | closed | Resolution | no change required | ||
| Product Version | 5.017 | ||||
| Summary | 0004490: In-Game Update Is Broken | ||||
| Description | Well, I mentioned this in the forums, but I'll try here also: A few days ago I decided to reinstall AIWar and the associated expansions. I downloaded the snazzy latest and greatest AIWar + Expansions from the website, and ten minutes later, everything was up and working again. Then I clicked the "3 Beta Updates" available message to get the latest version. At that point, it begins downloading "update packages" at a rate of about 1 per second. Which seems fine, except for the fact that there is no way to know how many thousands of these things it wants to download, and somewhere in the 10000-28000 range, the update fails with a "General Heap Error" that crashes AIWar. So...Is the in-game update option broken? I'm fine playing whatever the latest stable version of the game is, albeit some of the sound bugs get on my nerves. If you need any logs from my computers, let me know. Obviously this is a fresh install, and I have tried it on my Windows 7, Windows XP, Linux and Mac also. I can also guarantee that it is not my home internet connection, since I have tried it from home, public wifi, and the OC192 that feeds into the data center where I work. | ||||
| Tags | No tags attached. | ||||
| Internal Weight | Discussion Only | ||||
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Hmmm, that is really peculiar. It sounds like for whatever reason it ran out of space in memory to download these things. It should only have been about 6mb of stuff to my recollection, certainly no more than 20mb. You might try it again and see what it does, because we've got thousands of players and this is the first report of the problem. There might also be some antivirus interfering; sometimes that can happen when a program downloads data from the internet, but this would be the first case I've heard of with the updater in AI War. |
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Thanks for the incredibly fast response - unfortunately, I already tried the "turn off the antivirus, etc" routine. Same effect there. I have also branched out and managed to get this problem with the in-game update to fail on all six of my friends/relatives who own AIWar also. Not only is it broken, but it is also heinously painful that it will run the computer out of memory over the course of 7+ hours. I recommend installing a vanilla 5.0 with all expansions, run the update and see what happens. I have also attached a screenshot showing my sister-in-law's computer. Note that AIWar is using 1,150,484K of memory, and is only running the update. |
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Hmmm, I am guessing this has something to do with the language of your OS, looking at the screenshot. Or something along those lines. Literally, we have at least a dozen new players a day, and this version of the game has been out for 9 months; there's just no way that this is a generalized problem or I'd have heard about it thousands of times by now. We have very few people running eastern OS languages, though. To be on the safe side I'll have our QA guy do a fresh install and see if he can get it to break, just in case it's something new all of a sudden, but I think that's not going to turn up anything. What happens if you try to download this file? http://www.arcengames.com/dl/AIWarBetaUpdates2.xml This is the file that tells the game how many updates are present, and my best guess is that somehow it is getting a really really wrong set of data out of there. Then again, it's telling you there are 3 updates, which is correct. It's then just downloading thousands of updates once it tries to do anything more. At worst case, you can download the zip files from at the url above and apply them manually to your game to update it (just unzip the files into your game folder). But it would definitely be nice to figure out what it is that's interacting so oddly with these particular computers, for sure. There is some string parsing going on there, and I think it's something to do with your system language that's causing it to bug out. |
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Took a look at the code; it's been a while, because this identical code has been a part of all our games for over a year now. I'm really not seeing anything that would cause this based on the system language, but it did raise a few more questions: 1. When you first start trying to do the updates, how many updates does it say it has left to do? Presumably just 3, and then it keeps counting up? 2. Are there errors being logged in your RuntimeData folder inside the game folder? 3. Are there error messages in the AIWar_Data/output.log file? I'm actually starting to wonder if this is some sort of firewall or ISP issue, almost -- given that you're trying it on so many machines with the same result, and so many operating systems. Are you able to download the zip files from that xml file above manually? Or do they give you some sort of error when you try to download them? |
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I just did a complete re-install from scratch of the base game and all three expansions with no problems at all. |
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This included re-downloading the files, just in case the ones I had were different. |
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Thanks for checking into it! |
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Well, I have good news and weird news. After reading these notes, I tried an English version of Windows 7 Professional, fresh install of AIWar, and the update ran fine. Since it worked fine from my home ISP connection with the English OS install, I deleted all of my AIWar directories off my normal computer, tried another fresh install, and encountered the weird incrementing updates like I have been mentioning. So I opted for a "simple stupid" solution and ran it from my Japanese version of Windows 7 using the "Run as Administrator" option and the update ran without any problems. This doubly aggravates me. I have no idea why I need to "Run as Administrator" on the Japanese version of the OS, but not on the English version. Even worse, I feel like an idiot for not trying that about a week ago when I first ran into the problem. Since older versions of the game did not demonstrate this behavior, I suspect some "Security Patch" messed up the Japanese version of the OS. Can I blame Microsoft? It will make me feel slightly better. |
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Whew, well, I'm really glad that you figured it out, anyhow -- I agree, let's blame Microsoft for this one. ;) It does indeed sound like some sort of odd security patch on the Japanese version. You might try making sure that your non-administrator account has full read/write privileges to the AI War folder on the machine. Possibly what got messed up was the ability for the game to write to that or something. But why there's a huge number of updates being downloaded like is happening... that's really odd. If the game encounters a failure, it just stops trying the updates and gives an error message. What seems to be happening here is no failure from the OS, but just some sort of... I'm not sure what. Hopefully whatever this patch is, it isn't coming to the English version of Windows anytime soon, and they fix it in the Japanese version. Cheers, and thanks a lot for the patience and sleuthing! |
| Date Modified | Username | Field | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Oct 2, 2011 8:00 am | indarien | New Issue | |
| Oct 2, 2011 7:00 pm | Chris_McElligottPark | Note Added: 0015343 | |
| Oct 3, 2011 9:41 am | tigersfan | Internal Weight | => Discussion Only |
| Oct 3, 2011 9:41 am | tigersfan | Status | new => feedback |
| Oct 3, 2011 7:48 pm | indarien | File Added: aiwar.jpg | |
| Oct 3, 2011 7:49 pm | indarien | Note Added: 0015532 | |
| Oct 3, 2011 7:49 pm | indarien | Status | feedback => new |
| Oct 3, 2011 7:58 pm | Chris_McElligottPark | Note Added: 0015533 | |
| Oct 3, 2011 7:58 pm | Chris_McElligottPark | Assigned To | => tigersfan |
| Oct 3, 2011 7:58 pm | Chris_McElligottPark | Status | new => acknowledged |
| Oct 3, 2011 8:09 pm | Chris_McElligottPark | Note Added: 0015534 | |
| Oct 3, 2011 8:46 pm | tigersfan | Note Added: 0015535 | |
| Oct 3, 2011 8:46 pm | tigersfan | Note Added: 0015536 | |
| Oct 3, 2011 9:49 pm | Chris_McElligottPark | Note Added: 0015537 | |
| Oct 3, 2011 10:53 pm | indarien | Note Added: 0015540 | |
| Oct 3, 2011 10:54 pm | indarien | Note Edited: 0015540 | |
| Oct 3, 2011 10:58 pm | Chris_McElligottPark | Note Added: 0015541 | |
| Oct 3, 2011 10:58 pm | Chris_McElligottPark | Status | acknowledged => closed |
| Oct 3, 2011 10:58 pm | Chris_McElligottPark | Resolution | open => no change required |
| Apr 14, 2014 9:28 am | Chris_McElligottPark | Category | Bug - Crash or Exception => Crash/Exception |
