Deadly Skies III - random hangs/crashes
#1
Certain stages early in the game are notorious for making the emulator hang. In rare occasions they crash instead. If a reload a savestate before the hang happens, sometimes i can continue playing like there wasn't an issue in the first place. However in all cases there doesn't seem to be anything at all weird in the log.

So i'm open to suggestions as to what i can try to get a reading on these hangs/crashes which occur randomly with no warning.
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#2
Do you use non-default settings?
Is the bug somehow reproducible e.g. every 3-5 minutes (time dependent bug) or every time you change the area (triggered bug) or something like that or is it completely random and you can not identify the source?
Is something special during those first stages that is different to the rest of the game were everything is stable?

Is sound still working after the hang or is it broken as well?

What are your relevant system specs and OS?

Maybe you can find something is you set the log level to verbose...
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#3
(04-04-2015, 11:16 PM)willkuer Wrote: Do you use non-default settings?
Is the bug somehow reproducible e.g. every 3-5 minutes (time dependent bug) or every time you change the area (triggered bug) or something like that or is it completely random and you can not identify the source?
Is something special during those first stages that is different to the rest of the game were everything is stable?

Is sound still working after the hang or is it broken as well?

What are your relevant system specs and OS?

Maybe you can find something is you set the log level to verbose...

Non default as far as defaults go Tongue Besides speed hacks (which don't seem to make a difference to the issue) and the GSdx having an upscaled resolution, the rest are proper.

I've only noticed these hangs/crashes happening the most often during certain stages (I don't recall their names right now), and if they've occurred at some point during another stage, i do not remember it.
They are the definition of random. There's nothing to tell me that the emulator will flip its sh*t imminently, and reloading a prior savestate bypasses the problem most of the time. It doesn't appear to be time dependent either, for two reasons. One i mentioned before, the other being that it would have to be some event causing it, which can't be because it wouldn't be random anymore.

Whether there's something special about these stages, i don't know. I am absolutely confident that 2 of these stages include the huge weaponized rollers, which would point towards a link, but another stage (near at the start of the game, it's about attacking an oil refinery) also appears to suffer from the same issues. So far the only link to both of them is the fact that their maps contain lots of dust. They're in desert areas Tongue

The sound works partially. It loops a fixed portion of the last few seconds of audio but it won't go further past the point of the hang (I may be remembering wrong and it may be playing audio a few seconds after the hang and repeating that, but i'm not sure if that's useful info. I'll verify the behavior when i can).

Highly doubt my OS or system specs have anything special to do with the issue but here you go. Windows 8.1, Intel i5 750 @2.6, ATI HD6770. Yes the game is in ISO format.

I will try this again with verbose and hope something odd comes up. I don't like being blind to the cause of issues, and i would know, i've had plenty of those and a developer who hasn't been too happy dealing with me. In all fairness he's bad at listening to reproduction instructions Tongue
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#4
If desert is the connecting link you might want to try:
1. Dx9 vs Dx11 vs OGL
2. iGPU vs dGPU

Can you look into the event viewer (eventvwr) for time instances where you had a full app crash? Maybe there is some hint.

Is the iso on your system partition/hdd or on a separate one?
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#5
(04-05-2015, 12:42 AM)willkuer Wrote: If desert is the connecting link you might want to try:
1. Dx9 vs Dx11 vs OGL
2. iGPU vs dGPU

Can you look into the event viewer (eventvwr) for time instances where you had a full app crash? Maybe there is some hint.

Is the iso on your system partition/hdd or on a separate one?

I don't think i've ever used the iGPU on this CPU, besides instances after a format. Personally i've no idea how to test that. AFAIK GSdx doesn't allow you to pick the GPU after the first time you save its settings, so i'll experiment. Is it actually possible to render one game in the iGPU while the dGPU does all the rest? Never seen that before Tongue

As for directX, i didn't think it would be relevant. I haven't seen many instances where the different renderers have this much of a difference where one hangs and the other doesn't. Usually it's just crap looking right or not.

The only bothersome thing is how much time it would take to troubleshoot this. Without any point of reference to trigger this issue i will have to play through the game quite a damn bit and replay the missions over and over to make sure they're fine.

sigh
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#6
I had similar issues like this on Ben10: Protector of Earth , the only workaround was to load a previous save state and continue without triggering a issue. but since, you had no warnings something is definitely different.
We're supposed to be working as a team, if we aren't helping and suggesting things to each other, we aren't working as a team.
- Refraction
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#7
I haven't yet had any luck getting the issue to appear in the game, but it appears that the latest build for some reason causes PCSX2 to crash mid-game, blaming the SPU2-X module. Any ideas?

Added the emulog for those interested. It would appear it's getting quite a few of "no stop" errors for the audio files. And there's also a lot of exclamation marks which in my experience means something that's not really supposed to happen Tongue

EDIT: it was a double crash while playing Dark Chronicle. I mean, i got the emulator to crash twice. After i closed the first error window saying it crashed, another popped up a second later saying it crashed again. How that even works i have no idea.


Attached Files
.txt   emuLog.txt (Size: 118,08 KB / Downloads: 234)
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#8
Good time to test the SPU-null plugin I would say...
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