Sauerbraten is a first person shooter and editing engine at the same time, a game i'm in love with for well over 4 years now. However, recent crashes have stripped my ability to play this game for prolonged periods of time, the fastest being a few seconds in.

The game developer, eihrul, claims that he cannot fix something he cannot reproduce, and as such, without solid evidence, a serious problem which may (or may not) affect others could be carried on the soon-to-come release.

The issue is composed of a massive memory leak that usually occurs under these conditions:

1) Enter a map which contains textures assigned to virtual slots. Each texture has its own slot (index), and they're assigned a virtual one when v(irtual)commands are used for offsetting, scrolling etc
2) Lower the game window. Does not always trigger it. Does not always occur instantly. Restoring the window used to stop the leak, but it's not the case anymore. I believe the recent SDL library update is the reason for that.
3) Happens sometime on any map after a prolonged period of time.

This ENORMOUS leak that has a speed ranging from 10MB to as much as 60MB a second is the main reason for the crashes. Sometimes, the game won't even leak to its own death, but will crash instantly; sometimes there's not even an error.

When there is an error, it's usually about the C++ runtime being terminated in an unusual way, or it performing an illegal action of sorts.

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So in order to help myself and possibly convince eihrul that this little problem needs to be addressed as soon as possible, i've decided to make a thread here with suggestions from you people as to how to troubleshoot what causes this memory leak. Specifically, i'd like some help getting a debugger to attach to the game's executable. Preferably one that will provide some substantial information on what's causing the leak, when, where, and why. The more info the better. I want to know whether this is some problem only i am having for whatever reason, it being a bad driver or stupid visual C++ libraries messing up, and get to the bottom of it.

Intel VTune might do it, that tends to provide a fair bit of information.

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If it is this one:
http://software.intel.com/en-us/articles...lifier-xe/

Then i'm not quite sure it's what i'm looking for. I need a debugger, not an optimizer. If i can get some solid info that will point towards something, then eihrul will mostly take care of the rest.

It shows function speed and memory usage does it not?

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(03-10-2012 04:41 AM)refraction Wrote:  It shows function speed and memory usage does it not?

Not what i'm interested in. This game i'm talking about exhibits memory leaks that i cannot trace back to somewhere without a good debugger to tell me where and when the leak happens.

If i wanted to check function speed, i'd look at the fps rate, and memory usage at the task manager.