Hello everyone,

Many of you should already know that I've been working for many years now on several plugins for Gamestudio, mainly revolving AI and Pathfinding. About 7-8 months now, I've hit a major slump. There's been some seemingly random E1513 error messages popping up and I've been trying to get rid of them ever since. This started happening on my latest plugin, Intense Ai - Copper edition. It's preventing me from releasing the almost completed Silver and Gold editions of Intense Ai and have pretty much destroyed my sales on Intense Ai Copper, not to mention my reputation. Now, with the release of the latest A7 private beta (which produced some interesting results with Intense Ai) and the next release candidate version coming up, I'm giving it another go on fixing the bloody bug. But I will need your help.

Anyone that has some free time, please download this file:

http://www.intense-i.com/files/WhyAmICrashing2.zip (78mb)

You won't need to have Intense Ai, or any of my plugins installed to test this. What this is, is a small game containing two levels, completely open sourced. When you try to run this game, it should compile fine and then crash a few seconds after the level loads. What I'm interested in, is what error message you get and if it even crashes at all in your computer.

Now, here's something interesting (if you can call any bug interesting..) about this infamous bug. After you extract the zip file, open Backyard.wmp in WED and run it. After it compiles ok, you should get one of the following E1513 runtime error messages:

Crash in is_ai_Npc_Event or
Crash in ActionManager or
Crash in ix_AgentAttributes_Loop or
etc..

Now, close WED and open main.c with SED. Now click the blue arrow (Run current Script). The game will compile and run just fine! You will get no crashes at all, although you're running the exact same level and the exact same main script file! Which is why I believe this has nothing to do with my code and heavily relies on something going wrong with the engine.

Of course, since I'm the only one getting this atm (although there have been other E1513 random crashes reports every now and then) there must be something I'm obviously not doing right, but if it runs fine when i run it with SED and crashes when I run it with WED, you can tell how it can be nearly impossible to debug this myself. But I digress..

If you want to help, please reply with the following information:

Current Gamestudio edition: (Non-beta, like A7.82.3 or earlier or a private beta, like A7.83.5b. If you have the latest A7.83.6b then don't test this at all since you'll get a lot of errors. Check this thread for more on this)

Your System Specs: Operating System, RAM size, # of processors and gfx card type.

Open Backyard.wmp from WED and run it (don't build the level or anything). Does it compile? Yes/No. Does it crash? Yes/No. If it crashes, what is the crash message?

If it crashed, run it two more times. Do you get the same crash message (does it crash in the same function or a different one each time?). From my tests, if you have the A7.83.5b beta you should get the same errors, but if you run an earlier non-beta version you may get crashes in different functions each time.

If you get the same function crashing each time, please also try the following. Open a heavy application (irrelevant to gamestudio). It could be Photoshop, or Blender, or you could try opening WED 2-3 more times. With this application(s) open, run the level from WED again. Do you get a crash in the same function again, or a different one this time? (Here, with A7.83.5b I will get consistent crashes until I open up Photoshop, then another function will start crashing. If I run it again and again, the same different function will be crashing until I close or open another heavy application, indicating that this bug is definitely related to a memory problem.).

Finally, open main.c from SED. Run the blue arrow (Run current Script). Does it compile? Yes/No. Do you get a crash after the level loads? Yes/No. If you get a crash, what does it say?


I understand that this is a cumbersome test so as a little thank you, if you do the test also type in your Full Name either in the reply or through a PM. You will be allowed to use any of the models from this game for your own commercial (or non-commercial) projects, even if you haven't purchased Intense Ai Copper. These include 2 humanoid models and 4 weapons with both normal and 1st person camera modes (with hands), all with a LOT of animations. You can check them out from here.

Which brings me to my last point.. You can't use any of the Intense Ai Lite-c Scripts for your own projects, if you don't own Intense Ai Copper. But I left them open so you can get some ideas from them if you want to. Lots of Ai code in there..

Any help would be very much appreciated. Me and jcl are trying to figure this out and it's really important to have as many test results as possible.

Thanks again,
Aris