[Fantinaikos]

I think it's just some specific lines that are not accepted, otherwise there would be problems even with the official addons and Alien New Order. And even the only four that runs flawlessly have little changes in their code both for fixes and Eduke32 compatibility. Unless BuildGDX isn't specifically scripted to make work only the official addons ignoring the .CON changes that normally wouldn't work with any other .GRP, but that doesn't seem to be the case.

Let's go step by step and try with those that require to remove undefinevolume tags first.

[Phredreeke]

None of the official addons uses EDuke code and World Tour doesn't use EDuke code either

[Fantinaikos]

Well, of course they can't. I suggested this?...

I forgot to mention that however most of the not working addons, after the error message, instead of close the program, appear to be detected at least superficially given that apart for the episodes selection which remain the four of the main game, all the rest of custom material is actually loaded.

[Ferry]

Hey I wanted to report a fatal issue I have with A Dream Trilogy, im using the latest build of Eduke32 so far (10166) with the latest version of the EAC Installer.

Specifically the first map, it starts fine (thought I think the incoming helicopter thats gonna crash into you should not dissappear).
The longer I play the level however, the slower it gets, till the point it reaches almost powerpoint presentation and it becomes unplayable.
Checking the console it sends many of the same error message: "ERR| scripts/dreamtrilogy_extra.con:785: sound: invalid sound #3026"

It sends this error so many times the console says it exceeds error count and starts ignoring them. My Eduke.log is 22MBs due to how many lines of that same error it writes! I think that could be the culprit as to why the first map ends up slowing down, as the other 2 maps play completely fine and don't show that error.

Map 2 has another error however, it always crashes for me in that dark hallway just before you takes a turn to the right and you see a spooky ghost jumpscare, the game freezes and then a windows pop in telling me Eduke32 stopped working
Map 3 on the other hand plays completely fine from start to end.

Wanted to report that since so far its the only addon I've been having technical issues with, everything else I've tried has been working well so far!

[NightFright]

A sound issue wouldn't (or shouldn't) cause the whole game to crash. Try with older EDuke32 snapshots, this sounds like something rather port-related since fundamental issues like this would have been noticed sooner otherwise.

Anyway, can't hurt to check how that specific sound is defined, I suppose...

*EDIT*
After a quick check, turns out that sound is labelled BLANK and defined as such in defs.con, however I cannot find a corresponding definesound line. This could be problematic. Gotta check more thoroughly tomorrow. As for that crash in the second map: That one could be port-related still, but let's see.

[NightFright]

OK, someone with coding knowledge should maybe help me out here.

It seems there is a definition in A.Dream which comes straight from the default defs.con:

define BLANK 3026

The tilenum already indicates this is not supposed to be a sound. However, then you have code like this in dreamtrilogy_extra.con:

state actor_run_walk
{ ifactioncount 3 { ifonwater sound BLANK else { state actor_movement_sound resetactioncount } } }
ends

actor SPARKSPAWNED  
fall sizeat 21 21
ifcount 1 sound BLANK
else { ifrnd 32 { move MOVSP1 getv randomangle } 
else ifrnd 64 { move MOVSP2 getv randomangle } 
else { move MOVSP1 getv randomangle } }
ifcount 4 cstat 130
ifcount 7 cstat 642 
ifcount 10 killit 
ifinwater killit
enda

There is no definesound BLANK anywhere in the CON scripts, so the author might possibly have assumed here that a blank/empty sound can be referenced by using an empty/unused tile from the original game? There's no way this could have ever worked, right?
Intuitively, I would say BLANK should be replaced with a sound name that has blank.voc assigned to it, like MONITOR_ACTIVE (user.con: definesound MONITOR_ACTIVE blank.voc 0 0 0 0 0). I tried it in a test build and the error logs don't happen any longer.

[Reaper_Man]

I think you can get away with replacing the "sound BLANK" commands with "nullop", because it seems to be used here as a way to skip doing anything (which you sometimes want because of the way if statements work in CON) rather than actually trying to play an actual sound, blank or otherwise. As for if it ever would have worked, the CON author may not have known about / how to use "nullop", and this method may have just given an internal error about playing an invalid sound but otherwise worked to do what they wanted. Remember there wasn't a console or game log file, and it sounds like the slowdown is coming from huge amounts of log read/writes, so this would have gone unnoticed.

[NightFright]

Well, zykov eddy released this back in 2011, with EDuke32 in mind. So I guess the port must have been a bit more tolerant regarding such tricks over a decade ago. Now it seems it creates a log entry every time the invalid sound is referenced (I remember that this was added a while ago, probably to identify issues due to buggy sound defs more easily), which is obviously a lot, up to the point when the port decides to call it a day.

But you are right, there's actually no difference between "play no sound" or "do nothing" in these cases.

[Reaper_Man]

That's entirely possible. For example, I know EDuke at some point started throwing code warnings from the original retail CONs, so it became more strict about syntax and general usage. I don't know exactly when this was, but it wouldn't surprise me if the usage of playing an invalid sound now throws an error when it previously didn't.

[NightFright]

So here goes nothing, then! Can't say if this will also fix the issues in the second map, but at least those crazy log entries should not happen any more.

Changelog:
- A.Dream Trilogy: Sound-related crash fix in dreamtrilogy_extra.con (incorrect usage of BLANK tile)

To update:
- Use the EAC Downloader Script (unzip into your EDuke32 root dir and execute eac_install.bat) OR
- Get the updated EAC Base Pack and download dreamtrilogy.grp from the EAC repository

[Ferry]

Have to report the Issue is fixed in map 1! Played from start to end without any problems, I found one tiny glitch tho, in that vent where you shoot the switch to disable the fan, the floor in the area where the fan pushes you away is scrolling, when it should not. Apart from that there's no other issues.

Sadly with Map 2 it still crashes in the dark hallway when it turns to the right and the spooky jumpscare awaits, I dont know what can cause it since the game freezes and the Eduke log reports nothing, I do have to admit its really funny the game crashes right before the jumpscare.

[NightFright]

Have you tried with older builds? I am sure that one is port-related, especially if logs don't yield any clue.

[Ferry]

I tried older builds, at first I thought maybe the crash has to do when they added Anisotropic filtering back, but after doing some testing I finally found out when the game started crashing.

At r9651 is when the game started crashing, the previous build uploaded, r9631, runs completely fine on that part with in the hallway with the spooky ghost, something changed between these builds made the game crash at that part. Those builds are 2 years old at this point, I thought maybe the crash was a lot more recent related, they dont have some of the enhancements like the anisotropic filtering or not having conflicts with Color Profiles and wow during those builds they were tinkering a lot with the mouse controls, wish I knew what causes the crash but hey at least I know when it started crashing now.

[NightFright]

It will help guys like Doom64Hunter with their EDuke32 bug reports at least. Thanks a lot for your research!

[Fantinaikos]

Another major bug in A.dream trilogy, but related to Eduke32 I guess: Trying to pass this corridor of the 2nd dream causes a crashing error "game.cpp Expression: (unsigned)t->picnum<MAXTILES".


This happens only in first/third person, but if you walk through it when in automap mode the crashing error does not occur.

[NightFright]

Yikes. EDuke32 broke quite a few mods in the last few years, it seems. I'm kinda sceptical we'll ever see a new build that will be able to run the entire compilation. The newer it gets, the more it breaks...

[Fantinaikos]

"The longer the Eduke32 gets newer on Earth, the compilation broken it will become"
"So the fight of NightFright against the code will be ETERNAL"

*insert riff*

[Phredreeke]

REJECT MODERNITY, RETURN TO MONKE

[The Battlelord]

Phredreeke, on 18 January 2023 - 08:58 AM, said:

REJECT MODERNITY, RETURN TO MONKE

JUST AVOID THE DONKEY
What a fantastic rhymes compilation we can get

[NightFright]

Trollolo lo-lol lolo-lol lololooo, trollo-lo lolooo...

[Fantinaikos]

Important bug in Xmas 1997. At the end of Big CIty, touching the sled, the blue smoke or the bells not make happen what it should: Exit the level.

[NightFright]

That's also something that used to work before.

[Phredreeke]

While you've been working hard to make it compatible with Rednukem, can you do the same for Raze? Normally running an addon in Raze is as simple dragging and dropping a zip file on the executable, however this does not work with Duke addons that use different names for GAME.CON

Running your modified Metropolitan Mayhem in this way just results in loading the normal episodes. My current fix is to move the metromayhem.con to the root and rename it game.con, add in a renamed copy of the original game.con and modify the metro con to include the renamed copy instead

[NightFright]

That would require another massive round of changes for a large amount of addons. I think Raze doesn't even support my minimized con code, or was it DukeGDX?

Anyway, right now I cannot continue expanding support for other ports. Real life™ happened again, and lately it really, really sucks.

[Phredreeke]

What exactly do you mean by it doesn't support?

[Reaper_Man]

Fantinaikos, on 17 January 2023 - 02:23 PM, said:

Another major bug in A.dream trilogy, but related to Eduke32 I guess: Trying to pass this corridor of the 2nd dream causes a crashing error "game.cpp Expression: (unsigned)t->picnum<MAXTILES".
Dreambug.png

This happens only in first/third person, but if you walk through it when in automap mode the crashing error does not occur.

Now that's a really interesting error. What version of EDuke are you running? What this error means is that something, somehow, is setting an actor's tile ID to something beyond the valid maximum. This really shouldn't be possible on accident.

Can you test if this crashes on the original release of the mod, not the one packed in the compilation?

Can you also make a save file in the area before the crash starts? I wanna take a look and see what might be going on, and don't really have the time to play it to find it myself.

[Fantinaikos]

It is the debug version of the latest snapshot, still cannot use the standard Eduke32.exe for that annoying reason you know (but I can bet that it would happen the same with that too). This error happens also in another area, and also that, I managed to get past it with automap trick.

I'll see to provide save files, but I assure that the conditions for the error to appear are not more than the "walk in the area and game crashes" I described.

[Reaper_Man]

What other area, can you post a screenshot? Was it in map 3?

Looks like there are 2 game actors that use a (now?) out of range tile offset causing the crash. Both EVILGHOST (in map 2) and ENDINGGIRL (in map 3) have action definitions like:

action AENDINGGIRL1 32768 0 0 0 2
action AENDINGGIRL2 0 0 0 0 2
action AENDINGGIRL3 32768 0 0 0 2

That tile offset (the first number) is out of bounds for MAXTILES which is 30720, throwing the crash you're seeing.

I assume the reason the mod author did this is to make the sprites invisible until triggered, which could be done in a much more simple (and crash proof) manner using cstat. What's weird is they did exactly that in several other actors. If there's other functionality here with the action offset then I'm not aware of it, and if not then I don't understand why they went this route with these 2 actors in the first place. I'm also assuming, like the sound error, that this stopped working as the engine was hardened against out of bounds crashes, memory leaks, or other odd behaviors. Basically, this probably shouldn't have ever worked.

I modified the actors in question to use the invisible cstat instead of the out of bounds animation offset. I haven't playtested this though, but it's a simple fix so it should work.

Attached File(s)

•  dreamtrilogy_extra.con (76.18K)
  Number of downloads: 166

[Fantinaikos]

Quote

What other area, can you post a screenshot? Was it in map 3?

Nope, again the 2nd. In the aqueduct-sewer zone, if you can call it that, after one of the doors. Didn't even reached dreammap 3 because I've passed to another mod after a while, but if fixes that too, better.

Uh... What command I have to use to include this extra.con in the load of the compilation version? I can just put it Autoload folder or I need a .Bat with a -x parameter somewhere?

Also, can you even try to fix the Xmas 1997 bug?

EDIT: Nevermind, I figured out that it gets automatically detected by putting it in the EDuke32 folder (at least he did according the log). Unfortunately nothing changed, and the error line 4302 etc. keeps appearing in the same areas. Actually, then it even appear a c++ runtime error after that and the crash log is full of "Access violation" and references to various .cpp stuff. It Could be another MAX tiles violation you've missed?

[Reaper_Man]

You gotta upload these logs with errors in them. Without seeing the specific, exact error message there's no way to figure out what's going on. I'm pretty sure the map 2 crash Ferry mentioned above is the same one you experienced, but you posted the error with the MAXTILES message so I was able to track down the source of that.

Also I don't know if this is what you did, but you can't load from a save file after altering CON files, you have to start a new game and warp to that map for the new CON to take effect. If you're loading a save file with new CONs then that can cause all sorts of problems.

What's the problem with Xmas 1997 exactly? Does it throw any console errors? Like I said I don't really have time to play through mods to find bugs, and I haven't even played most of these in the first place, so you gotta be real specific.