Crashing when zoning into Trakanon's Teeth
 

I can zone into Trakanon's Teeth once without any problems, but if I leave the zone and then attempt to zone back in, the loading bar initializes and stalls at about 20% before crashing to desktop. Reproducible 100% of the time - have tried replacing zone files, disabling the load screen, changing CPU affinity, disabling hardware vertex shaders, downgrading to low-resolution zone textures, etc. Would be interested to see if this happens for everyone else.


Debug log, after it finishes loading player inventory:

Have you tried with any other characters if they work zoning in and out after that?

I noticed this occurring in EJ for one char but works for another char. No amount of tweaking allowed me to log back on that char in EJ or FoB for that matter (including removing *.ini files)

Check Technical Discussion... Trak's Teeth latency is a notorious problem for certain players. Tons of threads about it there.

http://www.project1999.com/forums/sh...ad.php?t=32600
http://www.project1999.com/forums/sh...ad.php?t=84947
https://www.project1999.com/forums/s...ad.php?t=91754
http://www.project1999.com/forums/sh...ad.php?t=99238

Yep, it happens across all characters and accounts.

Definitely not the same issue - it only occurs when zoning into Trakanon's Teeth, and I'm always able to log back in after crashing.

Also definitely not the same issue - once I'm in the zone my ping is flawless and I have no issues with linkdeath. At this point I'm fairly convinced it's not a connection issue at all, server- or client-side, and is purely a file-related issue on the server's side. I think trakanon.eqg is loaded server-side - could be some corruption going on there or maybe the zone just needs a reset or something.

In any case, I'm also fairly certain this will happen to everyone - I just need someone else to test to verify. I came across the bug while working on a retexturing project and noticed that when I installed some new global textures it exacerbated the issue with that one specific zone. I'm not sure why that is, but normally - without installing new custom textures - it always happens on the second reentry to TT, which is less of a problem, but still a weird bug that doesn't pertain to any other zones.

So in summary, if someone wants to try to reproduce this, you might be able to zone out of TT, then zone back in without experiencing the bug, but if you zone back out again, and then attempt to zone back in again you will crash.

No reason for the server to be loading files in response to someone zoning in (other than scripts maybe -- but no reason for the server to inform the client about those).

The line about "trakanon.EQG" is just there because when the client is entering <zonename>, it always tries to load <zonename>.eqg before defaulting to <zonename>.s3d if the .eqg file doesn't exist. This is the most basic way the client distinguishes newer-format zone data from old, classic format zones. Think of the "re-done" nektulos vs classic nektulos.


Looking at the actual error reported... it seems like the client is simply running out of RAM (or VRAM, but probably RAM). Bear in mind that 32bit programs like the client can generally only use up to 2GB. Speaking from the experience of having written some zone-viewery type stuff... Trakanon's Teeth is one of the most memory-intensive zones in the game to load, up there with Plane of Growth. Later zones tend to be more efficient. Older clients probably had a lot of little tricks to keep total memory use down by loading things piecemeal, which presumably got wiped out when they moved everything to newer systems, and clients with 1GB+ of RAM became a given.

Could explain why the crash presents after zoning in and out multiple times (more stuff sticking around in memory, maybe the client doesn't aggressively unload things if it keeps seeing them get reloaded?) and why it would get more severe when you have much-larger textures hogging memory.

Okay, I've more or less figured out this is only an issue related to my specific install due to custom textures, so I was wrong in thinking it's server-side or universal - feel free to move this thread to Tech Discussion.

Basically the issue was that I had too many higher-resolution (and therefore bigger in size) global custom textures installed - I wasn't accounting for these being stored in memory with each zone. So with each zone it's writing into memory a bunch of item and character textures that are quite a bit larger than the originals. Trakanon's Teeth - and actually, sometimes Emerald Jungle as well - might just contain such a wide variety of NPCs using differently textured weapons which puts it over a tipping point in conjunction with higher resolution custom textures and the memory-intensiveness of the zone itself. So I went and replaced every global S3D with custom textures with the stock S3Ds and the problem disappeared - I could then zone in and out of TT as many times as I wanted.

Which reminds me - there are a couple different texture-related options in the Titanium client: one for texture caching to reduce zone times once it builds the cache, and one for texture compression. I didn't have compression enabled, which is pretty dumb in light of the client's RAM usage limitations, and in light of the fact that the reduction in quality is negligible. Enabling that did help a little bit while using custom textures: I can zone out and into TT once without issue, but on the second try the loading bar stalls at 20% and the client crashes.