NS2 Crashes during tutorial

dtandersondtanderson USA Join Date: 2013-12-05 Member: 189793Members
in Technical Support
The games crashed every time that I am trying the tutorial and get to the part where I upgrade to the shotgun. Once I get the shotgun, it crashes as soon as I fire it. I can switch to the pistol and fire that and it does not crash but if I fire the shotgun, it crashes to the desktop every time.


Operating System Version:
Ubuntu 13.10 (64 bit)
Kernel Version: 3.11.0-14-generic
X Server Vendor: The X.Org Foundation
X Server Release: 11404901
X Window Manager: Compiz
Steam Runtime Version: steam-runtime-release_2013-10-23

Video Card:
Driver: NVIDIA Corporation GeForce GTX 650 Ti BOOST/PCIe/SSE2

Driver Version: 4.4.0 NVIDIA 331.20
OpenGL Version: 4.4
Desktop Color Depth: 24 bits per pixel
Monitor Refresh Rate: 59 Hz
VendorID: 0x10de
DeviceID: 0x11c2
Number of Monitors: 1
Number of Logical Video Cards: 1
Primary Display Resolution: 1920 x 1200
Desktop Resolution: 1920 x 1200
Primary Display Size: 20.43" x 12.76" (24.06" diag)
51.9cm x 32.4cm (61.1cm diag)
Primary Bus: PCI Express 16x
Primary VRAM: 2048 MB
Supported MSAA Modes: 2x 4x 8x 16x

Sound card:
Audio device: Realtek ALC889

Memory:
RAM: 7902 Mb


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Comments

  • ConfusedConfused Wait. What? Join Date: 2003-01-28 Member: 12904Members, Constellation, NS2 Playtester, Squad Five Blue, Subnautica Playtester
    Sadly its been reported with back traces, at this point The team knows about it but as far as i know have not released a patch or work around for it.
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  • goarillagoarilla Join Date: 2014-01-11 Member: 192956Members
    I can confirm this.
    My guess however is that it is a driver issue since that's where it segfaults:
    Jan 6 19:46:12 dargo kernel: [36093.838073] ns2_linux32[24413]: segfault at 0 ip 00000000f1591807 sp 00000000ffbc3250 error 4 in libnvidia-glcore.so.331.20[eff88000+21cf000]

    I also run 331.20 on Slackware 14.1 multilib.
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  • goarillagoarilla Join Date: 2014-01-11 Member: 192956Members
    The beta nvidia driver 331.17 crashes less. t allowed me to shoot 8 shotgun rounds and finishing the
    tutorial one time out of two tries.
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  • rkfgrkfg Russia Join Date: 2013-09-03 Member: 187744Members, Reinforced - Supporter, Reinforced - Silver, Reinforced - Gold, Reinforced - Diamond, Reinforced - Shadow
    @goarilla Not necessarily so. That's a common case when a segfault happens inside a properly working library because of bad data being supplied. You can call any API function with null instead of a pointer to the structure it expects and if that function doesn't check for null (which is often the case) you'll have a segfault inside it, not in your program because calling function with null argument is perfectly normal.

    The bug in the driver could be that it doesn't check for invalid arguments but the bug in the game is that it passes those arguments. As a side note, I'm playing more as marine to correct the hive stats and I get a shotgun to practice. Haven't had crashes last couple of weeks firing it, though had one spectating a guy with a shotgun just as he fired. None after that. I understand that you run 64 bit system. Have you tried to set textures to medium or low?
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  • goarillagoarilla Join Date: 2014-01-11 Member: 192956Members
    True, But shouldn't NOT checking for a NULL pointer in your exposed functions
    be considered bad practice. And thus classify as a bug ?
    I'm not a C-coder though, I could be talking way out of my depth here.

    Anyway I tried medium, high and low quality textures but it keeps crashing on the shotgun :(.
    I even tried disabling everything: bloom, shadows, AA, ... with the same result.
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  • rkfgrkfg Russia Join Date: 2013-09-03 Member: 187744Members, Reinforced - Supporter, Reinforced - Silver, Reinforced - Gold, Reinforced - Diamond, Reinforced - Shadow
    It depends on the API and common sense. AFAIK, there're no rules but of course checking everything inside a library is a good thing. Whatever. I've just completed a session of several hours of playing, I guess about four hours in a row. Different maps, all-marines with shotguns sometimes and I've been shooting as well. Everything is solid, no crashes or slowdowns, high textures, no V-Sync (since it still introduces a lag which is unacceptable in such a dynamic game), everything else is maxed up except atmospherics, bloom, AO and shadows. My GPU can run it all with decent FPS but I noticed that it becomes hard to target aliens with all those fancy shadows and blurry lightrays. They are super good looking but get in a way, unfortunately.

    So I'm out of ideas. Everything looks equal except that I use Debian but it shouldn't be an issue. I'll also try the newer stable driver (and I suggest you to do it, too), 331.38, when it would appear in the experimental repo.
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  • Racer1Racer1 Join Date: 2002-11-22 Member: 9615Members
    With graphics libraries especially, performance is much more important. If you have a low-level method that is being called millions of times a second, adding null checks adds significant overhead. A typical way to address this is allow for asserts in development mode, but turn them off once development is complete.
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