Lockup on execution sequence in JB-Arlon

[Haarg]

As of JB2004b, I have gotten an occasional lockup when the execution sequence is played. So far this has happened once in JB-Arlon, and twice in JB-Arlon-Gold. I know someone else who has had the same thing happen four times.

The team was captured, and then started on fire, and when they should have been killed, the computer locked up. UT2004 started taking 100% of the CPU. I could still bring up the 'Windows Security' dialog by pressing Ctrl-Alt-Delete. The computer was responding too slowly for any of the options to work though, and I had to hard-reboot the computer.

[Mychaeel]

Next time this happens, please wait for a while to see whether you're getting an error message. If that's an UnrealScript-level deadlock, the engine will stop after a certain number of iterations, giving you a crash message that's possibly useful to fix the problem.

[Haarg]

One of the times, I waited for at least 5 minutes to try to end the task, or log out, but it didn't do anything.

[ZedMaestro]

I've had to wait 15minutes for a crash-log to finally appear. Quite simply, play it just before you have dinner. If it happens, leave it running while you have your food, and when you get back it should have crashed. Eat slowly too

[Haarg]

Well, I let it go for an hour, and it never gave me an error message.

[ZedMaestro]

Okay, if Ued is gonna be stubborn...

Play the map just before you go to bed. Play until it shows signs that its going to crash, switch off the monitor, and go to bed. If no error message is up in the morning, then... well, I dunno. Leaving it overnight should give at least 8 hours for the iterations to reach whatever huge figure it needs to get to before crashing with a message.

[Mychaeel]

Haarg: Does your computer's harddisk work constantly while you're waiting when the game is frozen?

[Jrubzjeknf]

let the game crash, then go on a vacation. When you come back, you should be seeing an error message

[The_Head]

Originally Posted by jrubzjeknf

let the game crash, then go on a vacation. When you come back, you should be seeing an error message

And if there ain't one then leave it alone, buy a new pc and play some UT. and in another life it might give the message.

[Raffi_B]

I and several other people have gotten this lockup. It isn't just a one-time thing.

I also installed the mod on a new computer and it does the same thing, so it's not my hard drive or anything.

[Mychaeel]

The harddisk question (which still hasn't been answered, by the way) aims at an attempt to find out what's happening there -- during testing we had a problem which caused the game to allocate more and more memory, which would cause Windows to swap like crazy -- and that in turn would mean that your harddisk would be active all the time.

So, is your harddisk active during the lockup, or isn't it?

And: Why does it only happen for some people, sometimes, and not all the time for everybody? Anything you can remember doing that might have triggered this problem might help. The less action required before a lockup, the better. Perhaps you could even try to artificially reproduce this bug (by playing alone or against a single enemy bot, if that works)...

[Mychaeel]

Oh, one more question: Does the game freeze in the moment the new round should have started, or does it freeze earlier than that (i.e. before all prisoners have died)?

Keep in mind that there's supposed to be an one-second delay after all prisoners have died before the next round starts; the old (and fixed, I hope) bug during testing I was talking about in the previous posting happened when everybody was respawned, and it froze the server or a single player game, but never a client.

As said before, any additional input you can give might help.

[ZedMaestro]

I thought I'd try to see if I could recreate this bug offline. I first played a 6on6 game for 15mins with no problems, and then I was hungry, so left the bots playing for an hour. Since the execution sequence needed to be run as many times as possible to ensure that this bug might surface, I set up a 1on8 game...

After one hour, Mekkor had scored 47frags 0captures, and the blue team had a few more frags and 170captures.

Thus, in 170times the execution sequence had been performed, it hadn't crashed once offline. So I'm guessing its an online problem.

However, the UT2004 log file isnt clean. It was long (due to all the celebration initialisations), so I've extracted all the different errors and warnings for you:

Warning: xBot JB-Arlon-Gold.xBot (Function UnrealGame.Bot.RateWeapon:0008) Accessed None 'W'
Warning: Mover JB-Arlon-Gold.Mover9 (Function Engine.Mover.EncroachingOn:02C9) Accessed None 'Other'
Warning: Mover JB-Arlon-Gold.Mover8 (Function Engine.Mover.EncroachingOn:02C9) Accessed None 'Other'
Warning: xBot JB-Arlon-Gold.xBot (Function UnrealGame.Bot.ExecuteWhatToDoNext:00DF) Drekorig WhatToDoNext with no weapon, JB-Arlon-Gold.xPawn health 0

The above errors occur lots of times.

Since suggestions to causes of these bugs doesnt hurt, my first thought would be something to do with the JBExecutionBurning and how the flame effects are spawned on pawns, or how they're attached to pawns, or how they're destroyed after the sequence.

[Haarg]

I've been trying to reproduce this bug again, but haven't been able to in the last few days. I don't know yet if it causes constant hard drive usage.

A bit more info: I've had this lockup on both the JB2004 Mothership (playing with bots only), and the BU Ketnar Mothership (with other players). I have had it when on both the team being captured and the other team.
The lockup happened almost instantly after the players were skeletized.

[Mychaeel]

Originally Posted by Haarg

I've been trying to reproduce this bug again, but haven't been able to in the last few days. I don't know yet if it causes constant hard drive usage.

Drat... a heisenbug. Those are the worst ones: Appearing just frequently enough to annoy, but not quite often enough to be reproducible...

A bit more info: I've had this lockup on both the JB2004 Mothership (playing with bots only), and the BU Ketnar Mothership (with other players).

Did the server crash (as well) when this happened? Did other players on the server report the same client-side crash at the same time?

[Haarg]

Originally Posted by Mychaeel

Did the server crash (as well) when this happened? Did other players on the server report the same client-side crash at the same time?

The server did not crash. At least one of the times (I've only had it 3 times in normal play), one other client locked up at the same time.

[Jrubzjeknf]

clientside crashes, but only when playing online and completely random. Is there much to do about it whatsoever?

[Mychaeel]

Random, but only in JB-Arlon and always exactly when players are about to skeletize, right?

Might have something to do with JBExecutionBurning... or is there another Jailbreak map using that execution method which doesn't crash?

[edit]
On second thought, there's no client-side code in JBExecutionBurning or its related classes, so that doesn't sound so likely after all...

[Jrubzjeknf]

I think it might have to do with turning players into skeletons when they are too close to eachother. When the computer is trying to draw the skeletons/emitters while they're going through eachother (what's a better word for this, forgot it :S), the game might lock up, because it's trying to draw something that's already there or something. That might explain why there wasn't any lockup when you let one guy getting jailed over and over.

Know what. When I'm home I start coding a small addon that removes disables the release points to work and llamaizes everyone on one team (1st time red, 2nd time blue, 3rd time red again etc.) (lotsa 'Log("Round X, Killer X")'s?). All you gotta do is:
-put up 16 godlike bots on each team (all different characters. If it's character related, you've got the highest chance of getting a crash when all the characters are different )
-enable instagib
-insert 'slomo 100' (dunno what max is, thought 50 or so, but insert 100 to be sure ^^)
-lower settings to minimun, you won't need eyecandy anyways

When it locks up, plz look what team it is that's being killed atm, who made the last frag and at what round.

thoughts on this one?

[Haarg]

Originally Posted by Mychaeel

Random, but only in JB-Arlon and always exactly when players are about to skeletize, right?

I do see the player skeletons, but otherwise you are correct.

Originally Posted by Mychaeel

Might have something to do with JBExecutionBurning... or is there another Jailbreak map using that execution method which doesn't crash?

[edit]
On second thought, there's no client-side code in JBExecutionBurning or its related classes, so that doesn't sound so likely after all...

That would have been my thought as well, given that this started with JB2004b, and one of the changes listed involves that.

I was able to reproduce the bug again. I didn't have any hard drive activity, UT2004.exe's memory usage was fixed at ~325MB.
I didn't do anything special that could cause the lockup. I just joined the Jailbreak Mothership, voted in Arlon, and played a few rounds against bots. At the end of one round, it locked. I let the game go for at least 4 hours, but it never produced a crash log.