This crash has been confirmed on crossroads, and possibly happens on Arid. When in commander view, if you fail to place a building in the center of the map somewhere, and then a building is destroyed in that area, you crash. We've almost got this down to being able to perfectly replicate it every time. I would imagine that the low spots on Arid are the same issue, but we have not had a chance to change the map. It will crash in Command overview, and while driving. I also had one crash when I was on the ground just after leaving the command vehicle. *Edit* It appears this is limited to areas where there is a displacement that is lowered below it's 0 vertical value. The bottom of a ditch or river. Will be trying to replicate on other maps, may work on maps like canyon in the tank holes, and will likely work on arid in the lower portions. Probably the best and fastest solution is to adjust the displacements of the map so that the base level of the displacements' brush is below the lowest point on the displacement.
So... it took us about 3 hours.... but we got crashing the commander down to an art form - with 100% success rate! Basically what you need to do is this: 1) Find low parts of the map (crossroads here). The space in the image above works every time. 2) As commander... try to place a structure (armory is best for this). There are areas where it turns green - but still doesn't get built. 2) Someone then has to build and recycle a turret in this area (it may also work if destroyed by the enemy). 3) The com will crash within 5 seconds. Notes: It does not matter whether the com is in com view.... or is even still in the vehicle... it will still crash him. In the area marked above - this was repeated many times... mainly for our entertainment - with 100% success rate. I am going to bed now - but please add any enhancements to the method below!
I am blown away. Seriously, the dedication in finding this is really amazing. I can't thank you guys enough. I really hope this helps Jephir to find and fix this problem. Once this is done, apart from a few extra little bits, the code is essentially ready to be sent. There are other maps, models and script bits to do, but the code (being the most important) will actually be ready, and we can finally get this patch out. Thank you. You guys are fucking awesome.
We've confirmed this issue on Isles and crossroads so far. We'll test each of the maps in cycle to see if it exists anywhere else.
And here goes the recompile wagon. Also, special forum titles obtain for team awesome. It took us like straight 5 hours :S
I've managed to crash myself with this. On Isles, on a downsloped area near the c3 refinery. Successfully placed an armory in that area, then recycled it. Then placed an MG turret (BE) in the same location and recycled it. When I recycled it, I crashed. https://dl.dropbox.com/u/10061381/emp_crash1.dem https://dl.dropbox.com/u/10061381/emp_fail3.dem demo of the event. I wish I had the first one we did. Had the guy counting down and he'd just stop mid sentence. Was a riot.
btw, this process will crash anyone who has been in the command vehicle and placed a building it would seem. It wouldn't crash people who had not tried to place a building. We could probably use some more testing as to whether it needs to be a building placed by an engineer in the same location as where the commander tried to drop the building, etc. But it can happen even if you successfully place a building. we were messing around with different spots on Isles, and when we finally found a place, 5 of us that had been in the com vehicle messing around had crashed.
This is not only commander problem. It may be that it happens a lot more often for comm because commander sees "more" (in a different way) than infantry. After most of you left i just tryed building walls and changing class on isle in the mid....most infantry just kept crashing and there was pretty much nothing else on the map than rax, refs and walls.. even if you try to reproduce it it just sometimes happens sometimes not and seems to be with a lot of different actions... nothing easy this one lol
That was a log round of crossroads.... Though I've seen district go on for longer! So relieving when we found how to reliably reproduce the problem. On crossroads in the center of the map the crash was very reproducable as has been said; a near instant crash every time. On other parts of the map the problem was still reproducable but I don't think it was as effective. Seeing a wall destroyed also caused the crash as well as turrets, I'm not sure we tried with buildings? On Isle it was possible to reproduce but not with the same success rate. It may be telling that on occassions multiple people crashed at the same moment. All the people that crashed had previously been in the CV and made a failed turret placement. There is an instance of this in my demo on isle, Neeony also in the same area of the map & on my team also crashed at the exactly the same time & I think maybe someone else too? Certainly there is something about the center of the map in Crossroads that makes it very easy to reproduce & the ability to reproduce the crash is definitely affected by the map / location. Hope its not too hard to figure out / put right. I hope you don't - but if you do need to go down the route of recompiling maps let me know, I can't map but I do have some spare capacity on a vsphere cluster for someone who does. At least then their PC isn't tied up for hours and hours. Thats was pretty damn funny, now we have our own in-joke! Even funnier because of the relief factor, at that moment we knew it hadn't been at total waste of time. Edit: Also if doing this again highly recommend everyone to use Team Speak rather than ingame voice so you can continue to converse after the crash!
Just out of interest, may help with pinpointing the bugs--does this happen with the old maps (old crossroads for example), or any of the non updated maps or is it something thats occurred when the maps have been updated? That would help narrow it down to see if its a code or a map problem surely?
Yep, we tried everything possible, even the worst build & recycle spam in history in / near the NF main base, without any crashes. Same for isles. No crashes in / near NF main base... That's why it took us so fucking long...
I was able to reproduce this on a local server setup with a bot on crossroads (old version): join BE, add a bot (sometimes they won't spawn in the rax and stay dead - just like when players can't spawn...hmm) navigate bot to center like in the screenshot (using bot_mimic/bot_halt) make sure you have the bot equip the calculator for later deconning switch to nf, build your engy turret get in cv, do a fail-drop of a buildable near the bot get out, navigate the bot in front of your turret and let him decon it - crash when the turret explodes. Another thing we noticed yesterday was the entity-name spamming in the console: This seems to happen when you "hold" a buildable in comm view, and hover over other enitites - it will constanly dump the colliding entity class in the console. This caused a different crash when I had "developer 1" enabled ("too many indices for index buffer. . tell a programmer (42324>32768)") - appears as if that overflows the debug output buffer at some point...
So... I did a bit more work on this. You can reproduce the crash on your own by recycling an armory and then recycling an engineer turret in the same space. This should allow faster testing - and faster identification. This is repeatable in Isle and both versions of Crossroads - but not any other maps I tried (I forgot to test Arid.... that would have been a prime candidate) Testing on Isle suggests that this only works in the middle of the map. This is not much lower than the surrounding areas - suggesting it requires both proximity to the middle and a low base to the map. This would explain why we couldn't cause any crashes in Canyon. I think the affected area can be indicated by "Phatom walls" - see below: I thought this was a visual bug on my client - but I've noticed these in other people's screenshots too. Basically - the last personal structure the com drops draws a line in transparent walls to the very centre of the map. I dont com often - so cant remember if this happened in previous versions - however it seems more noticable here (and reproducable every time). Basically - if you view this wall as the radius for the middle of the map... the affected areas seem to fall within it (this is probably more to do with max wall length being similar to the affected radius rather than direct causation). So... what makes Isle and Crossroads different? Well... the phantom walls seem lower. On Crossroads they are at the same level as the central buildings and actually follow the shape of the terrain. On Isle they do not follow the terrain - but are roughly at the same height as the surrounding hills. In the other maps I tested the phantom walls appeared much higher (they didn't appear on cyclopean at all!) This may (or may not) be useful. Other things I noticed: Cyclopean has the wrong minimap. Building a turret before taking the com view made the cursor disappear in com view. It only reappeared again when I went to drop a strucutre. However, I had difficulty reproducing this.
Retried... the minimap was correct this time. Must have been an issue with minimap-updating on map-change with local-server.
Phantom walls are at least as old as 2.0 I remember then being really annoying on isle where they sometimes strenched from corner to corner of the map.
