help me find a new engine

[boink182]

one more thing, i have tried just using -noforceaccel and -noforcespeed w/out -noforceparms and still get crashes, so i'm pretty sure it's -noforceparms that did the trick. that being said, i haven't tried just removing one of the other two and seeing what happens. i am honestly sick and tired of messing with this right now and am just happy to have it finally working.

i'll make sure to do that tomorrow before i see how it goes in xp.

[Baker]

Interesting. That's for sure. When it does crash without that command line parameter, does it crash ...

... 1) with an error message
... 2) does DarkPlaces freeze eating a lot of cpu
... 3) or does it crash straight to desktop?

/I didn't say the input code was like original Quake. I just said that isn't likely to be code that constantly gets changed again and again and again. Then again, I think in recent DarkPlaces they added some Nexuiz mouse driven menu and CSQC stuff. But either way, this detailed information should prove useful for the developer.

[boink182]

well i went all the way back to the 20070707 build during my escapades. also the 20080808 build and the two latest stable releases as well as the newest beta. no error message from darkplaces, video output goes white and program ceases to respond, my mouse freezes within windows and i have to either hit alt-f4 which brings up the "this program is not responding" dialogue, or end task via task manager which closes darkplaces and gives the mouse back to windows. this happens full screen or windowed, doesn't matter. i will have to get back to you on cpu time. i'll do that right now in fact.

the only error message i get is from my display drivers telling me they have encountered a problem and successfully restarted, but i think the drivers crashing is what makes darkplaces freeze, i don't think it's actually darkplaces crashing. i mean it does crash, but i think it's only because the drivers crash first. but it's darkplaces making the drivers crash.

my head hurts.

[terminus]

Qrack owns Dark Places.

[boink182]

cpu usage during lock is about 25%, which is less than average while playing

[LordHavoc]

Often restarts are a result of driver bugs or an overheating card or weak powersupply (if it's buzzing while playing or something, replace it), or not enough power cables plugged in (optional power cables for video cards are often not very "optional") or something of that nature.

Regarding 25% - is it quad-core? 25% might be one whole core being locked up.

Any pattern to these crashes? Perhaps they occur when certain events happen (like seeing a dynamic light interacting with a particular kind of model - player vs not player, etc).

Regarding -noforceparms, that makes some vague amount of sense - if the driver is restarting, it puts up an error message and the game loses focus and tries to restore the mouse settings to what they should be, when it regains focus it tries to restore the mouse acceleration back to the game settings (no acceleration), such toggling back and forth might somehow offend the operating system, though I doubt it, but -noforceparms disables that (so you play with an accelerated mouse - no good).

-dinput also avoids accelerated mouse while not using the forced mouse parameters, but it only detects one of the side buttons on the mouse (darkplaces still uses DiX5 like glquake did, very old).

I recommend using darkplaces-sdl.exe instead, that has entirely different input handling.

[boink182]

yeah you're right, it is quad core, doh

no pattern though, happened once in the new game multiplayer menu with a black background so i don't think it's rendering related.

i have a 1200 watt psu with both power cables plugged into the video card.

also happens in sdl. (but much less frequently)

thought maybe it was the fact that i have a slightly factory overclocked video card (the lowest of the 3 above stock evga offers) so i used riva tuner to tune it down to nvidia stock and still got the crashes, and darkplaces doesn't push the card as hot as newer games like crysis does and i have no problems with that, and i can let atitool's artifact run indefinitely with no problems, which seems to stress it more than anything. so i don't think it's my card.

later today i have to breakdown my system to perform a memory upgrade anyway so while i'm at it i'm going to remove my very slight cpu overlock (no voltage adjustments involved, everything stock aside from fsb) and see if that has any affect, and also i will try in xp and see how that goes, but that won't be until much later.

i had a bad accident involving some glass and ended up lacerating my 4 fingers on my left hand pretty badly, severed a nerve in my pinky and had to have microsurgery. i now have some time off as a result and i wanted to play some quake while i was waiting for l4d to come out so at least this is giving me something to do heh.

btw, i used the cpl fix to remove acceleration so -noforceparms isn't the worst thing that could happen. i know cpl fix doesn't work 100%, but it does reduce it to the point where i can't notice it anymore.

my feeling at this point is it's an nvidia driver problem, but i don't know what to do about it, i tried every whql version they have up right now, plus the newest beta.

[boink182]

i think i'll also try -nomouse and using the keyboard (will have to cheat haha) and see what happens

[boink182]

btw, are -noforcespeed and -noforceaccel completely redundant then if using -noforceparms?

[boink182]

noooooooo!!! i just got my first crash with -noforceparms on

ARGH!!

so anyway, yeah. i guess it really was just a coincidence. really weird though, i guess maybe at least it is easing whatever is causing this problem because i was playing for very long stretches with no crashes whereas before i would get a crash anywhere between 5-15 mins. i actually left darkplaces running overnight (after beating 1st episode) while i slept last night, and was playing that same instance 5 mins ago on the 2nd episode when i got the crash which makes me still think this must be input related somehow... how could it run 12 hours without crashing and then within 15 mins of me resuming play my drivers crash? and this is with about 30 mins of playing 1st episode prior to the 12 hour stretch of it just setting there with me dead and zombies starring at my corpse on the second episode. which btw, i died because there where zombies that i couldn't kill, my grenades where passing right through them, on the rock pillars at the end of e2m2.

so it seems -noforceparms is about as effective as using the sdl version for me. at first i thought using sdl fixed it but eventually starting getting crashes there too.

[boink182]

cpu overclock was having no affect, still got crashes without it. haven't gotten around to trying xp yet, but i will post here when i do finally get around to it.

[Chuck]

Sonsquake

[boink182]

Sonsquake

you wouldn't happen to have a link would you? i'm having trouble finding anything on this.

[Baker]

Chuck is joking.

SonsQuake was an innovative Russian NetQuake client from about 6-7 years ago with some really wild and visionary features, like being able to display a player's name over his head.