Bug for The Cat Lady

[countrugen]

Receive error during the Chapter 2 "hospital scene". Boots me out of the game every time. This is for the Steam version. I'm using the default settings, but did try lowering the RAM usage in the "Setup" pop up. Still get the error.

An internal error has occurred. Please note the following information.
If the problem persists, post the details on the AGS Technical Forum.
(ACI version 3.3.0.1146)

Error: Out of memory: failed to allocate 885410856 bytes (at PP=77)

[monkey0506]

There are several other reports of this nature, unfortunately. It seems to only be affecting the Steam build, which is making me second guess my decision that 3.3.0 was "stable enough" on Windows.

Mark/m0ds is the one receiving these reports, so he has the most information about it (I myself just learned about it earlier tonight). It seems to occur at various points throughout game, failing to allocate several hundred MB. As per usual, this never occurred to me while I was playing (several hours worth, I actually did testing this time!). The error message seems to imply there's a memory leak.

This is under investigation.

[Crimson Wizard]

I have a strong suspicion that could be the string buffer growth bug I fixed in 3.3.0.1148 (it was introduced somewhere around 1146 btw ) no, more accurately, it was introduced long ago, but started to be noticed after 1146, e.g.:

With the new build, we're occasionally getting this error which I'd never seen before: "error: Out of memory: failed to allocate 903224498 bytes (at PP=77)"

Receive error during the Chapter 2 "hospital scene". Boots me out of the game every time.

If it is possible to run with 3.3.0.1148 (or recent "release-3.3.0" branch), there will be a crash dump written on "out of memory" error which may at least show some details.
(On other hand I hope updating to 1148 will fix it anyway)

[countrugen]

FWIW, I saved the game about mid way through Chapter 2 (when it typically craps out on me) and then after it crashed, I restarted, loaded the saved game and played straight through till Chapter 5 (almost at Chapter 6) with no other issues earlier this evening. Dunno if that helps. As we speak (I'm out of game now) I see the game is updating, so maybe you all are already on top of this.

Something Valve does in games is utilize the launch options thingee. Basically, in Steam, if you right click on a game and go to properties and click the "set launch options" button you can enter in console switches of some sort. When the game is run, the switches activate. Common ones are: -console (which shows all the running code/errors in a console window) and -condump (which dumps all console output to a text file). I'm not sure if it's helpful, but maybe for future games you all may wish to consider including those switches in your code. Might make Steam-related debugging easier.

Anyways, my problem seems to be solved now. Thanks for your time

[monkey0506]

I actually pushed two updates today. One to update the engine version to 3.3.0.1148 and one was a fix for the French translation file. If anyone does encounter further bugs with this Steam build, it should generate a crash file with additional information. If you go to "Properties -> Local Files -> Browse local files..." that will open the game directory where you should see a CrashInfo.dmp file, which you can upload here or send to me or Mark (m0ds) (Screen 7).

If you get a crash and don't see the CrashInfo.dmp, please right click on "The Cat Lady.exe" and select Properties. On the Details pane, "File version" should reflect 3.3.0.1148. Otherwise you don't have the latest updates, so you'll need to download them from Steam to make sure that it's a different issue.

Sorry about the problems folks. Hopefully this sorts it out though!

[m0ds]

Someone has reported this error around the same point in the game on Steam version, do you think it could be related Michael?

An exception 0xC0000005 occurred in ACWIN.EXE at EIP = 0x770BDFE4 ; program pointer is +77, ACI version 3.3.0.1152, gtags (23,0)

(despite them being the only person to report a problem in chapter 2 for months)

[monkey0506]

Hmm... It seems unlikely that it would be related to this same issue, even if it's occurring around the same spot. Is the player consistently able to replicate the error, or is it more random? I'm not aware of anything on the plugin-side that would be causing it, though I could try pushing up the most recent version to see if it helps in any way (I'll have to double-check that the game runs properly, but as far as I remember none of the existing functions should have changed (their signatures) so it should be fine).

[m0ds]

Hi sir thanks, yeah I thought these issues were long gone - but it seems it is being experienced by that player around the same point, and also similar things happening to others:

Similar for me: Game crashed (locked up actually) once at beginning of Chapter 2, then again during a replay but locked up a bit earlier (right after getting the crowbar). Will try the RAM adjustment mentioned above and cross my fingers...

For some reason the whole of chapter 2 seems to have gone to shit.... ?

The game just crashed for me in chapter 2, right after the roses on the table crumbled away. Here is the error message that popped up.

"An error has occurred. Please contact the game author for support, as this is likely to be a scripting error and not a bug in AGS.
(ACI version 3.3.0.1152)

Error: The character 'Susan' could not be displayed because there were no frames in loop 0 of view 129."

The last one less related to the other two but wondering if they have any relation to the original error (reported at the start of this thread).

[Crimson Wizard]

Hi sir thanks, yeah I thought these issues were long gone - but it seems it is being experienced by that player around the same point, and also similar things happening to others:

Similar for me: Game crashed (locked up actually) once at beginning of Chapter 2, then again during a replay but locked up a bit earlier (right after getting the crowbar). Will try the RAM adjustment mentioned above and cross my fingers...

This may help if crash dumps are provided (if there are ones).

Also, does the game use threaded audio? It still may be buggy at times (although that didn't affect Windows versions much), so that's worth checking.
By the way, monkey_05_06's auto-locking mutexes was included in 3.3.0.1154, not 3.3.0.1152.

[m0ds]

Thanks CW! Sorry what is threaded audio tho? Dem hip AGS terms

[Crimson Wizard]

Threaded audio = audio running in a separate process thread. In theory, that should've improved sound & music perfomance.
Problem is that it still works unstable in certain cases. For that reason I've disabled it by default, but this was only done since 3.3.0.1146 (Beta 9). And Cat Lady was compiled with 1142, according to error message. This means it is still enabled there, and IIRC there's no way to switch it off on Windows . Since 1146 it is off by default, but you can turn it on by putting magic line into config file.

[monkey0506]

I don't want to keep pushing out updates for users that don't need it, so I've uploaded to a beta branch for testing. It shouldn't break save games, so as long as this resolves the issues then I'll push it out to the main branch. Please tell anyone experiencing issues to 1) Send you the "CrashInfo.dmp" file if they can, and 2) Opt-in to the "Bug-fix" beta.

To get the CrashInfo file they can right-click on The Cat Lady and choose "Properties", then "Local files" and "Browse local files".

To opt-in to the beta branch, they can choose "Betas" from the Properties pane and it should show up in the drop-down list. There's no password.

[m0ds]

Crazy! Thanks Michael And thanks for the info CW.