2.10 Crashes - May be bow \ frontend acceleration related

[wesp5]

The problem with the bow after loading seems to be a common bug of 2.10, I noticed it in other missions as well!

[Wellingtoncrab]

1 hour ago, wesp5 said:

The problem with the bow after loading seems to be a common bug of 2.10, I noticed it in other missions as well!

Yeah a user over at darkfate.org also reported some crashes in Iris specifically after using the bow as well. 

I could not replicate exactly what ever it was, and didn’t have the issue in HP either which certainly puts the bow through its paces, but it does seem repeatable perhaps.

[beyondthesun]

Yep, the game just crashed for me too, after using the bow on a zombie. This was my third crash on 2.10, the mission "Written in Stone" also crashed like two times the moment I was trying to shoot water arrows for some reason. Something's definitely not right.

Edited March 18, 2022 by beyondthesun

[nbohr1more]

@beyondthesun crashes all coincide with arrow operations?

please post your darkmod.cfg

[beyondthesun]

@nbohr1more After vozka's and Wellingtoncrab's post above, it seems likely. At least in the case of what happened in "Written in Stone", I'm fairly certain it does.

In "Written in Stone" the crashes were happening after I quickloaded a save, equipped my bow with water arrows (well I'm not sure if I already had the bow in hand after quickloading, or I had to equip it), and as soon as I pressed the left mouse button to charge up a shot, the game crashed. Not sure why it didn't happen every time, fortunately it only happened a few times, but when it did, it was at that exact bow action.

In "Hazard Pay", similarly as vozka mentioned above in his post, I shot a zombie in the head, and then crashed.

Darkmod.cfg

Edited March 18, 2022 by beyondthesun

[nbohr1more]

11 minutes ago, beyondthesun said:

@nbohr1more After vozka's and Wellingtoncrab's post above, it seems likely. At least in the case of what happened in "Written in Stone", I'm fairly certain it does.

In "Written in Stone" the crashes were happening after I quick-loaded a save, equipped my bow with water arrows, and as soon as I pressed the left mouse button to charge up a shot, the game crashed. Not sure why it didn't happen every time, fortunately it only happened a few times, but when it did, it was at that exact bow action.

In "Hazard Pay", similarly as vozka mentioned above in his post, I shot a zombie in the head, and then crashed.

Darkmod.cfg 14.5 kB · 0 downloads

Thanks!

It looks like you use the "Bow Aimer" enhancement.

Try disabling that in the gameplay settings or set tdm_bow_aimer to 0 in the console.

If the crashes stop after this change, try disabling "Frontend Acceleration" in the advanced video settings and try re-enabling the bow aimer. If it still crashes, try disabling all multicore via the console: com_smp 0 .

 

[AluminumHaste]

Crashes related to attacking AI has happened to me periodically also, but I've never been able to reproduce it reliably, and it's quite rare.

[beyondthesun]

16 minutes ago, nbohr1more said:

Thanks!

It looks like you use the "Bow Aimer" enhancement.

Try disabling that in the gameplay settings or set tdm_bow_aimer to 0 in the console.

If the crashes stop after this change, try disabling "Frontend Acceleration" in the advanced video settings and try re-enabling the bow aimer. If it still crashes, try disabling all multicore via the console: com_smp 0 .

 

Thank you for the help and suggestions! I'll try to test these out in the coming days. Although if I remember correctly I played with these options enabled in 2.09 and there weren't any crashes for me.

[nbohr1more]

Yes, I wouldn't doubt that there might be some regression here.

I just want to attempt to narrow down the scope.

I know that we need to improve the cvar system with thread locking in 2.11, so there may also be something in the script system that needs more work there as well. ( Or maybe I can use this as an excuse to nag stgatilov to try replacing the script compiler with a JIT )...

[kingsal]

2 hours ago, AluminumHaste said:

Crashes related to attacking AI has happened to me periodically also, but I've never been able to reproduce it reliably, and it's quite rare.

Likewise, this has happened to me a few times.

@nbohr1moreThis mission and Written use my custom arrow models which has me a little worried. I am not sure if a bad model is causing the crash, but its possible.  Its very hard to pin down though. 

Maybe the best option is to hook up the debugger in visual studio and just shoot zombies over and over again until it happens 

[vozka]

3 hours ago, nbohr1more said:

Thanks!

It looks like you use the "Bow Aimer" enhancement.

Try disabling that in the gameplay settings or set tdm_bow_aimer to 0 in the console.

If the crashes stop after this change, try disabling "Frontend Acceleration" in the advanced video settings and try re-enabling the bow aimer. If it still crashes, try disabling all multicore via the console: com_smp 0 .

For the record I do not use the bow aimer so that's probably not it. I may try the other changes you suggest. 

[vozka]

7 minutes ago, kingsal said:

This mission and Written use my custom arrow models which has me a little worried. I am not sure if a bad model is causing the crash, but its possible.  Its very hard to pin down though. 

The same crash (right after headshotting an NPC that was attacking me with a broad arrow) happened to me in Iris. So that's probably not it either.

[kingsal]

1 minute ago, vozka said:

The same crash (right after headshotting an NPC that was attacking me with a broad arrow) happened to me in Iris. So that's probably not it either.

Good to know. I'll investigate once I get my debugger running. Thanks for playing the mission and for the report!

[AluminumHaste]

I get this crash also when attacking guards with the sword. It's always so random

[beyondthesun]

@nbohr1more Had some time to test the game, and I think I found the culprit on my end regarding the "Written in Stone" water arrow crash. That still leaves the "Hazard Pay" crash a mystery though, more on that below.

So I began to test your suggestions out, one at a time, played a good chunk of "Written" (and "Hazard") going around quickloading, using water arrows, dousing flames as much as I could. Bow aimer off: no crash. Frontend Acceleration off (with bow aimer on): no crash. Then I decided to turn back Frontend On, also with Bow aimer On, trying to replicate the crashes I had originally a few days ago. Went around most of "Written" again for awhile using arrows with these original settings, and to my surprise, no crashes.

Then I remembered a crucial detail I forgot when I wrote my post here, I might've been running MSI Afterburner + RTSS while playing "Written" a few days ago when those crashes happened. So I fired MSI + RTSS up again, started "Written" with original settings (bow aimer on, frontend on). Started dousing flames with arrows in the starting area, quickloaded, and then, as soon as I pushed the left mouse to charge up a water arrow, bam. Crash. So I think this pretty much confrims why the water arrow crashes were happening.

But this still leaves the "Hazard" crash a mystery, I played that yesterday and I specifically remember that nothing was running in the background while playing. I was trying to replicate the crash I had yesterday, testing out your suggestions, going around shooting zombies in the head, but the crash didn't happen again..

[kingsal]

@nbohr1more Can we move this discussion to its own dedicated thread? At this point it should be broken off since its a mod related bug.

[vozka]

Since I posted about this in 2 different threads, to sum up:

1. Non-crashing bow bug: sometimes after loading a game I cannot use the bow at all. Pushing left mouse button brings up the bow and immediately puts it down again, releasing does nothing. Switching to a different weapon and back fixes it. Happened definitely with broad arrow, maybe with water arrows, and I observed it in Iris and Hazard Pay. 

2. Crashing bow bug: the game would crash immediately after headshotting an NPC with a broad arrow, when the arrow made contact with its face. In all cases it was a close shot, from a meter or so when the NPC was either already attacking me or about to. Observed in Iris (don't remember which NPC, but it was a human) and Hazard Pay (a zombie). 

I do not use the bow aimer.

My Darkmod.cfg is attached.

 

On 3/19/2022 at 11:15 AM, beyondthesun said:

Then I remembered a crucial detail I forgot when I wrote my post here, I might've been running MSI Afterburner + RTSS while playing "Written" a few days ago when those crashes happened. So I fired MSI + RTSS up again, started "Written" with original settings (bow aimer on, frontend on). Started dousing flames with arrows in the starting area, quickloaded, and then, as soon as I pushed the left mouse to charge up a water arrow, bam. Crash. So I think this pretty much confrims why the water arrow crashes were happening.

Now this is pretty interesting because I also run MSI Afterburner. I use it to slightly underclock my GPU and turn up the fans because the GPU is an older GTX 970 and it runs too hot otherwise. However I do not experience crashes in any other games (some more demanding than TDM, some less) and I also didn't get any crashes in 2.09. And I didn't get any crashes with water arrows. 

Darkmod.cfg

[nbohr1more]

@vozka can you replicate the crash if you disable Frontend Acceleration in the advanced video settings?

[Daft Mugi]

I'm new to The Dark Mod.

During the training mission while practicing sword fighting, I experienced crashes often (on Linux, TDM 2.10). If I quick loaded after each failed round, I didn't experience crashes. Felt like a memory leak, perhaps.

Also, in The Painter's Wife at the start while trying out sword attacks, I experienced crashes. (That's the moment I discovered sword attacks and went to the training mission to learn more.)

I haven't experienced crashes with the bow.

I have no mods installed. Frontend Acceleration is off.

[nbohr1more]

That might be a slightly different scenario. What Linux version?

[stgatilov]

Someone should finally capture full memory dump at the moment of crash.

Here are instructions on Windows: https://wiki.thedarkmod.com/index.php?title=Save_a_Memory_Dump_for_debugging_Crashes

It is also possible on Linux, but we don't have description anywhere, and investigating such dumps is known to be painful sometimes... but it is indeed possible.

[nbohr1more]

Yep. Linux is a bit of a pain.

The last time I tried replicating a crash, I invoked "gdb thedarkmod.x64" and then "run" and when the application crashed, I invoked "step" to see subsequent operations.

After doing more digging, most Linux distros should have kdump installed and the /etc/kdump.conf should show the path where crashes are supposed to be written.

https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_enterprise_linux/7/html/kernel_administration_guide/kernel_crash_dump_guide

The kdump data is also supposedly able to be parsed by gdb.

https://developers.redhat.com/blog/2021/04/30/the-gdb-developers-gnu-debugger-tutorial-part-1-getting-started-with-the-debugger#next_up

[vozka]

I haven't been able to reproduce the crashing bug yet.

On 3/20/2022 at 3:45 PM, vozka said:

1. Non-crashing bow bug: sometimes after loading a game I cannot use the bow at all. Pushing left mouse button brings up the bow and immediately puts it down again, releasing does nothing. Switching to a different weapon and back fixes it. Happened definitely with broad arrow, maybe with water arrows, and I observed it in Iris and Hazard Pay. 

However I encountered this again twice in The Black Mage and I have a save where it happens after loading a game.

I can upload the save here if you want. However I observed that when I switch to a different weapon and back, the bug gets fixed and doesn't happen even after I load the same savefile again. When it happened first in this mission I fixed it by switching and then loaded the save and tried to reproduce it but couldn't. However until I switch weapons I can load the save repeatedly and it always happens.

I didn't try shutting down the game and then starting it back up and loading the savefile again. Maybe that would work and reproduce the bug. But I'm not trying it just yet because it's possible it would just fix the issue again and I'd lose this save that reproduces the bug.

Is there anything I can do now? Look at some logs, post the savefile so somebody can investigate?

[stgatilov]

5 hours ago, vozka said:

Is there anything I can do now? Look at some logs, post the savefile so somebody can investigate?

Post the savefile.
Of course, that would only help if it is reproducible from a clean TDM run.

UPDATE: Also, you can record crashdump, upload it somewhere, and share the link.

[vozka]

Savefile for The Black Mage here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1CHXidcfVLtxcF2JebQjRB5kXfebOL1pE/view?usp=sharing

 

This is the non-crashing bug, where the bow merely doesn't work. I have a water arrow in my hands in the savefile and when I try to fire it, it doesn't work and the animation is broken.

 

I'll try to record a crashdump if I reproduce the arrow in the face crashing bug.

 

EDIT:

The bug happens when loading the save in a clean install, at least on my machine.

After "fixing" it through switching weapons and reloading the same save it doesn't happen again, like I already mentioned. 

However if I "fix it", restart the game and load the save it does happen again. So the issue lies in some state that doesn't reset through loading but does reset when launching the game. 

Edited March 26, 2022 by vozka