Constant crashes [SOLVED]

[tatsu]

I'm not going to put this in the support forum because this is everyone.

the stability of the game has been going south lately.

I think the two latest FAF patches need to be reviewed and fine combed for bugs, possibly a backtrack considered. the stability of FA has never been this bad.

I'm saying this from a windows machine.

get this : it ran better when I was on my linux machine.

I think that speaks volumes.

[Col_Walter_Kurtz]

What exactly is the problem? Crash of the game itself or bugs in the FAF platform / lobby? This thread badly needs a poll!

For me it is the latter, FA itself runs fine. Lobby "unhandled exception" crashes are less now, but there are things like being unable to select a slot that is in fact empty. I have also experienced a large amount of issues with corrupted replays, replays that give an error message when you try to open them, replays that just stop progressing without an actual crash, and it seems 2/3's are desynced nowaways.

[Sovietpride]

Lobby unhandled exceptions are rampant, although some people seem to be fine.

I know for instance that myself, Actuallyaction and Caulus constantly get crashes when trying to host...

Yet others seem to host fine.
Strange really.

[tatsu]

various lobby crashes and bugs, varying range of ingame crashes. virtually no tolerance for dualscreening anymore, windowed runs better but still crashes : unhandled exceptions, crash to desktop with no message, freeze with no crash message, blackscreen that can't be refreshed and that halts the game for the other players while FA is focused but unfreezes for other players when you alt-tab to desktop. basically the widest spectrum of crashes you can imagine.

I've since then tested it on two other computers.

[Neutrino]

I've had FA freeze perhaps 20 or 30 times since I installed FAF about 4 months ago, sometimes several times in one evening. So far it's only ever been playing against AI though, it's never frozen playing online yet (fingers crossed). Sometimes there is an error dialog reporting that some resource couldn't be found, other times there is no error dialog at all.

[tatsu]

also hotstats is being prevented from showing stats at the end of the game not to mention NUMEROUS lobby glitches forcing us to rehost that did not occur in the past.

[E8400-CV]

Ya, where people can take a slot, but have no ping, rating, games counter and can't x....

[Ze_PilOt]

Xinnony doesn't speak english very well, but he tried to warn the coder team about changing every function in the game for "clarity" and "cleaness". His code is probably not the cleanest ever, but he has deep understanding of how the lobby truly works, and his works toward effectiveness. He shouldn't be ignored but respected. Up to the coder team to accept that go past the language barrier.

I would say that cleaning up code is important, but not as much as other priorities that FAF really need. At least, it shouldn't be done on a production patch, but on a beta, and not before the production server is stable (and it seems that it's not since it moved to a new server, things got lost in the process). A clean code is useless and counter-productive if it breaks things.

The coder team will probably ignore my advice, but they should revert every change they done and only include real bug fixes until they have a proper environment to test the refactoring. FAF is back to alpha/beta stage, that's a huge step back IMHO.

Given all the changes that were done, and my experience on working on the same code, I would say that it need a least 6 months of work before being pushed in production (and that's if they don't introduce new changes, something that is done almost on a daily basis).
I'm sure sheeo is competent, but I think he under-estimate greatly the impact of changing a single line of code in FA.

For reference, it took a team of 4 competent coders (Moritz, FunkOff, Thygrr and me) a year to bring changes tested for years in mods to the main codebase without any bug occurring, and the code was much simpler back then.

There is also very good reasons, improved and tested for 3 years, for the code being organized the way it is currently. Changing it is not without consequences, and shouldn't be done without strongly thinking about it. The new team thought I wasn't pushing changes fast enough, I hope you understand why now.

[Hellcat]

Same experiences for me.
(-More and more "unhandled exceptions"
-People taking slot without rating, game counter and can't x'
-dual screen seems to be not supported anymore accordingly to mate trying to play with it)

[jmd3au1]

When somebody can't x, or change position, or click anything it is because he has unhandled exception, which is nothing new. Just alt-tab, click OK and join again. Apart from this, I had only one single in-game crash so far (no error message, the game simply shut down).
So, at least for me, the only issues are those annoying exceptions, and I can confirm that they are quite frequnet. From my observations, it usually happens when there are several people trying to connect at the same time, for example during rehosting games, which often takes 2-3 attempts to connect there.