[11.18] Race conditions

[zook2]

I hate to bother you with non-reproducible bugs, but here's a weird one from my testing range.

I have set up seven parallel, identical lines now, length 49km.

Trains have a 10% minimum load so they wait at the station. To start the race, with the game paused, I remove the min. load and then unpause. It takes them a second to reserve their tracks and then they're off.


What happened in one race (actually the one set up in the savegame above) was that only the trains on lines 4-7 started. The first three sat there, waiting for clearance. When I checked the lines with the "B" tool, I saw that they hadn't fully reserved their tracks to the finish line; perhaps only 80%, with each line at a slightly different number of reserved tiles.

There are no stops or signals on those lines, and trains have raced there many times with no problems.

[zook2]

Here it is again, this time with screenies:



They can't get into starting position because something, somewhere is blocked.



Actually, all the lines are reserved. By the correct trains, but they reserved the end of the line, with no reservations in between.



And it's not only a display error:



It has to be the same bug I've been bothering you with for quite a while now (insert smiley of your choice here), just this time it happened to all seven trains.

[jamespetts]

How very odd. In your initial post you refer to it not being reproducible - is that still so? It will be difficult for me to do much about it if that is the case unless a pattern emerges and I can try to draw inferences from the pattern as to where the problem lies.

[zook2]

That's why I'm posting the screenshots and descriptions. One other point I noticed is that since I've begun with these trials, the game tends to crash a lot. It did that before, but rarely; mostly it crashed on exit. Now that I'm doing nothing else in my network but run these tests, it hardly goes through a full month without a CTD.

[jamespetts]

Hmm - can you upload a saved game? Does it normally crash just as you start the convoys, or does it crash even when you are not immediately interacting with the game?

[zook2]

http://simutrans-germany.com/files/upload/Racing.part1.rar
http://simutrans-germany.com/files/upload/Racing.part2.rar

It can crash at any time.

[jamespetts]

I am having some trouble recombining your split .rar files - are you able to upload a single compressed file?

[zook2]

Hmm, I just downloaded and unpacked the file with WinRar and 7Zip, no problems. You just need to unpack the first file.

Or, wait...
http://freakshare.com/files/bd7qk5pb/Racing.sve.html

(use the 32-exe!)

[jamespetts]

(use the 32-exe!)

Do you mean for testing or for unzipping? I am so far not having any luck in reproducing any crashes with this.

Edit: I notice that trying to load the server game with a 32-bit executable results in an out of memory error (but this, I think, is because it really is out of memory: a 32-bit application can only address a limited amount of RAM and the server game has a very large number of private cars). Were you getting explicit out of memory messages with these crashes?

[zook2]

Do you mean for testing or for unzipping? I am so far not having any luck in reproducing any crashes with this.

Edit: I notice that trying to load the server game with a 32-bit executable results in an out of memory error (but this, I think, is because it really is out of memory: a 32-bit application can only address a limited amount of RAM and the server game has a very large number of private cars). Were you getting explicit out of memory messages with these crashes?

No, just ordinary crash-to-desktop with no specific messages. But I usually have a few other applications running when playing Simutrans and I noticed that with the traffic network growing, my paltry 2 GB RAM are regularly full and the PC starts swapping a few hundred MB before the game crashes. At least that's what I suspect.