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Xenofur
Di-Tron Heavy Industries Freelancer Alliance
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Posted - 2006.12.20 19:06:00 -
[1]
Alright, another thread brought me to test this matter more in-depth. For those who do not know what i am talking about: A number of players is currently experienced crash-to-desktop when they try to login or warp to a gate.
First off, technical details:
I have two computers, a desktop which is always at home and connected directly to the internet. No firewall, no router, no antivirus, nothing. This computer has never had any of these crashes.
The second one is a laptop. This computer does experience the crashes. Until today i thought it in itself was the cause, but here's the point: I only use it to play eve when i am at school. When at home it is hooked up via ICS and a simple lan cable. At school however it connects to the WLAN routers there, which are heavily firewalled. This forces me to open a putty connection to a shell account provided by the school, which is luckily completely open to the outsides. Then i use sockscap to force the eve client to tunnel through putty.
This worked perfectly fine during Red Moon Rising. Now with Revelations released things are breaking down.
The first symptom i noticed was that sites in the ingame browser would not load completely. http://di-tron.org/market/market.pl for example would only load up to the second <hr>. The new page on the login screen would only display the first news. I first attributed this to changes in the school network. This of course was extremely foolish, since there hadn't been any change in the last three years; but there had been an extreme change in the software i was using.
The second symptom took a bit longer to manifest, since i do live in 0.0. I began crashing when warping to gates. In empire. What is the difference between empire gates and 0.0 gates? Turrets and more importantly, BILLBOARDS.
Today i started the client at home for the very first time and noticed: NONE of this was happening. No cut websites, no crashes, nothing.
So this is where i explain wtf is happening.
Billboards load images from an external server and apply them as textures to 3d models in the game. Now, i cannot prove this, but let's just assume that images loaded for webservers suffer the same fate as websites: They are not downloaded completely. An internal game routine now tries to convert the image into data that the 3d engine can understand. It goes merrily until it notices the image is not complete. Now instead of gracefully telling the billboard to please use a replacement texture or making up some mock data to feed the billboard it goes all "Screw you guys, I'm going home!". At this point one of two things happen:
a) It fails, taking the whole client with it, resulting in a CTD. b) It fails, shunts what data it has to the 3d engine, which then tries to work with corrupt data, nuking the client in the process.
At this point i have two requests to the eve developer team:
1. Please implement this as a temporary measure: a) Shut down all billboards. If you have a way to simply deactivate all of them at once, please do it. It will at once remove all occurances of CTD when warping to a gate. b) Remove the blue [I] icon and all other images from the website that is loaded as the news page. Your web browser may be able to deal with incomplete html files, but with images it fails the same as the billboards, thus leading to a CTD on logging in. If you remove these ad make the news page text-only noone will crash when trying to login.
2. Long term, please have an in-depth look at the changes to the network engine you did with revelations, some of these changes leadin conjunction with tunneling to prematurely terminated downloads of files, thus creating all those CTD reports you are getting.
--
P.S.: This is the time to prove how slow or fast you can react CCP, please do not disappoint your customers. ;)
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Hakera
Freelance Unincorporated Ushra'Khan
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Posted - 2006.12.20 19:10:00 -
[2]
Edited by: Hakera on 20/12/2006 19:09:58 excellent diagnosis!
However I feel the powers that be have fixed it already when the next patch is released.
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Xenofur
Di-Tron Heavy Industries Freelancer Alliance
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Posted - 2006.12.20 19:15:00 -
[3]
Edited by: Xenofur on 20/12/2006 19:16:48 Thank you for the hint, i would have completely missed the blog. From skimming over it it seems though like they only found half the problem (jpgs borked), but not the why.
Edit: On second read, they did find it.
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Oveur
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Posted - 2006.12.20 19:16:00 -
[4]
This is pretty much spot on and is exactly what was fixed, the corrupt JPG handling and an error in the socket manager which applied amongst other things, the ingame browser (which is also used in the in-game news).
Billboards were the thing disabled last Tuesday an eventually caused all the lag after the billboard cache expired.
10 out of 10 for an excellent post.
Senior Producer EVE Online
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Xenofur
Di-Tron Heavy Industries Freelancer Alliance
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Posted - 2006.12.20 19:18:00 -
[5]
Cheers, here's to hope i can get to working on my websites soon again! :D
ĤoO( First dev-post in a thread of mine, whee. \o/ )
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CreEDLom
DAB RAZOR Alliance
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Posted - 2006.12.20 19:19:00 -
[6]
Edited by: CreEDLom on 20/12/2006 19:30:13 Edited by: CreEDLom on 20/12/2006 19:28:01 Dev Oveur
We are still having these issues crashing to gates even today. The only fix seems to be deleting the IMG folder, which is just temporary fix. Do you have any idea when there will be a better fix for this problem?
By the way Hakera, I still crash and so do other folks so its not fixed yet.
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Zautechre
Minmatar Republic University
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Posted - 2006.12.20 19:33:00 -
[7]
You have a windows machine directly connected to the internet with no router, firewall, or antivirus/malware software? It's safe to assume you do not fully control your computer.
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Xenofur
Di-Tron Heavy Industries Freelancer Alliance
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Posted - 2006.12.20 19:39:00 -
[8]
Edited by: Xenofur on 20/12/2006 19:39:54 Zautreche: I can with quite a bit of confidence state as a fact that i have more control over what goes on in my computer, than the majority of the users of this forum can claim to have over theirs. Blindly relying on traditional security measures does not necessarily mean they more secure than any other computer and rejecting them does not mean a computer is less secure. ;)
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Wintermoon
Interstellar eXodus R0ADKILL
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Posted - 2006.12.20 19:45:00 -
[9]
Originally by: CreEDLom Edited by: CreEDLom on 20/12/2006 19:30:13 Edited by: CreEDLom on 20/12/2006 19:28:01 Dev Oveur
We are still having these issues crashing to gates even today. The only fix seems to be deleting the IMG folder, which is just temporary fix. Do you have any idea when there will be a better fix for this problem?
By the way Hakera, I still crash and so do other folks so its not fixed yet.
From the dev blog quoted by Hakera
Originally by: Redundancy We're now at the stage where we're working through some changes to how we load JPGs to solve that issue, and looking into fixing the change that messed up how http downloads work which was causing it. We hope to have a client patch out as soon as possible. (A client patch for this issue is being published on 21 December. ~kieron)
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Vrizuh
Eve Defence Force Ascendant Frontier
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Posted - 2006.12.20 21:12:00 -
[10]
Props to you OP. I wasnt having this problem, being that I'm in 0.0 and all. That is a nice catch though. Even though they found it first, Im still amazed that you took the clues and put it together.
I needed more isk, so I took a risk. I mined some ore then fled once more. I'll return to the core to escape the war! |
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mazzilliu
Caldari Sniggerdly
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Posted - 2006.12.20 21:46:00 -
[11]
i didnt have the crashing problems, but thats a really good post
1000% awesome guide to logging out |
Taedrin
Gallente Mercatoris Technologies
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Posted - 2006.12.20 22:34:00 -
[12]
10 out of 10. Excellent analysis. Your post shows that you obviously have a clue about what was happening and you showed excellent debugging skills by figuring out the problem on your own, without any debugging tools either.
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Jim McGregor
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Posted - 2006.12.20 22:38:00 -
[13]
Edited by: Jim McGregor on 20/12/2006 22:37:45
If you're female, marry me.
--- Eve Wiki | Eve Tribune | Eve Pirate |
Dmian
Gallente Starline Engineering Corporation
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Posted - 2006.12.20 22:54:00 -
[14]
Xenofur: what an interesting post!. Kudos to you.
D.
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Akita T
Caldari Navy Volunteer Task Force
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Posted - 2006.12.20 22:55:00 -
[15]
I only got as far as billboards and corrupted JPEGs, didn't get further with the analysis. Good to see it helped somebody else at least a little bit _ My skills | Mod/Rig stacknerfing explained |
Taedrin
Gallente Mercatoris Technologies
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Posted - 2006.12.20 23:06:00 -
[16]
Originally by: Akita T I only got as far as billboards and corrupted JPEGs, didn't get further with the analysis. Good to see it helped somebody else at least a little bit
Long story short, Billboards in EVE download a jpeg and draw it to the "screen" of the billboard. The jpegs were not being downloaded properly, which caused EVE to die when attempting to draw the corrupted jpeg to the billboard.
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Vasiliyan
PAX Interstellar Services Anarchy Empire
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Posted - 2006.12.20 23:54:00 -
[17]
Apropos of billboards, when did the "read news" right click option on them get added? It's very cool. Not very useful, but very cool
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Sochin
Reikoku Band of Brothers
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Posted - 2006.12.21 00:50:00 -
[18]
OP should apply to be a Bughunter. EVE needs more analytical minds figuring out things like this.
Nemo me impune lacessit
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Yuri Voronin
S.A.S
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Posted - 2006.12.21 01:38:00 -
[19]
Xenofur, thank you for your excellent analysis.
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Xenofur
Di-Tron Heavy Industries Freelancer Alliance
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Posted - 2006.12.21 19:33:00 -
[20]
Thanks for the laudatio, but it was mere coincidence that i found it. The biggest claim i can make here lies in the write-up. ^^
A question though: Who or what are the bug hunters?
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Irrilian
Eve University
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Posted - 2006.12.21 19:44:00 -
[21]
Well done Xenofur.
BugHunters is the informal name for Equipment Certification and Anomaly Investigations Division (ECAID), part of the ISD volunteer team. They help test stuff prior to public release.
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