Off Topic Productions

NatVac wrote:Again, this is just a workaround for now. Maybe the TNM crew can trap the runaway exception and simply kill the one NPC if he is not important.

Nope.

This would probably be an easy fix if we had the source code... but we don't.

Yeah there's a ton of bugs in the pathing system for the unreal engine, mostly due to the lack of checks, basically nothing is checked for validity, but these look like it's just state processing errors that infinite loop, but for all I know this is changed in DX and the native code changes states. either way, I hope you guys can fix this stuff. tracking bugs is serious business

Sadly we have no access to that part of the code. Nick and Shane tried to hook into it and prevent it from crashing (instead just terminating), but they never managed to locate the offending functions. If you have any idea what it might be, I'm all ears.

Until then, the only way to fix these is to tweak the pathing, but... it's very difficult to verify whether a fix is successful, since we can rarely replicate the crash as they tend to only happen under extremely specific circumstances.

hmm.. I reviewed the uscript and it looks fine, it's possible the native code checks for the state name and does fancy stuff based on that. maybe renaming the state to TNMPatrolling and anything referencing it to that might help?.. it's a thought at least.

It's too bad the saved games are so large, or we could upload one that freezes a few seconds later...

As for the dogs, myself, I didn't want to cheat, and after trying and failing to kill them all myself before it froze (hell, it seemed like it was freezing after they died), I decided to reload from a slightly older saved game, and used stealth instead. Originally I had activated the milbots, but on the second try I didn't. The second time around I got to my destination without any freezes.

Thankfully I didn't have any alien-related freezing, except once when Silverdawn killed me after I failed to hit him with the gibernator three times in a row - The game froze after I died.

I'm getting similar freezes! Its in ABI in the warehouse with the little guy wearing the funny costume... Cant remember his name, but yh... i've turned the cameras off for him and now i cant go down and turn off the power cause it freezes!!! But i get no error messages! It just freezes and stops there

killall TNMspiderbot2 (or just spiderbot2)

Trafalgar reported freezes with the bot in the patch topic, never had any problems with it myself...

Its okay now i managed to get past without it freezing for once
And i manged to complete the game ITS SO AWESOME!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I must go and play it again But this time do it differently Going to go and lock myself in my room and play it again and not come out for another few days or so

May be that not the right place but i have big problem when i want go to space .
The game crash after i go to the suttle i can just look at the skip choice on the rightupper part of the screen and then that message :
DXOg:File'../TNM/Music/Ogg/Blank.ogg' is not a valid ogg morbis file

<?int?Core.Errors.History?>:AActor::ProcessState<-Object Dispatcher
23_ABILabs.Dispacher7,Old State State Engine.Dispatcher.Dispatch,New State State
Engine.Dipatcher.Dispatch<-AActor::Tick<-TickAllActors<-ULevel::Tick<-
(NetMode=0)<-Ticklevel<-UGameEngine::Tick<-XGameEngineEx::Tick<-
UpdateWorld<-MainLoop

I suppose some trouble with cinematic Could u help me please ?

[]KAOS[]Casey wrote:hmm.. I reviewed the uscript and it looks fine, it's possible the native code checks for the state name and does fancy stuff based on that. maybe renaming the state to TNMPatrolling and anything referencing it to that might help?.. it's a thought at least.

The code for pickstartpoint() is really fairly ugly, though. Maybe iterating through the navigationpointlist just tends to get overly extended, especially since it specifically contains a break for instances when you encounter the same navpoint again...which suggests some form of unintentional looping is possible (perhaps increasingly likely with hugely over pathed ubermaps).

If it were me, I'd be tempted to replace the whole thing with a foreach allactors iterator, since pickstartpoint isn't called THAT regularly, and computers now are a fuckton faster than they were in 2000.

!tresketon! wrote:May be that not the right place but i have big problem when i want go to space .
The game crash after i go to the suttle i can just look at the skip choice on the rightupper part of the screen and then that message :
DXOg:File'../TNM/Music/Ogg/Blank.ogg' is not a valid ogg morbis file

<?int?Core.Errors.History?>:AActor::ProcessState<-Object Dispatcher
23_ABILabs.Dispacher7,Old State State Engine.Dispatcher.Dispatch,New State State
Engine.Dipatcher.Dispatch<-AActor::Tick<-TickAllActors<-ULevel::Tick<-
(NetMode=0)<-Ticklevel<-UGameEngine::Tick<-XGameEngineEx::Tick<-
UpdateWorld<-MainLoop

I suppose some trouble with cinematic Could u help me please ?

Not a freeze... look for a key word, or phrase in your crash like this:
DXOg:File'../TNM/Music/Ogg/Blank.ogg' is not a valid ogg morbis file

And looking at the stickies you find this:
Testers wanted for DXOgg.dll fix

most recent version

Better yet: 1.0.2 patch.

Put me down as another guy with the Doberman3 problem.

My main complaint is: shouldn't you guys have found this while testing? I mean, you give us a wide, relatively straight corridor at the start of ABI, crammed full of enemies, which is simply THE perfect place to use the lollerskates; and yet, unless you run around murdering all the dogs as fast as you can, you run into some shitty pathing error 60 seconds later. I've experienced this 3 or 4 times now, this is not a one-off occurrence. Am I gonna have to go via the alternate entrance, or use stealth, or something equally as irritating? I'm not going to download 1.0.2 yet, since I skimmed the release notes and it looks like it will be incompatible with 1.0.1 savegames.

This is not a TNM problem: it's a DX problem. And from the looks of things, a native DX problem.

And yes, it was encountered in testing, but as noted, there's fuck-all that they can do about it.

Blaming the TNM team for this is like falling off a roof and blaming an engineer for making gravity too strong: it's not their fault, and they can't fix it either.

Well we didn't encounter this specific problem with the dogs, no, and we're still not entirely sure what's causing it because we can't actually really replicate it ourselves. Much as you've got it fairly consistently and a lot of people have reported it, believe it or not, it's not something everybody gets. Nevertheless, testing indicates that it's been fixed in 1.0.2 (we disabled a part of their AI functionality, so they don't run into the Unreal Engine bug that causes the freeze), and you're welcome to think that's not good enough, but it's definitely all we can do. So yeah.

Whoa whoa! There's no need for you to get defensive, since I'm not accusing you of anything. I'm not so unreasonable that I think it's a bad thing you've now released a workaround for the bug; if I originally wanted bug-free software, I'd've waited months after the first release before I played TNM.

The point that I was drunkenly failing to get across is: typing 'killall tnmdoberman' is a successful workaround, but it also gets rid of much of the challenge of ABI, by getting rid of at least 6 enemies. Personally, my error message only ever said 'Doberman3', which would suggest that only one character was crashing the game. Perhaps there is a more targeted command I could use? I tried typing 'kill doberman3', and while it didn't complain about an unrecognised command, it didn't prevent the same crash from occurring either, again with doberman3.

Admittedly, even if I successfully used such a command, there would be nothing to stop, say, doberman2 causing a crash instead. Nevertheless, that would be for me to experiment with. If such a command exists, could you tell me please? And could you tell me the identifiers of all those dogs, to use with the command?