V1.42 bug-fixes (Windows)..when ?? It is now mid-September.

[kilkenny_cat]

Darwinia 1.42 has the unfortunate honor of being the most crash-prone game on my machine --- and I have many, many games, latest drivers, latest version of XP. Random, unpredictable darwinia executable crashes to desktop ("Report to Microsoft..") when there is lots of on-screen battle-activity, and an occasional exit apparently triggered by in-game monitoring code, bringing up a message box with the following contents:-
----------------------------------------------
Direct Sound Error
C:\Development\Darwinia\code\sound\sound_library_3d_dsound.cpp line 997

Direct sound couldn't set fx
Error code: E_OUTOFMEMORY
Run out of memory
-----------------------------------------------
Looking for a development directory on my C: drive... er, wot

Of all the games on my machine at present-- HL2, Oblivion, BF2, VTM:B, Arx Fatalis, Serious Sam 2 etc, etc. and all with the latest patches, Darwinia and Oblivion are the only ones that share the honor of any crashes at all. Oblivion is just a little more complex than Darwinia ; its desktop crash is a well-documented one and far, far, far less frequent. And NONE of the above games has ever crashed with an audio-related bug nor has had any other obvious problems with sound.

System: AMD X2 4400+ ( No, Set Affinity does not help... )
Single 7800GTX, 91.47 driver ( driver changes do not affect the bug type or
frequency)
A8N32-SLI motherboard 6.86 driver
on-motherboard audio (Realtek)
2 Gbyte memory
WinXP SP2 fully up-to-date

[xander]

A very quick search of the forums would have revealed that this is a known bug. The solution is to turn off Hardware 3D Sound and Realtime FX.

xander

EDIT: As I don't really like the tone of your post, a few more words of wisdom:

First, IV is a very small company. The total number of employees can be counted on fingers, with the total number of programers for Darwinia equaling 1. Currently, IV is working on releasing a third game, and that is taking a fair amount of time. However, they have released at least four patches for Darwinia in the last year, you I think that you should relax a little, and cut them some slack. Beligerantly posting in a forum that is dominated by fans (and fanbois) of IV is probably not your best move if you want polite help. May I suggest that a less rude tone would have been appreciated?

Secondly, you have failed to follow several very simple rules of forums etiquette. To start, when you are new to a forum, it is wise to check the boards for stickied topics that might have information for you. If nothing else, they may tell you what kind of behaviour is and is not considered acceptable. However, on these forums, you would have lucked out, and found an answer to your problem without a lecture on etiquette. There are at least two topics that would have served:
FAQ - READ THIS BEFORE POSTING A QUESTION, which can be found in the Gameplay Discussion subforum
Common Darwinia Bugs! --with-solutions, in the Windows Issues subforum (which is where your thread should have been posted.

Furthermore, you didn't even bother to search. It would have taken you thirty seconds to use the forums built in search functionality and type in something like "E_OUTOFMEMORY." If you had done so, you would have found all of the following threads, many of which would have answered your question:
http://forums.introversion.co.uk/darwin ... utofmemory
http://forums.introversion.co.uk/darwin ... utofmemory
http://forums.introversion.co.uk/darwin ... utofmemory
http://forums.introversion.co.uk/darwin ... utofmemory
http://forums.introversion.co.uk/darwin ... utofmemory
http://forums.introversion.co.uk/darwin ... utofmemory
http://forums.introversion.co.uk/darwin ... utofmemory
http://forums.introversion.co.uk/darwin ... utofmemory
http://forums.introversion.co.uk/darwin ... utofmemory
http://forums.introversion.co.uk/darwin ... utofmemory
http://forums.introversion.co.uk/darwin ... utofmemory
http://forums.introversion.co.uk/darwin ... utofmemory

Now, on this forum, it is generally considered rude to post a new thread when several old ones, especially ones that are easily found, would have answered your question. It is doubly rude when you are so incredibly impolite about it.

[kilkenny_cat]

Thanks for the etiquette lecture. Very sorry for taking the few extra lines re-posting the known bug and not doing the search first. You took up a lot more lines lecturing me than I did in listing the bug. However, you still did not answer the question posed in my heading... when is the next patch due to be released? Am I correct in recalling that V1.42 was released last March 10? Longer and longer gaps between bug-fixes in gaming software are a very ominous sign. Darwinia is a very fine game indeed and Introversion is to be highly commended. Strong flashbacks to similar graphics and style of games on my beloved Amiga. It would be a very great pity indeed if these needed fixes to Darwinia got forgotten forever in the rush to later things. Kinda like "losing a very fine ship for the half-penny worth of tar". I would be very grateful if you could ask the programmer still working on Darwinia whether he/she has a list of the items to be addressed in the next patch and an <<approximate>> idea when the patch will be released ?? After all the game was originally released ~ March 2005 and it does now seem a long time for some very obvious bugs to be resolved. Did the testers not see these crash bugs at all before initial release ? Or are they a consequence of new bugs introduced by the various patches ?

[kilkenny_cat]

Thanks for the etiquette lecture. Very sorry for taking the few extra lines re-posting the known bug and not doing the search first. You took up a lot more lines lecturing me than I did in listing the bug. However, you still did not answer the question posed in my heading... when is the next patch due to be released? Am I correct in recalling that V1.42 was released last March 10? Longer and longer gaps between bug-fixes in gaming software are a very ominous sign. Darwinia is a very fine game indeed and Introversion is to be highly commended. Strong flashbacks to similar graphics and style of games on my beloved Amiga. It would be a very great pity indeed if these needed fixes to Darwinia got forgotten forever in the rush to later things. Kinda like "losing a very fine ship for the half-penny worth of tar". I would be very grateful if you could ask the programmer still working on Darwinia whether he/she has a list of the items to be addressed in the next patch and an <<approximate>> idea when the patch will be released ?? After all the game was originally released ~ March 2005 and it does now seem a long time for some very obvious bugs to be resolved. Did the testers not see these crash bugs at all before initial release ? Or are they a consequence of new bugs introduced by the various patches ?

[xander]

• You never actually asked when a new patch is expected. You simply vented about the game being unstable.
• IV is very secretive about when things are going to be released. Until they announce that a new patch is on the way, we wont know anything about it. Therefore, assuming that you had asked that question, no one but a few IV staffers could answer it. As they are rather secretive, they are unlikely to answer it. So, again assuming that you had actually asked the question, I would have more or less ignored it because I can't answer it.
• IV have been working on Defcon for the past year (and more). Darwinia received several patches early on to clear up some major issues, another patch in December of 2005 before the Steam launch, and a final patch last March. I don't see this as an "ominous sign." They have been busy with other projects. Furthermore, they recently released another patch for Uplink, a game that is 5 years old. Darwinia will continue to be supported, though perhaps not in the timeframe that you desire. Relax about it.

xander

EDIT: NeoThermic -- he obviously has three posts in this thread, yet his post count seems to be 1. Any idea why that might be?

[NeoThermic]

Just to say that things are being looked at in terms of Darwinia, and that hopefully a patch should be out in the near future. The main reason why Darwinia fell silent was due to the shift in development focous, but it was never quite left behind.

NeoThermic

[Adam Black]

xander = overreacting, tbh. Nothing wrong with guy's tone; he wasn't complaining, just stating the many problems he was having with Darwinia. In fact I found xander's post to be much, much more curt in tone than his. And IV shouldn't be 'cut some slack' - they are a professional software house, and as such should be treated like one, however few of them there are. Releasing a game that isn't relatively bug-free is not good practice. (That being said, I do not mean to imply the previous sentence is my personal opinion of Darwinia or any other Introversion game.)

[Montyphy]

xander = overreacting, tbh. Nothing wrong with guy's tone; he wasn't complaining, just stating the many problems he was having with Darwinia.

I think it was the following statement that stirred xander, "Darwinia and Oblivion are the only ones that share the honor of any crashes at all. Oblivion is just a little more complex than Darwinia "

And IV shouldn't be 'cut some slack' - they are a professional software house, and as such should be treated like one, however few of them there are.

Meaning this is the best sense possible, I don't see IV as a professional software house. I see them as bedroom programmers who act professional in order to put food on the table, and I'm probably not the only one who thinks that.

[kilkenny_cat]

Thanks for the support from others in this forum re Xander's criticisms of my comments. I have been playing computer games for many years and have seen game companies come and go. Fixing obvious bugs in a shipping game is one of the signs to look for in a company's long term viability. The CRASH bugs in Darwinia are very obvious and too frequent to ignore. What message does that send about DEFCON and its stability ?? I had not heard about IV until I came across Darwinia and this game excited me probably more than any other action/strategy game in the last 3 years for eschewing fancy graphics in favor of superb and absorbing game-play.

Statements that IV is a small company does not excuse the presence of CRASH bugs one and a half years after release, especially since the crash bugs all leave a crash-log profile. And the crashes seem to occur at certain times when there is a high level of play activity. These bugs must have been very obvious to the play-testers; they occur with pretty high frequency -- at least one crash to Desktop ( Report to Microsoft) in a high-activity play area such Biosphere per 2-3 hours of play, and with an available crash-log.

So some questions for Xander, as one of the play-testers:-

Were the 2 sets of crash-bugs I mentioned in my original posting seen by Xander in Darwinia + patch V1.42 before it was released ? And if not, why not ? Insufficient play-time ?

And if the crash-bugs were seen, why was the V1.42 ( the "final patch", according to Xander ) publicly released without any release information in a V1.42 Darwinia readme file listing these bugs as still unresolved? No such file exists on my V1.42 CD-ROM ( US version ).

BTW, I earn part of my living as a tester for commercial PC software. Crash bugs are always a SHOW-STOPPER and go straight to the top of the fix-priority list.....

If, like Oblivion, the Darwinia crashes occured very infrequently -- in my case with Oblivion once in maybe 30 play-hours --- then I would forgive IV or their play-testers for not yet converging on the root-causes. And being a small company with limited resources would then be a VERY legitimate excuse for the finding and fixing taking a long time.

[Montyphy]

You do realise there is apparently a work around for you problem, right?

[xander]

ThaWere the 2 sets of crash-bugs I mentioned in my original posting seen by Xander in Darwinia + patch V1.42 before it was released ? And if not, why not ? Insufficient play-time ?

The armour crashing bug was introduced in 1.42. Since 1.42 was released, IV hav ebeen working on Defcon. Again, you really do have to cut them some slack -- there is only one person that does the coding. It is a somewhat subtle bug, and doesn't occur very often in the default scenerio, though it happens with some regularity in mods. Within mods, the work around is to not include an AI unit and battle cannons in the same level.

The sound memory leak has been around since the original beta. In my not so humble opinion, hardware 3D sound and realtime effects should not only be disabled by default, but they should not be selectable. However, as they are off by default, and the work around is to keep them off (i.e. you have to actively invite a crash), I can see how this bug has not been a top priority.

Either way, it is quite possible that both bugs are on the very top of the priority list for Darwinia. However, with Defcon being released in a little over a week, everything Darwinia releated has taken something of a backseat to Defcon. I would expect a patch not too long after Defcon's release (say, a month or two).

As to why this information was not released on the CD, I don't know. I don't work for IV, and am not privy to their secrets, plots, or way of thinking.

xander

[trickfred]

Aww, xander's just having a cranky day. Everyone gets them from time to time.

*platonic man-hug for xander, complete with back-slapping*

BTW, dude, your keychain finally made it in the mail today. Not too many post offices open around here the hours I'm normally awake.

[xander]

Aww, xander's just having a cranky day. Everyone gets them from time to time.

*platonic man-hug for xander, complete with back-slapping*

BTW, dude, your keychain finally made it in the mail today. Not too many post offices open around here the hours I'm normally awake. :D

\o/

xander does a happy dance!

xander