BftB, HttR Patch progress?

[decaro]

Any progress to report on the patch to fix the "halting" issue in these engines?

[Arjuna]

As I mentioned in the other thread this week, we have a few serious issues (not related to the halting issue, which I believe is now fixed) but which are crashing the game. One is an XP compatibility issue which is preventing our autotesters from working. The other is a memory leak which eventually stalls or locks up the game. Another involves a major lockup or thread crash caused by an errant iterator ( the pointer used to navigate lists and vectors ). I have been trying to track down the latter one now for some time. The problem is exascerbated by a known bug inside Microsoft's Visual Studio which is the development software we use. The upshot is that to debug iterators it takes ages to load a scenario and then it runs oh so slowly. So this is impacting on my productivity.

But yesterday I found at least one cause for these lockup/thread crashes. It took my pretty fast dev machine no less than 9 hours to finally work through two days of game time to hit the spot where it crashes. I have just fixed it this morning but will need to spend another nine hours just to get back to the point so I can verify it works. Now that I know what to look for I need to go through all 1947 instances in the code where similar function calls are made and check each one. Tedious, yes. Time consuming, yes. Making progress, yes.

In the meantime Paul has also tracked down a cause of a thread crash inside our ForceGroup class and is trying to solve it.

[Arjuna]

Just for your info the recording I was testing has finally run through to the point where it previously crashed. My fix has worked and its running again. Yeeha! Now back to the next one.

[decaro]

ORIGINAL: Arjuna

As I mentioned in the other thread this week, we have a few serious issues (not related to the halting issue, which I believe is now fixed) but which are crashing the game ...

Sorry I missed the other thread, but do you plan to release a patch just for the halting issue, or release a mega patch for all fixes?

I didn't realize there were that many issues, but when you have one the best AI engines on the market, I imagine there will be bugs.

[wodin]

Joe.D trouble is I expect he can't release a patch just for the halting issue. You see it's most likely been fixed whilst he was working on other things with the game exe. SO in effect the only place it's been fixed is in the current build they have that has these game killing bugs\lock ups.

I'ts very unlikely that when developers gets told about an issue they make a separate fix on a separate build just for that issue so it can be released. More likely they fix i on the next build they are working on which will have unfinished\unfixed features that they'd been working on before they were told about the issue.

[decaro]

ORIGINAL: wodin

Joe.D trouble is I expect he can't release a patch just for the halting issue. You see it's most likely been fixed whilst he was working on other things with the game exe. SO in effect the only place it's been fixed is in the current build they have that has these game killing bugs\lock ups ...

OK, I'm hoping for a mega-fix by Xmas since myself and other Matrix members enjoy running a Bastogne scenario around that time of year.

Season's greetings, (well) in advance.