mrimer
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VIPCOOL wrote:

I backed up my files and installed this patch, but this error message is appearing: Drod was unable to complete updating your data files and will now exit.
Is there any way I can stop this happening? Should I post the dat files here?

Yes, please post your original 3.0 player.dat file (zipped up somehow, of course) or email it to me.

____________________________
Gandalf? Yes... That's what they used to call me.
Gandalf the Grey. That was my name.
I am Gandalf the White.
And I come back to you now at the turn of the tide.

mrimer
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VIPCOOL wrote:
Is your email mrimer@caravelgames.com (just making sure)? The forum email system doesn't let me attach files and it is too big to post here

It's miker. You may always find it here.

____________________________
Gandalf? Yes... That's what they used to call me.
Gandalf the Grey. That was my name.
I am Gandalf the White.
And I come back to you now at the turn of the tide.

Kevin_P86
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VIPCOOL wrote:
I got it working (3.0.0) without any data loss or imports. I re-installed the game and pasted the dat files in the new folder.

That's good that you got it working, but if it wasn't working before, it is very likely a bug. One that ideally should be fixed. And it would help Mr. Imer (or others) reproduce and thereby fix the bug if you found a way to send them your player.dat anyways.

____________________________
+++++[>+++++<-]>[>+++>++++>+++++<<<-]>.>+.>-------.<++++.+++++.

Kevin_P86
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VIPCOOL wrote:
And it wasn't working just like that, it would have worked anyway if I re-installed drod and didn't download this patch.

Which would seem to imply that there is a problem with the patch. Still something that should be investigated, I think.

____________________________
+++++[>+++++<-]>[>+++>++++>+++++<<<-]>.>+.>-------.<++++.+++++.

jbluestein
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I'm currently in the process up doing a full upgrade to 3.1.

Just to frame the conversation, here's what I've done:



So, I've had two potential problems with Step 5. The first is relatively minor, I think. The second, not so much.

1) While importing, I get a lot of unexpected noise. It's a whole bunch of beeps -- all the same tone, all fairly inoffensive. I think it's the same sound you get when you make a menu selection in DROD. The beeps all happen while DROD is 'Checking saved game integrity' for each hold that it's importing demos for.

2) I left the import cooking overnight since it was going to take a long time. When I came down in the morning to look at it, I got a message that drod.exe had had an error and needed to close. At the moment I don't have more information than this, but I'm doing a reimport right now and if it happens again I should be able to tell you where it chokes. (It doesn't look as though any of the imported saves/demos from last night's import survived the crash.)

So, sorry it's a little sparse. I'll put in more info as I have it.

[EDIT: Well, it crashed again. I tried to retrieve the information from the temp files that the error report said it would send, but I wasn't able to get my hands on them. I will probably try again. I do know that it crashed fairly early in the import process -- either during or after the process of checking demos for Channel One Suite. And yes, my player file is fairly large...just shy of 9MB]

Josh

____________________________
"Rings and knots of joy and grief, all interlaced and locking." --William Buck

---

[Last edited by jbluestein at 09-27-2007 11:33 AM]

Briareos
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jbluestein wrote:
1) While importing, I get a lot of unexpected noise. It's a whole bunch of beeps -- all the same tone, all fairly inoffensive. I think it's the same sound you get when you make a menu selection in DROD. The beeps all happen while DROD is 'Checking saved game integrity' for each hold that it's importing demos for.

Are you sure it's not your Windows default error beep? In that case, a line should have been added to your drod.err in your program directory with each beep - and if that's the case, could you please attach your drod.err here?

2) I left the import cooking overnight since it was going to take a long time. When I came down in the morning to look at it, I got a message that drod.exe had had an error and needed to close. At the moment I don't have more information than this, but I'm doing a reimport right now and if it happens again I should be able to tell you where it chokes. (It doesn't look as though any of the imported saves/demos from last night's import survived the crash.)

That's... not so good...

I guess Mike would be glad to get hold of your player export in this case...

____________________________
"I'm not anti-anything, I'm anti-everything, it fits better." - Sole
R.I.P. Robert Feldhoff (1962-2009)

jbluestein
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File: drod.err (374 KB)
Downloaded 45 times.
License: Public Domain

Briareos wrote:

jbluestein wrote:
1) While importing, I get a lot of unexpected noise. It's a whole bunch of beeps -- all the same tone, all fairly inoffensive. I think it's the same sound you get when you make a menu selection in DROD. The beeps all happen while DROD is 'Checking saved game integrity' for each hold that it's importing demos for.

Are you sure it's not your Windows default error beep? In that case, a line should have been added to your drod.err in your program directory with each beep - and if that's the case, could you please attach your drod.err here?

It looks like that was what it was after all. I'm attaching my drod.err here.

2) I left the import cooking overnight since it was going to take a long time. When I came down in the morning to look at it, I got a message that drod.exe had had an error and needed to close. At the moment I don't have more information than this, but I'm doing a reimport right now and if it happens again I should be able to tell you where it chokes. (It doesn't look as though any of the imported saves/demos from last night's import survived the crash.)

That's... not so good...

I guess Mike would be glad to get hold of your player export in this case...

I will send it via email to him.

Josh

____________________________
"Rings and knots of joy and grief, all interlaced and locking." --William Buck

jbluestein
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For the record, the above crash occurred while importing demos/saves for Channel One Suite. I've deleted the hold and am trying again to see if that will get me past it. (And what things will look like at that point.)

[EDIT: Also for the record: After removing Channel One Suite from my holds list and the import made it past that point. It was on Egg's Treasure Tower when I had to leave for work. According to my wife, it hasn't crashed yet, but it's minimized and she can't get it to come up, so who knows. I'll report on it when I get home.]

[EDIT2: It also occurs to me that I probably sent mrimer the wrong file. Should I have sent the .player file (exported from DROD) or the player.dat file (pulled out of the DROD directory?). I send my .player file.]

Josh

____________________________
"Rings and knots of joy and grief, all interlaced and locking." --William Buck

---

[Last edited by jbluestein at 09-27-2007 02:40 PM]

jbluestein
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OK, last update on the story that is: My attempt to upgrade to the full installation of 3.1.

After removing the hold that caused DROD to crash (Channel One Suite), the import of my player file made it all the way through to the end.

As soon as it finished processing the very last hold in the list (which, for some reason, it decided was Terrakept Resonant -- one of two holds I imported rather than downloaded via CaravelNet), DROD, which had been running in full screen mode, immediately switched me back to my desktop, with DROD minimized and non-responsive. I couldn't get it to come back up, and I couldn't get it to close either -- I had to reboot my machine to get back to it. (The computer seemed otherwise unharmed.)

I'm currently trying to look at the very last line in my drod.err file. This is taking a while because my drod.err file is over 400MB in size now. I don't seem to have a program that will read in a file this size without barfing. (And I never got around to installing Cygwin on this machine -- oh, for a tail.exe!)

Josh

____________________________
"Rings and knots of joy and grief, all interlaced and locking." --William Buck

mrimer
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jbluestein wrote:
For the record, the above crash occurred while importing demos/saves for Channel One Suite. I've deleted the hold and am trying again to see if that will get me past it. (And what things will look like at that point.)

Thanks very much for your .player file. I was able to reproduce and fix the crash. The crash occurs when an "active" evil eye NPC is turned into a real monster, and was introduced by a change I made on April 25th. I recall Anson recently reported a similar bug during play. Though I couldn't reproduce it, I'd expect it's fixed now.

I also presumably fixed all the assertion failure beeps that occur during import that caused your drod.err to balloon. (DROD was probably running so slowly because it kept writing to that 400MB text file, one line at a time.)

I'll be uploading a build 53 patch and new demo+full installs with this fixes sometime soon.

____________________________
Gandalf? Yes... That's what they used to call me.
Gandalf the Grey. That was my name.
I am Gandalf the White.
And I come back to you now at the turn of the tide.

---

[Last edited by mrimer at 09-28-2007 01:46 AM]

bomber50
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It says it's 100 % now. Does that mean that it is completely ready to go and should be safe?

jbluestein
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mrimer wrote:

jbluestein wrote:
For the record, the above crash occurred while importing demos/saves for Channel One Suite. I've deleted the hold and am trying again to see if that will get me past it. (And what things will look like at that point.)

Thanks very much for your .player file. I was able to reproduce and fix the crash. The crash occurs when an "active" evil eye NPC is turned into a real monster, and was introduced by a change I made on April 25th. I recall Anson recently reported a similar bug during play. Though I couldn't reproduce it, I'd expect it's fixed now.

I also presumably fixed all the assertion failure beeps that occur during import that caused your drod.err to balloon. (DROD was probably running so slowly because it kept writing to that 400MB text file, one line at a time.)

I'll be uploading a build 53 patch and new demo+full installs with this fixes sometime soon.

Well, I downloaded build 53 and started again. It still has the same problem. This time it conked out much earlier, but not before it wrote out about 877K worth of assertion errors into my drod.err file. It's the same error message as before...well, almost.

Assertion error in line 1874 of .\CurrentGame.cpp: "!"Encountered CMD_DOUBLE in old double placement commands""

I think the line number was different before.

Josh


____________________________
"Rings and knots of joy and grief, all interlaced and locking." --William Buck

---

[Last edited by jbluestein at 09-28-2007 11:39 AM]

schep
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bomber50 wrote:
It says it's 100 % now. Does that mean that it is completely ready to go and should be safe?

I wouldn't be so sure just because of the DBOD. But since the Windows patch also now appears on the downloads page, I'd say yeah, looks officially recommended now.

TFMurphy
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Downloaded the full 3.1 installation to try it out.

Glad to see the changes to the Holding Vats room and The Stalwart Battle (though I'm surprised a conquer demo isn't saved for 2N, unlike other cutscenes... maybe the monsters present interferes with that... eh, not really a big problem). Didn't find any big issues.

Did notice the changes to pressure plate graphics though. For the most part, it'll take me some getting used to (I liked the previous design overall, but I can see me coming to terms with the new design). There is one exception though: I really don't like the One-Use Pressure Plate design. This boils down to two main complaints about it:

* The color chosen for when it can be used seems far too bright, and doesn't seem to go well when next to Yellow Gates. This might also be down to the color taking up so much of the plate's space: from a distance, it looks like a solid block of bright yellow. I'd prefer the color taking up less space on the plate or using a more contrasting or darker color.

* Each and every tile in a One-Use Pressure Plate has a black border surrounding it, unlike the other two plates. This looks inconsistent, and seems ugly when used with a large section of connected plate.

Maybe this is all just me, though - as stated, having played TCB for about four months so far, I'm definitely more used to the old design. But I still feel that the One-Use plate will take me far longer to get used to than the other two plates. (I almost didn't notice the change when I first saw it in the Holding Vats, so it seems that the Toggle plates are fine to me, anyways).

Anyways, good luck with the IGF. By the way, I'll note that the IGF will accept patches to the game after the deadline (so long as they're done before the end of the Nominating Period which is December 3rd), but they do not guarantee that they'll apply any or all of them. So it's still a good idea to get the most final version to them before the deadline.

EDIT: On a related note, would it be a good idea to have the old pressure plates available as an extra style that could be accessed via the INI? There's advantages and disadvantages to that, obviously, but it was just something that occurred to me while I was thinking about it. Obviously, it can't be a distributed file due to copyright, but if the alternative was in the .dat itself, that would work, right?

---

[Last edited by TFMurphy at 09-28-2007 11:04 AM]

Briareos
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After downloading the 3.1.0.53 full installer, re-importing all holds I've played and importing my player (which yielded a single assertion in drod.err) I took a look at the broken demos listed in drod.log (BTW - shouldn't there be something in the release notes about checking drod.log after upgrading?) and noticed that my demo for "Don't Kill The Messenger : Messenger 1 : Entrance" was now broken.

To cut a long story short, so seems to be everyone else's - at least none of the 25 demos I grabbed off of CaravelNet are valid anymore. Beethro gets killed by a bomb blast because the black doors now seem to drop before the blast radius of bombs is calculated...

Still, I think changing this one room should be easy to fix this - making the green doors a bit bigger should do it.

____________________________
"I'm not anti-anything, I'm anti-everything, it fits better." - Sole
R.I.P. Robert Feldhoff (1962-2009)

TFMurphy
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No, no, what you've brought up is actually a good analogue to something that has already been fixed for another element: orbs. Essentially, what's happening now is that the exact order a bombs explosion radius is calculated can determine whether it penetrates past a Black Gate or not, and just like Orbs, this is essentially impossible for the player to predict, and thus should be changed.

The quick and easy fix would just be to have an additional CCoordSet called tarstuff which acts in the same way as activations, but handles the destruction of tar instead. This would need to be changed in both CDbRooms::BombExplode and CPhoenix::Explode.

The ideal way to fix this is to recode explosions to work out all the squares they're allowed to hit first, and *then* handle how it affects all those squares. That'll take more work though, but it would save on having to keep on being on the lookout for exceptions like this.

Good find, anyways.

jbluestein
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Here's a question: Now that I have the 3.1.0.53 full install in place, and there's a build 54 patch coming out, can I just install the patch on top of this, or is it better for me to do another full install?

Josh

____________________________
"Rings and knots of joy and grief, all interlaced and locking." --William Buck

mrimer
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jbluestein wrote:
Here's a question: Now that I have the 3.1.0.53 full install in place, and there's a build 54 patch coming out, can I just install the patch on top of this, or is it better for me to do another full install?

Future 3.1 patch installs on top of a 3.1 full install should work perfectly.

____________________________
Gandalf? Yes... That's what they used to call me.
Gandalf the Grey. That was my name.
I am Gandalf the White.
And I come back to you now at the turn of the tide.

Briareos
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mrimer wrote:

jbluestein wrote:
Here's a question: Now that I have the 3.1.0.53 full install in place, and there's a build 54 patch coming out, can I just install the patch on top of this, or is it better for me to do another full install?

Future 3.1 patch installs on top of a 3.1 full install should work perfectly.

AKA "there's not going to be further changes in the DAT files vs. 3.1.0.53?"

Would that mean that the one-use-only pressure plates will continue to look quite disconnected, or is that rather something to do with the code?

np: Contriva - Forget About Nightshifts (If You Had Stayed...)

____________________________
"I'm not anti-anything, I'm anti-everything, it fits better." - Sole
R.I.P. Robert Feldhoff (1962-2009)

mrimer
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Briareos wrote:
Would that mean that the one-use-only pressure plates will continue to look quite disconnected, or is that rather something to do with the code?

Until we have a tool written up that can patch portions of drod3_0.dat (not a binary diff patch), we'll have to stick with a single tile graphic for the one-use plates, just like 3.0 had. After that, we could upgrade them in a future minor patch to use connected pieces just like the other two types of plates have.

____________________________
Gandalf? Yes... That's what they used to call me.
Gandalf the Grey. That was my name.
I am Gandalf the White.
And I come back to you now at the turn of the tide.

---

[Last edited by mrimer at 09-28-2007 08:30 PM]

TFMurphy
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mrimer wrote:
Until we have a tool written up that can patch portions of drod3_0.dat (not a binary diff patch), we'll have to stick with a single tile graphic for the one-use plates, just like 3.0 had.

3.0 One-Use Pressure Plates didn't have a large black border around *every* tile in a connected segments. The only border was the usual black one that surrounded the entire connected segment.

The black border around single tiles on 3.1 plates is new, and unique to One-Use plates only.

mrimer
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TFMurphy wrote:

mrimer wrote:
Until we have a tool written up that can patch portions of drod3_0.dat (not a binary diff patch), we'll have to stick with a single tile graphic for the one-use plates, just like 3.0 had.

3.0 One-Use Pressure Plates didn't have a large black border around *every* tile in a connected segments. The only border was the usual black one that surrounded the entire connected segment.

The black border around single tiles on 3.1 plates is new, and unique to One-Use plates only.

No, the old one-use plate didn't have any border drawn around it at all. I know, because I drew it. Still...I could be going senile in my old age... But I'm with you there. You'll have to email Erik if you want to complain -- he's the art director, and that's the way he wanted it changed, for some reason.

____________________________
Gandalf? Yes... That's what they used to call me.
Gandalf the Grey. That was my name.
I am Gandalf the White.
And I come back to you now at the turn of the tide.

---

[Last edited by mrimer at 09-28-2007 11:53 PM]

TFMurphy
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mrimer wrote:
No, the old one-use plate didn't have any border drawn around it at all. I know, because I drew it. Still...I could be going senile in my old age... But I'm with you there.

The *tile* doesn't. But CalcEdge in TileImageCalcs.cpp gives it one in most valid cases. (It could've given it in all cases if it had higher priority, too)

EDIT: Had a bit about Hot Tiles here, but I misunderstood the code - CalcEdge was being used to *complete* the edging that was already there, so it could always have a one-pixel border no matter where it was placed. My mistake.

mrimer wrote:
You'll have to email Erik if you want to complain -- he's the art director, and that's the way he wanted it changed, for some reason.

In that case, would it be better to point him to this thread, or make a new thread about it and then ask, or just stick to an e-mail? I generally prefer public discourse of this nature, given that it's more an aesthetic issue and thus kinda subjective - maybe others have their own comments about this.

---

[Last edited by TFMurphy at 09-29-2007 01:16 AM]

mrimer
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jbluestein wrote:
Well, I downloaded build 53 and started again. It still has the same problem. This time it conked out much earlier, but not before it wrote out about 877K worth of assertion errors into my drod.err file. It's the same error message as before...well, almost.

Assertion error in line 1874 of .\CurrentGame.cpp: "!"Encountered CMD_DOUBLE in old double placement commands""

I think the line number was different before.

Thanks for mentioning this. Hmm...no, I don't see this error in your earlier drod.err log, and I didn't encounter it when importing your .player file either. But I cheated when doing my last bug fix -- I reimported your .player file with only Channel One Suite installed (import while debugging literally goes 10-100x slower than normal), so I missed any import errors that might have occurred while importing your player data for other holds.

I did fix up something that could have caused the above assertions to fire, though I don't think that would have actually caused a crash (that's what you mean by "conked out", right?) I'll look into this more. I'll probably import everything and then let the debugger crunch slowly through the import all night.

____________________________
Gandalf? Yes... That's what they used to call me.
Gandalf the Grey. That was my name.
I am Gandalf the White.
And I come back to you now at the turn of the tide.

---

[Last edited by mrimer at 09-29-2007 07:40 AM]

Briareos
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mrimer wrote:
I'll probably import everything and then let the debugger crunch slowly through the import all night.

Errr... why not try it with a release build first to see if it even "conks out"? If that's really 10-100 times faster the extra time used should be rather negligible.

(OT: Yeah, using debug builds of ffdshow to decode MPEG2 is running at similar glacial speeds... *shudder*)

np: Modeselektor - Hyper Hyper (ft. Otto Von Schirach) (Happy Birthday!)

____________________________
"I'm not anti-anything, I'm anti-everything, it fits better." - Sole
R.I.P. Robert Feldhoff (1962-2009)

mrimer
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Briareos wrote:

mrimer wrote:
I'll probably import everything and then let the debugger crunch slowly through the import all night.

Errr... why not try it with a release build first to see if it even "conks out"? If that's really 10-100 times faster the extra time used should be rather negligible.

(OT: Yeah, using debug builds of ffdshow to decode MPEG2 is running at similar glacial speeds... *shudder*)

Good idea. Okay, I did try that first, and his player file imported with all holds installed just fine. (Still took a couple hours, I think, to perform the import and verify saved games+demos.) Man...I'm confused. I can't say why some people are getting crashes when I'm not having any problems at all on my local installation. I wonder if it's a memory issue -- this could happen if people don't have enough RAM+virtual memory assigned or something like that. That's enough to kill any program whether it's buggy or not, so that'll be my conclusion for now. When more evidence comes in, we can reevaluate.

I checked memory usage while the import was executing, and DROD was probably using ~400MB by the end of the import session. No memory fragmentation, like before, so as long as a user has this much RAM available to the OS for importing very large .player files, it should be fine.

____________________________
Gandalf? Yes... That's what they used to call me.
Gandalf the Grey. That was my name.
I am Gandalf the White.
And I come back to you now at the turn of the tide.

---

[Last edited by mrimer at 09-29-2007 04:06 PM]

Briareos
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mrimer wrote:
I checked memory usage while the import was executing, and DROD was probably using ~400MB by the end of the import session. No memory fragmentation, like before, so as long as a user has this much RAM available to the OS for importing very large .player files, it should be fine.

Yeah - I had not a single problem upgrading my 3.0.0 player file with the very first patch that did it, even though my player file had grown over several years and probably wasn't in the best shape to begin with...

Strange, that...

np: John Dahlbäck - Wet Summer (Speicher CD3)

____________________________
"I'm not anti-anything, I'm anti-everything, it fits better." - Sole
R.I.P. Robert Feldhoff (1962-2009)

mrimer
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I've posted build 54. I wasn't able to reproduce any crashes mentioned in yesterday's reports -- 3.0 --> 3.1 data upgrade, hold installations, and large .player file imports all worked fine for me -- but I did find some code to tweak that might help with the assertion mentioned by jbluestein, and maybe his crash if that happens to be connected. So try it out if you've been having player import issues.

____________________________
Gandalf? Yes... That's what they used to call me.
Gandalf the Grey. That was my name.
I am Gandalf the White.
And I come back to you now at the turn of the tide.

jbluestein
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I am testing the import on build 54 right now. I should have a good idea whether the assertion errors are gone soon.

[EDIT: About 40% of the way through. No beeps heard (meaning no error messages. It made it past Channel One Suite as well. So looking good...]

Josh

____________________________
"Rings and knots of joy and grief, all interlaced and locking." --William Buck

---

[Last edited by jbluestein at 09-30-2007 12:41 AM]

jbluestein
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Import completed and all appears to be well. I just checked through my progress on a hold that I played in 3.0.0 and it looks like everything survived.

Thanks, mrimer!

Josh

____________________________
"Rings and knots of joy and grief, all interlaced and locking." --William Buck