hmm... Anyone have a clue?

[whirlingdervish]

I've been testing my map and I have found
a serious problem that I haven't run into on many maps.
Occasionally (every couple of matches or so) Quake 2 will crash completely and throw a
"Memory at xxxxxx cannot be read" error.

I was getting overflow errors if I just tried out the bsp(no vis, no rad). then, I simplified some things and blocked some vis here and there, and tried it with a full vis build...
No more overflow, but now I get the above error when
approx 10+ "players" are in the heat of battle and stuff is spawning at an increased rate...

Usually its rockets, grenades or the BFG causing all the spawning, 'cause I hacked out tons of entities and it still happens every so often...

Ive tried a few different fixes (like taking out all the shit I added) but I can't think of much else to fix this...

Someone help!

[grieve[Q2C]]

Really difficult to tell what causes crashes. I have encountered various errors even in different installations of basically the same OS and hardware with similar driver configurations.

In one of my Windows installations Awaken 2 and Tourney would continously crash, without apparent reason, which was not in the previous windows installation and not in the following, even tho they were identical.

Right now I had a lot of troubles when I finally switched to a GeForce FX 5200. The latest drivers and a refresh rate fix tool fixed the most common problems for me, but now one of my maps ( the gothic arena I posted screens of last summer ) crashes on startup, but only when I use the ref_q2cpgl renderer ( part of a sourceport )

What I'm trying to say is that a computer/windoze system always has an unpredictable element in it which seemingly defies logic. Basically everything is just much too complex and noone can test all the drivers and stuff in all possible configurations and with all available applications. There will always be unexpected errors and exceptions.

Quake 2 is fortunately still not completely unknown, and it was worth a mention even on the ATI home page that their drivers cause issues with Quake 2 and related games (which include also prominent games like Counterstrike)
I encountered them myself, because I bought one in January this year. Quake 2 literally crawled with this card, while Unreal was running really fast. They say they have a fix for this problem, but I found that a GeForce is still better for vintage Quake engine games. Will keep the Radeon in reserve for the next system I build ....

About your error message, I find it does not really sound like a Quake error, more like a Windows problem. I can not imagine that a map is that complex. The only Q2-typical overflow error I encountered was getspace_overflow in SP maps where too many models were spawned and too many things happened.

If the map has too many faces/polys, Q2 would clearly say that when trying to load it.
So maybe you should try to run the map on different computers first, to see if the same happens everywhere. Also you should try different binaries/engines/renderers.

Only if the same thing happens everywhere you can be sure that the problem is definitely Quake 2 related.

[whirlingdervish]

well it happens on my comp at work but it's the same OS and the same version of q2,
same build tools, Ive got a 128Mb ATI card on the work comp that looks crappy, and a 64mb geforce mx 440 that looks gorgeous for some reason on my home comp....
I wish I could let you play with it, but its for the contest. shit.

as for the map itself, its not that huge. only like 3100
brushes total, its got a full load of weapons/armor/health, 10 spawnpoints, and very few other entities... 2 func_rotating,12 target_speaker,1 point light, 2 lasers and some relays and buttons and info not/nulls... not pushing the limits as far as I know...

The error message is actually a windows XP error message window that pretty much says that quake 2 tried to use a function on something stored in a memory location that "could not be read" or was probably the wrong place to look for the data in question(you get a hexidecimal value thats all zeros)... It shuts down quake2, which is locked at this point and skipping away on whatever sound was just playing, and prompts you to send one of those damn spying error reports...

now that I think of it, I was using the same version of Tourney every time...
wonder how I can test it with 10 real peeps to see if its just Tourney getting overloaded...

hmm...


<edit> I tried out Erasers instead of gladiators...
no more crash bug. Looks like it was the bots...
not the map. YAY! thx boyz!