Arcen Games

General Category => A Valley Without Wind 1 & 2 => AVWW Technical Support => : LaughingThesaurus June 16, 2012, 02:27:25 PM

: Non-crashing Fatal Errors?
: LaughingThesaurus June 16, 2012, 02:27:25 PM
In the windy depths of continent two, the game's gotten a little bit laggier on my computer, takes a little longer to load, makes me worry a bit but never crashes. My computer's got a historical lack of respect for running games at any level of stability, although AVWW and AI War work perfectly for me. Well, as things go along on continent two, I started getting more "fatal errors". I think I got maybe one on the first continent that didn't actually make anything worse at all. I could still play the game as normal, unhindered. It's been the same way on continent two, but they've been getting more frequent and I want to figure out what's going wrong before it actually gets worse, even though the game has still never crashed. It's been three so far, and I don't want it to get so bad that the entire game breaks my save file or something.

I've got the unhandled errors attached.

Edit: I forgot to mention! I've always been using the absolute most recent beta update. All of these errors also happened when nothing particularly special was going on. I was just moving around in a non-mission building and collecting items every time.
: Re: Non-crashing Fatal Errors?
: x4000 June 18, 2012, 09:37:39 AM
Hmmm -- anytime an error occurs in the game, what is best to do is to save and exit immediately to avoid the risk of corruption, then report it if you can and restart the game.  It sounds like you have not had any corruption anyhow, which is great.

What is strange about the log you provided is that it only contains three errors.  The first is literally imposible, it looks like two errors spliced together somehow.  I don't really understand that.  The second and third ones at least are cohesive errors that would make sense, but I can't see any way that they would result from the code as currently exists; it's very odd, because those are also extremely central methods that get called tens of thousands of times per second no matter what you are doing in the game.  But thus far I'm not aware of any reports from anyone else.

If you're playing through steam, I recommend verifying your steam cache.  If you're having lots of stability problems with games in general, you might want to run a virus/malware scan on your machine just to be safe.  Personally I like AVG Free, Spyware Search & Destroy, and the free version of Ad Aware (though I've not used that one in years, it was always good).

Beyond that, if you have a savegame that we can use to duplicate the problems you were experiencing, that would also be much appreciated.  Thanks!
: Re: Non-crashing Fatal Errors?
: LaughingThesaurus June 18, 2012, 10:53:58 AM
Yeah, I typically do restart immediately (Although I like to kill everything in the immediate area so I don't get a nasty surprise of several points of damage) because I don't want to end up losing my save file or anything.

Yeah, I've encountered three errors so far. The first one I think was many versions ago, so maybe that's part of why it looks weird. The other errors are a bit similar to errors in games like Terraria, but the difference is in that game, the entire game just crashes and there's about a 50/50 shot of actually making the error report. The thing is, I was certain it's got to be something wrong with my computer, or possibly with the game's files. If other people were encountering the issue I'd figure I'd be seeing a lot of those reports plus an immediate fix by you if it were at all possible. I've... stalked your changelogs on occasion, seeing fixes on an update before I even realize there was an update in the first place...

But yes, I need to check out maybe some virus scanners. I think there might be a hardware issue, but I don't know what kind of hardware issue might cause problems like these anyway.

Would just attaching my current save be reasonable? I mean, it seems random that something like this comes up anyway. It could take an hour of play, or days, or it would possibly just not come up at all. I'll just toss the file up for now, and maybe spend today playing until there's some kind of issue and immediately quit and put up that save file, to be more specific.
: Re: Non-crashing Fatal Errors?
: x4000 June 18, 2012, 10:55:44 AM
Okay -- thanks.  I think we'd need it more when it's actually happening, but having anything helps.  Are there any other error logs in your RuntimeData folder, by the way?
: Re: Non-crashing Fatal Errors?
: LaughingThesaurus June 18, 2012, 11:12:02 AM
All I have is the ArcenDebugLog. The only text file about errors is the one I put up.

I forgot to mention the oddest thing. I checked that save file right before I sent it to you so I would know whether it was actually right after the latest error... The thing is after the latest error, the trees were graphically glitched in my second continent's settlement. Like, there were several consecutive rows of pixels that were just not drawn in, speaking strictly of the background trees, not the blow-up-able ones. We're talking I actually quit the game entirely, and reloaded, went back to settlement, and the trees had issues. When I checked on that settlement today, it was actually just fine. Nothing was wrong with the background at all. Maybe a result of me restarting the computer.
Also this may have not been literally oddest thing.

I've attached the debug log in case that's helpful.
: Re: Non-crashing Fatal Errors?
: x4000 June 18, 2012, 12:03:53 PM
Given the first error you posted, it really looks like something funky is going on with your copy of the game.  Is this through Steam?  You might want to do a verify of the file cache just to make sure the DLL wasn't corrupted in some manner.
: Re: Non-crashing Fatal Errors?
: LaughingThesaurus June 18, 2012, 12:41:02 PM
Oh, I totally forgot to explain that. I actually preordered the game from your site, and downloaded it from here. It's been a long time, so maybe I should do a reinstall of it and make sure it installed right. I'll try that out, then when I get home later I'll just play the game for a while and see if I encounter something weird again. If I do, I'll immediately quit and see about uploading that too, if that'll help.
: Re: Non-crashing Fatal Errors?
: LaughingThesaurus June 19, 2012, 05:33:52 PM
I got another fatal error, and quit as soon as I killed a fire bat that came on screen at about the same time as the error.
I headed down the right branch from where I am in this save, a fire bat comes from off screen, everything flickered for a split second, and the message came up before I killed off the bat. This happened after I reinstalled and resumed playing from the same version.
The updated error file is also attached, and it's very similar to the second error, if not the same.