[8.018-8.019] Access Violation Errors, the dreaded 0xC000005

[Zair]

So, today Steam pulled AI War 8.018 for me and a very interesting problem came up with a game I had started earlier in the day (on 8.017) in what is literally the opening moves of the game. Twice now, after attacking my first AI planet, moving in with a colony ship and dropping a Mil II command station, within seconds of attempting to place temporary Forcefield Generator MkIs over the wormholes leading to my homeworlds, the game has basically done a crash-to-desktop. I found the crash logs - just wondering whether it would be better to attach one directly to this thread or to email / PM it to somebody, and whether I should sanitize anything in the log before I send it over.

Custom Build:
Intel Core i5-3570 (3.4GHz, 4 cores)
16GB RAM
Windows 7 Professional 64-bit, fully up-to-date as of earlier this week
Boot drive / Steam drive is an SSD, but Steam games (including AI War) are on spinning disk storage.

(This is probably my punishment for slapping the AI in the face with Spire Dreadnaughts last night.)

[keith.lamothe]

If you have a save file, and especially if you have steps to reproduce this, that would be wonderful

[Zair]

OK. Gimme a minute to heat up the game again, I'll edit the results into this post once I have them ready for you!

(Great. Now I need witty names for the planets I'm on.)



Okay, so I'm failing to get the big to generate a THIRD time, but I can dig up the last manual save I have from before the crash as well as the two error.log dump files that got generated.

Starting from the game state at which the save is being loaded, I build a colony ship and five Engineer MkIs on Owiji (one of two homeworlds in the corner of the map) and send them to Ravoisa. At the same time, Owiji's space dock is directed to send all new ships through the wormhole to Ravoisa as well, and all existing ships piled up next to it are ordered to move to Ravoisa. At the Science Lab, Military Command Station Mk II gets unlocked.

On Ravoisa, a Champion and a whole pile of fleetships are waiting for orders. They go to clean out any remaining guard posts over wormholes, but specifically ignore the AI Fort and the Special Forces Guard Post in the southwest corner of Ravoisa's gravity well.

As soon as the colony ship from Owiji arrives, it's ordered to build a Mil II station roughly in the middle of the system, so its translocators can reach every wormhole except Muna. The five Engineer MkIs assist construction, and immediately enter FRD as soon as the station is done. (This is automatic, I play with Engineers Auto FRD on for my planets).

It's as I'm directing placement of Force Field Generator MkIs over the wormholes to Owiji and Samusicpe and over the Mil II station itself that the game decided to quit on me and write its error log. Interestingly, the second time, I couldn't see the button graphics for any unit available on the Mil II's SUP tab, but I could still see the number-available counts for objects I had unlocked, and mousing over the appropriate blank spaces still yielded the appropriate tooltips. Sadly, the game went and crashed before I could take a screenshot.

I also looked in ArcenDebugLog.txt, since I noticed that file sittin' there on the way to my screenshots folder. Sadly, it doesn't seem to have anything of import. Just a whole lot of

Code: [Select]

10/8/2014 9:56:37 PM Game v8018
Steamworks Init     10/8/2014 9:56:37 PM Game v8018
Steamworks IsRunning: True     10/8/2014 9:56:38 PM Game v8018
audio load: 115 and similar.

(While I was typing this up, x4000 asked about vsync. I had it off, but I can try with it on. If it's relevant, I'm currently running the game in a maximized window rather than in fullscreen)

[x4000]

Also: can you try turning on V-sync and see if that makes any difference?

[Zair]

Just had another memory explosion while the game was paused, interestingly enough. Game in a window (maximized), vsync off, just as I was tabbing from my browser window back into the game. I'm turning vsync on now to see if I can get it to do that again. And if I can't, I'll throw some of yesterday's hideously huge Fallen Spire gamesaves at it, the ones where I end up with 17,000 ships on a planet at one time!

[x4000]

Okay, knock on wood, this one should fix you up: http://arcengames.com/mediawiki/index.php?title=AI_War_-_Current_Post-8.000_Beta#Official_8.019

I have also seen the crash when tabbing out in 8.018, and this seems to alleviate any of the behaviors that were related.  Knock on wood!

[Zair]

(Game Version 8.019)

I bring you more crashes! Apologies for this. :p

Game gone down in the middle of the first shard chase in a Fallen Spire Enabled game. There are more files in the crash folder this time, lemme dig 'em up for you.

This time I'm nearing the three-hour mark into a game, not the opening 10-15 minutes, fortunately. On sending my Survey Ship from Home to Isyi (two planets CCW around the outermost ring of this map) and starting the Fallen Spire shard chase, crash occurred while FS exos were pouring in at Home and Ring Five West but before the shard made it to Home. In the enclosed save, the survey ship is still at Home, just move it over and start the chase.

If it matters, I'm still playing in a maximized window to give AI War as much screen real estate as possible without actually hiding my taskbar. VSync is ON as per x4000's suggestion earlier in this thread.

Again, sorry I blew it up once more, guys!

[x4000]

Okay, so the problem here is that your card is running out of VRAM in some frames.  How much VRAM does your card have?  Unfortunately I have some pressing personal stuff for the next week and a half, so Keith is going to have to follow up with this and there's a limit to what he can do since he's not familiar in this area of the code.  We'll see what we can cook up, though.

[Zair]

It's an ASUS-branded NVidia GeForce GTX 460. A gigabyte of VRAM. I'm not running any other actual games in the background or anything, though the Steam client and Blizzard's battle.net client are still memory-resident. Idunno if either of those rent out space on the videocard to store their UI textures.

Also, I hope you'll be alright!

[x4000]

I'm good on the personal stuff, nobody needs to worry about me. It's nothing bad, it's just going to divert me from work.

I think I have a solution: if you enable the sprite combining at distance 12, blind bet you never see this particular problem again. I think the sprites still jump around some with that on, which is frustrating, but that's more in Keith's area than mine, actually. So that ought to be a lot more tractable, and anyway that's a minor graphical annoyance as opposed to a crash.

Thanks!

[Zair]

Yeeeesss. I'll give it a shot - ONWARD TO MASHING METAL MINIONS AGAINST THE MIGHT OF MY SPIRE FLEET - er ... The Spire Fleet I WILL have. Soon.

Thanks for the suggestion!

[orzelek]

Small hint:
Run GPU-Z while game is running and on it's sensors tab there is a current GPU memory usage. You can take a look there and see how it behaves.

[nelsino]

Hello, I'm seeing this issue in version 8.019.

My steps are similar to Zair's:

• Run the game in window-mode (1920 x 1080)
• Start a tutorial
• Pause it and unfocus the game (I was switching between the game and browser often)
• Observe the game's memory usage sky-rocket in Task Manager
• Switch back to the game after the memory reaches ~1,500MB (Should only take a couple minutes)
• Observe game being unresponsive. The game almost always quit unexpectedly after that.

I was not running V-sync, but I did try enabling the sprite combining at distance 12 after seeing the above suggestion. Unfortunately that did not work for me. I did not change any default settings besides switching to window-mode and changing the sprite combining distance.


Here's the top of an error log:

Code: [Select]

Unknown caused an Access Violation (0xc0000005)
  in module Unknown at 0023:00b78eff.

Error occurred at 2014-12-07_161948.
Unknown, run by Unknown.
87% memory in use.
0 MB physical memory [1003 MB free].
0 MB paging file [1766 MB free].
0 MB user address space [16 MB free].
Write to location 00000008 caused an access violation.

Context:
EDI:    0x00000008  ESI: 0x367c78a4  EAX:   0x00000008
EBX:    0x367c799c  ECX: 0x367c78a4  EDX:   0xffffffff
EIP:    0x00b78eff  EBP: 0x0062e3f4  SegCs: 0x00000023
EFlags: 0x00210202  ESP: 0x0062e3f4  SegSs: 0x0000002b


Here are some of my computer specs:

• Processor: Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-4670K CPU @ 3.40GHz
• Graphics: AMD Radeon R9 200 Series
• RAM: 8GB
• OS: Windows 8.1 (64-bit)

Let me know if you need any additional details. I greatly appreciate any help!

[x4000]

Unfortunately this is a but I unity 3d, and not something we can directly fix. But there is a simple workaround -- if you run in windowed mode at a size that is very near to you max monitor size, then the game will not engine will not log the sort of messages that are currently causing the memory spike for you.

I wish we had a better solution than that! One option might be to quickly pause and then hit ctrl enter to switch to windowed mode right before talons out. Then hit that hockey to go back to fullscreen when you return. I think that's the shortcut -- it's the general windows shortcut key, anyhow, that would do this. Sorry for not being able to check that directly real quick; on my phone and wanted to get you an answer as quick as possible.

[Mánagarmr]

Unfortunately this is a but I unity 3d, and not something we can directly fix. But there is a simple workaround -- if you run in windowed mode at a size that is very near to you max monitor size, then the game will not engine will not log the sort of messages that are currently causing the memory spike for you.

I wish we had a better solution than that! One option might be to quickly pause and then hit ctrl enter to switch to windowed mode right before talons out. Then hit that hockey to go back to fullscreen when you return. I think that's the shortcut -- it's the general windows shortcut key, anyhow, that would do this. Sorry for not being able to check that directly real quick; on my phone and wanted to get you an answer as quick as possible.

Typing on your phone again?