any newly built ship will immediately cause a minidump when moved

from Sins Forums
Hello everybody.

My friend and I get minidumps when playing multiplayer. I know there are apparently many causes for these things, but we've narrowed it down to exactly what triggers the crash in this particular game. It happens whenever I move an 'Aeria Drone Host' ship that I recently created. But the funny thing is that it minidumps his instance of the game, not mine. Also, I tried scuttling that ship to see if we could get around the crash and keep playing. But any newly created ship after that point causes a minidump when it is moved after being built. In this game, the bug is repeatable.

Also, it seems the game may be out of sync with some data. Looking at the pirate raid screen, we see different amounts of bounty placed on different players.

He's running XP, I'm running Vista.
Before you ask, yes we've sent in the minidump report.
We also have updated nvidia drivers to 174.74.
We're not running any mods, vanilla 1.03.
We tried lowering all settings to Low.

Any multiplayer game we create ends up in a minidump anywhere after 15 minutes to hours of playing. We haven't been able to finish a decently sized multiplayer game at all.

Any help would be appreciated to get a bugfix or mitigate this to allow us to keep playing.

Snoeseven
technical
2,148 views 9 replies
Reply #1 from Sins Forums Top
Also, it seems the game may be out of sync with some data. Looking at the pirate raid screen, we see different amounts of bounty placed on different players.
End of quote


That right there is probably the issue.
Reply #2 from Sins Forums Top
Please tell me you have the game saved at that point if the minidump is 100% reproduceable? Pretty please?

Send the save in too, if you have it, not just the dump :P
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Reply #3 from Sins Forums Top
I've seen some odd out of sync things as well. For instance, I'll be fighting a battle around a planet against a computer AI, but on my friends' screen the computer's fleet had retreated. Really odd, but I've never been able to reproduce it consistently. It does seem to lead to crashes, though, and oftentimes you have to go back through several autosaves before finding one where things are still aligned properly.

Glad you were able to capture the minidump, and hopefully you've got the save as well. I was never ever to get one that I could consistently reproduce the problems.
Reply #4 from Sins Forums Top
Snoeseven and I have been trying to complete a game, to no avail beyond a simple single system 20ish planet affair. We do have the save (that's how we were debugging the problem) and I can resend the support email with the save attached if that's what is needed. We're more than willing to work with the dev team directly if there's something they think they can get out of it.

With regard to the pirate raid screen, the AI would be placing bounty on him and what I saw was it placing bounty on another AI player. It would still give me the audio cue about the bounty on him but the screen wasn't showing it.

If the clients are getting out of sync that's a pretty serious issue but one I do not know how to correct. This very generic "mini dump" binary file I can't seem to open doesn't help the player diagnose the issue. It took us a bit of time to narrow the problem down to a ship movement.
Reply #6 from Sins Forums Top
Snoeseven and Sharkmonkey, take a look at reply #40 in this thread.

This is the MP minidump issue that's been hard to track down, and if you two are up to it since you can reproduce it you can sign up to help diagnose it once 1.04 hits. The info's in Blair's post (the #40 reply). ;)
Reply #7 from Sins Forums Top
lease tell me you have the game saved at that point if the minidump is 100% reproduceable? Pretty please?

Send the save in too, if you have it, not just the dump
End of quote


We do have a saved game in which the bug is 100% reproduceable immediately after loading the game. It's pretty awesome. I'm a computer programmer too, so I know how hard it is debugging something which is not reproduceable.

Later tonight or tomorrow we'll resend the minidump with the saved game and a detailed description of exactly how to trigger it. It's easy to trigger, but we'll write it all out exactly in the email.

Once we got a save that happened right before the bug, we spent about an hour or so finding out exactly the cause. We changed about every setting that anyone ever mentioned on the forums with regard to a crash. Finally, narrowed it down to a specific ship that caused it to happen. I would definitely be interested in helping out however possible to get 1.1 out sooner with the bug fix.

Snoeseven
Reply #8 from Sins Forums Top
WWW Link

Same post, but now in its own sticky, if you didn't get a chance to look at the other one I linked.

Blair actually mentioned that a save game may not do the trick since the point where the game went out of sync may have been before the save, and they need the exact point.

However if all of your games end up desynched like this, you should be able to help with the sync build ;)

If you guys do want to volunteer for the special sync build post 1.04, please email [email protected] with the subject "Sync Bug Volunteer" so that you can be added to the list ;)
Reply #9 from Sins Forums Top
The requested items have been sent in as well as requests to help with the sync bug issue, hopefully we can help get some resolution on this because we'd really like to get an epic scale game going and be able to complete it.

The only game we've played that hasn't ended in sync issues ended (we think) because the 10 player game with three 100+ ship battles going on simultaneously brought the host computer to its knees. A standalone server app would be much appreciated ;)