Oh man. So this is gonna be a nightmare. Take a deep breath, and we'll be fine.


Alright! So I work on Dungeon Deities, which is a (relatively) big project. It got lots of panels, bitmaps, and view entities, among them this one!



Including that makes acknex crash during compilation. Like so:



... but only sometimes.
If it crashes, the message is always the same:



Which, wise men tell me, means there's a FLT_INVALID_OPERATION, perhaps a division by zero.
The acklog:



(and it ends there)
Yeah, I directly give the path to the file in the filename... But it was never a problem before.

Anyway, if it WORKS, the acklog looks like this:




Sometimes it works fine. Compiles, and the game runs as it should.
But not always! Sometimes, it crashes. Inbetween those, no changes were made.

Since it only happens sporadically, this is difficult to test, so keep that in mind with the following.

Anyway, I've also tried publishing the whole thing. The resulting exe also crashes - sometimes. It used to crash pretty much everytime, but now I can't get it to crash (and on a different computer, it never crashed, but in fairness, I've only tried about three or four times). The error for that told me this:



which, as you will notice, has the same Exception Code (c0000090), and the same entries for "Additional information".

AS you can see from the screenshot, the whole thing crashed before the "xx seconds" message, before the amount of objects are stated, and before my actual script is started. So maybe it's the pre-processor. So I removed that ENTITY*-definition, and replaced it with a corresponding ent_createlayer-call.
If I run that, it crashes (when it crashes) AFTER compilation (there IS a "xx seconds" message, then a black window for a split second, then a crash).
I've now put "waits" in my panel/bitmap/view-entity initializations, and SO FAR it hasn't crashed. But I sure don't feel particulary happy and safe with THAT arrangement.


So maybe it's the model, right? Maybe it's corrupt. I've tried replacing it, and it seems that with some models - used in other view entity definitions that worked fine so far - there are no crashes. But with others (not used in a view definition) that work fine as level entities (and have for a long time before), it crashes again.
Anyway, I have uploaded the model for your consideration here.



I humbly ask for your assistance, because quite frankly, I'm lost.
I unfortunately couldn't create a simple program that also crashes (I mean, I can't even get the main game to reliably crash). I suspect it may have something to do with the amount of objects listed for the pre-processor, but this is really just a wild guess.


Help me, jcl.

Help. : (



Oh, yeah, before I forget. 8.45 also crashes.



I'm using two external, old DLLs from A6 times that I do not wish to replace, as they're quite central to the project. Unless you're pretty certain they're at fault -- and they have been working fine for years in this project (yes, even in A8) -- I'd rather not replace them.

Oh noes!
Have you tried turning it off and on again (read: in which mode do you start the program when it crashes, test or debug run)?

It's a "Test Run". I haven't tried it in Debug Run - as soon as it's crashing again (which, thankfully, it doesn't do right now - why is anyone's guess), I'll check out the Debug run!

Does a #define PRAGMA_ZERO resolve the issue?

Does replacing Models\\lock.mdl with an arbitray dummy model fix the issue?

If you got a model that randomly crashes, the first thing to do is loading it in MED, and saving it again. That can often repair a damaged file.

Crashes that do not happen always, but depend on random memory content, are hard to find. But from what you've written, it seems that you already traced it down pretty well to that particular model.

Thanks for all your replies!

I've tried resaving the model (both in MDL7 and MDL5-formats), with no results. Also, replacing it with a different one sometimes worked, and in other times did not.

Right now, it hasn't crashed in a while, so possibly something I've done magically "fixed" it - perhaps turning the direct view-entity definition into an "ent_createlayer"-call, perhaps distributing the workload in the first frame somewhat. I don't exactly feel super-comfortable with it, but if it doesn't crash, I can't really work on investigating the bug, either.

If it crashes again, I'll make sure to try out PRAGMA_ZERO.

Thanks again for all the help. I'll be back if it stops working again.

So I have been working on my laptop (instead of my desktop computer) for the past few days. And behold, it crashed.

But not a complete super-crash as before - instead, it says...



"LOCK.MDL: Bad file format."

So yeah, I've tried other models, and as I've said, it worked sometimes, but sometimes it didn't.
My current suspicion is that the models that don't work have all been saved on my desktop computer since a recent reinstall of windows.

So perhaps, my MED-installation on this computer is faulty, or for some reason creates faulty files.
jcl, can a faulty model really crash the pre-compiler as shown in the first screenshot in this thread?

I'll investigate a bit more.

Thank you all for your help. Uhrwerk, I'll try the PRAGMA_ZERO as soon as I get it to reliably crash again.

The dots in the compiler window mean two things: At first your script gets compiled and "checked" for syntax errors which probably everyone is aware of. Then however without notice at some point the "..." dots have another meaning, that is the engine is loading and creating engine objects such as SOUND files or apparently view entities.

I don't know but could it be that some other previous file is damaged which then leads to loading errors on subsequent files?

I once had a really weird acknex crash (I think it was of the "acknex.exe has stopped working" type) where indeed the reason was a faulty texture/ bitmap, it's not that uncommon (especially when you consider that MED literally destroys some files on saving if you don't treat it with care - for example on some "unsupported" undo operations the model gets messed up and when you then save it, all hope is lost).

I see.. yeah, that would make sense then. I don't really look forward to going through all models (let's assume that my images that were made in MS Paint or Photoshop are fine - at least for now) that get loaded, but since all this only started after I've added the "lock.mdl", and given that it crashed relatively often since then, it's probably save to assume that this model is indeed at fault.
But in any case, I now have a better idea of where to look.

Reloading the model into MED and just saving it again didn't change it at all - I've checked it byte-for-byte. This is true when done on other computers, as well (so maybe it's not a faulty MED installation).

I've just re-imported the 3ds and saved it new.
I'll be back if it crashes again.


I think it'd be great if, at least in the development version, the point of loading and creating objects would be indicating somehow - maybe with a ; or a _ or whatever. This would have saved me some time.




I also must say, I really was afraid that after posting this, this thread would die a quiet death. It's great to see that you guys are there to help! Thanks again.

Can you elaborate a little more on this? You have indeed mentioned this multiple times but I still don't know what the results are (esp. how and when does it crash/ not work then?).

I wouldn't use the seemingly problematic lock model at all anymore until I'm sure it is the reason.