Another bug in new stable

Okay, this report is going to be a little vague I'm afraid, as I have not personally seen it, only my playtester. Apparently game.exe will crash occasionally during certain battles. Based on what he's telling me, the only battles where this has occurred have had some certain characteristics:

1. They've all been triggered by a plotscript
2. They've all been relatively close to characters being swapped
3. At least one of them occured in a battle that was called by a plotscript, but there was another plotscript running in the background at the time as well. He can't remember for sure which other bosses had the crash, so this might be necessary, but might not be.

The problem is that after manually shutting down game.exe, he was able to get through the exact same battle fine (sometimes). Has anyone else experienced crashes during a battle? I feel like that hasn't been an issue for a while.

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I am Srime

This is news to me.

What operating system is he using? XP? Vista? Win7? Which service pack?

You might want to ask him to try with a music_silence nightly build to narrow down whether it is a music related crash or not.

He is using Windows XP Service Pack 3. No word on the silence backend yet, and unfortunately he has saved beyond the problem areas, which didn't start until over 10 hours into the game. We'll have to wait and see if he can find another crash.

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I am Srime

Okay, I've got a SAV file from my playtester, and it appears that there is a serious music-related issue going on. I played the given area of my game, and as soon as the serious scripting began (including, among other things, commands for stopping songs and playing other songs), the game crashed within a minute. Never at exactly the same moment as far as I could tell, but never before long. I never got far enough to even enter a battle to be able to check if it crashes there as well.

I tried with a silence nightly, and I didn't experience any crash at all, in battle or out.

I am using Windows 7 Home Premium. How should I proceed? Should I just send you guys the whole game?

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I am Srime

You could send the whole game plus the SAV file

I would also be very curious to know if the song that is playing when the crash occurs also crashes in the Import Music screen in custom.

Well, the game has crashed during various songs according to my playtester, but I did find one song that consistently crashes in custom. Using the silence backend, I inspected it (I could not even get its name to come up in Ypsi+1), and it is a song titled "Silence". It was basically an empty .bam, which I replaced with an empty .mid, from back when we didn't have certain options available for music we have now.

I suppose I can try to remove it from the game (can songs be deleted? will that affect other song numbers in the list, and/or the hsi file?), although this will be a long task perhaps. Plus, this song was not necessarily the one playing while crashes occurred in-game, although I will have to do some digging to find out whether or not it had been called prior to any crashes, which is certainly a possibility.

Thoughts?

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I am Srime

Ooh! Hey! That is very useful information. I had forgotten about bug 722 Crashing/problems with blank BAM and MIDI songs

If you send me the bam file that crashes, I will work on improving the sound backends to avoid the crash.

Yes, you can safely delete the silent bam without changing the song numbering.

And it is possible that the other music crashes were actually as side effect of failed attempts to play the silent bam. That could have corrupted the SDL_mixer's memory space, which could have caused later songs to crash. So there is a possibility that after removing the crashy bam, all the other crashes might stop too.

Hm, here is a question. Is it safe for me to use the latest silence nightly to be able to delete the offending song, but then revert back to the stable Ypsi+1 to continue working on the game?

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I am Srime

Yes, that should be fine. Normally you can't go back from a wip to a stable, but since the stable was released so recently, I don't believe we have changed anything that breaks compatibility.

Although, even if we had made some compatibility-breaking changes, you could just get an older nightly from the nightly build archive with a date close to the one that yspiliform was released at.

Or another option is to use unlump.exe to extract your rpg file into a folder, delete song#.mid (where # is the id number of the offending song) and then use relump.exe to convert the folder back into and rpg file.

I opted for the lumping technique. However, I encountered a new, very minor bug. It appears that relump.exe cannot handle passwords. It asks for the password, but won't accept more than keystroke (which appears as an asterisk), which cannot be backspaced either. Almost as if it thinks it is waiting for another y/n, rather than a full-bodied password.

This is minor since it was easy to just go in normally, destroy the password, and then relump worked fine. Notably, unlump asked for and accepted the password correctly, and did unlump my game.

In any case, thanks James! I haven't seen the crash again yet, and I will be sending the updated file to my playtester shortly.

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I am Srime