Flares negative list

Macedonia_night --> crashed offline pretty soon
KosovoNight --> seemed to work offline

I decided not to hold a positive list..... but if you want I can post here all maps I tested and turned out negative. But I mostly tested night maps, not "day" maps or CQB maps.

DM-INF-KosovoNight : Crashed a bit too much when flying around
EAS-INF-Frozen : Immediate crash
EAS-INF-Island : Got at least one crash without flying around, hence was removed from the "safe" list
EAS-INF-Mostar : Immediate crash
EAS-INF-Raid : Crash when entering certain zones.
EAS-INF-Silo : Crashed frequently

EAS-INF-DS-Arabba-sl/xl : Immediate crash
EAS-INF-DS-Arabnight : Immediate crash
EAS-INF-DS-BlackSand : Immediate crash
EAS-INF-DS-RailBridge : Immediate crash
EAS-INF-DS-SandmanNight : Immediate crash
EAS-INF-DS-BlackSandFix : Immediate crash
(at least the DS maps are consistent )

DM-Cargo_UT : Immediate crash (crashes also with INF tac light )
DM-INF-NightWater : Frequent crash
DM-INF-Macedonia_night : Frequent crash
DM-INF-VladivostokNight : Frequent crash
EAS-INF-Gatehouse : Immediate crash
EAS-INF-GatehouseFIX : Immediate crash
EAS-INF-LondonWenthamNgt : Got at least 1 crash
EAS-INF-Platoon : Immediate crash (crashes also with INF tac light )
EAS-INF-Taps : Frequent crashes


Those in green could be considered stable enough for the "stable" list, but are on the limit IMO.

I did a night coversion of DM-INF-ShootingRange for NV testing purposes. I found the experiemnt interesting. I might go for converting stable day maps into real night maps. Or I might try to find ppl to do it while I do some other stuff.

Nightwater crashes only with flares or with NVG as well? Can´t play it.. Xplosion or something package is missing..XP

747Siege crashes after the 2nd flare and some walls aren't illuminated correctly
Beachhead crashes frequently
ADV-RushCityPro][ crahses immediatelly
HRT-FacilityBeta5 chrashes immediatelly
ManorFarm no crashes occured

I got a few crashes on ManorFarm. So did Neabit (and he was pretty mad )

This is why I'm glad I opted out of flares for new40mm. Is it just the obscenely large dynamic lights causing these crashes?

yes. large dynamic lights cause the crash in some specific conditions. I'm looking into either zoning or BSP errors.

It can happen even with very small dynamic lights such as the tac-lights

Well... how come these weren't seen before? It's not like dynamic lights are all that rare...

I've seen it before. And quite often I should say.

Clearly a series of condition must be met to crash the system. Sometimes it crashes immediately, other times it crashes only when I walk in a specific area while carrying a dynamic light or being in it's range. Often you can fill a map without crash until you go in one area of the map. Probably a different zone or something. Sadly I not know much about mapping to find a correlation between map features and these crashes.

But I can assure you that these crashes happened before. To me and to others. Only know one knew what it was or wasn't able to reproduce it (due to the smaller radius of the dynamic light). The first time I crashed was while testing the night vision. I crashed on Gatehouse and my first observation after seeing the symptoms and logs I remembered this happened to me before. I clearly remembered arab-xl, platoon and cargo UT. I went back on these maps and got the crash with the NV as with Gatehouse. Following this test I discovered that the simple tac-light was able to reproduce the crash the exact same way it happend to me before I even started coding for UT. On Platoon and Cargo UT it's really easy to reproduce. That's how I linked dynamic lights with the crash.

Eventually, reducing the light radius allowed me to make the night-vision stable on most maps, reducing the changes to get in the coditions that crash the engine. It was reduced during my initial testing until the release in WP 1.4 and was reduced again in WP 1.5 to lower even more the chances of a crash.

With the flares, this is something that I cannot do. Flares with a radius of 2 meters aren't really usefull

If only I could exactly find out what are those conditions... But even then, there's probably not much I can do about it.

I tried posting about it in UT dev forums, talked to Freon who worked on this before (he is the original coder of the flare actor after all). No clue.

My next try will be to talk with someone that knows well the renderer and the engine. But I doupt it's an issue with the rendering driver itself as it happens with OpenGL (vanilla and Chris'), D3D and even software rendering. That means that even a new rendering device might not solve the issue.