Crashing.

[GothStag]

I've downloaded quite a few OXPs now & recently Oolite keeps on crashing sometimes. It may be beause one of the OXPs (probably a ship one) may be unstable. How can I tell which of the OXPs is causing this problem?

[TGHC]

The normal way is to take out the Oxp's that you think may be the problem and add them back in one by one to find the offender. Search the boards and you should find some of the contenders.

[GothStag]

Cheers TGHC I'll give that a try.

[Commander McLane]

Another generally good idea is to send the crash reports to the address Ahruman gave us here.

Usually crash reports are helpful for him in making Oolite more stable.

[GothStag]

Cheers Commander.

It didn't crash yesterday but if it does again I'll mail the error bits.

[nijineko]

mine always crashes. but that's likely because i'm always hanging around ceeseex (or however that's spelled. ^^) and the traffic gets rather high, then i get into a fight, and bloop! freeze and crash.

[Commander McLane]

Again it's a good idea to send the crash reports to the address Ahruman gave us here.

If he already has got lots of reports with that particular reason for a crash, and has fixed it, he'll let you know.

[Cmdr Thorsson(aka zx81)]

I'll have to hold my hand up to going a bit .oxp crazy and ending in crashes also.

I went from about 40 oxp's to 70ish yesterday and this morning was a fun bug hunt.

My stderr file did prove useful and enabled me to remove the oxp's that either were or could have been causeing the crash.

Orb.oxp seemed the most reliable to cause a crash - it gives lots of 'can't find laser' type errors and dumps to the desktop pretty soon after start-up.

I was also getting messages from these oxp's doing odd stuff:

Firewasp
Pallas
Condor

Not sure if they cause a crash or not, but they were complained about in stderr for a few things.

The oddest thing I notice is lots(like about 40-50) repeats of this line(or subtle variations of) in stderr:

"2007-11-14 17:13:40.000 oolite.exe[3712] don't know how to load entity 'http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd' id '-//Apple Computer//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN'
.:3: validity error : Validation failed: no DTD found !
<plist version="1.0">"

I noticed that most mods(but not all) have a similar entry at the very top of their shipsdate+shipyard(maybe others?) plist files.

So what happens if I remove those enteries in those files? will stderr no longer give multiple error messages like above? Will the oxp's still function as they should?

I should just say i'm not a coder(last stuff i did was in basic along time ago...in a galaxy far, far away!), but have worked on various mod projects over the years and am looking to help out here as I get into Oolite.

[another_commander]

It is not a very good idea interfering with the internal format of the plist files. The DTD reports on the stderr are harmless, although quite annoying. Are you using version 1.65? If you install a more recent one, these messages will be gone, as a slightly modified gnustep dll is utilized, specifically to not attempt to validate plists. The sure thing is, that DTDs are not responsible for any crashes you may be getting.

[Cmdr Thorsson(aka zx81)]

ah ok thanks for that, and yes i'm using 1.65 at the moment. Yeah i noticed all the DTD's in stderr before i had the crashes, so i figured they were not important as such.

[Captain Hesperus]

It is, perhaps, a lasting memory to Charlie's Benulobiweed Inc. ships that, although the ships are phenomenal (but oh so UBER) and groundbreaking, their OXPs are sadly very buggy. When (if?) he returns to these friendly boards, he may well re-release the Benulobiweed fleet bug-free.

Captain Hesperus

[Commander McLane]

Indeed!

For the time being it is (sadly so!) most safe not to install anything that comes from Charlie. And this is mainly Orb.oxp and all the fancy ships by Benulobiweed Inc (most of them are recognizable by their bird-names).

[Captain Hesperus]

all the fancy ships by Benulobiweed Inc (most of them are recognizable by their bird-names).

And the rather 'eccentric' nature of the readme.txt files......

Captain Hesperus

[Cmdr Thorsson(aka zx81)]

His models+textures are very, very good mind you.

I find(so far, fingers crossed) that Kestral+Merlin seem ok, i just reduce their top end speed. But yeah it was Orb.oxp that caused my only Oolite CTD.

As his models are so good i might start with these oxps and do a little bug-hunting when i'm ready to move from playing Oolite to modding. It could be down to some simple typo?

Overall I'm very impressed by Oolite in general(it stopped me playing X3 infact), and the oxp's that have been made. It seems a very good system for player modifications. Thumbs up all round to all your efforts

[Commander McLane]

You're welcome to surf around the boards (and the wiki as well) to find out more about how it all works.

And keep in mind that Oolite is still a work in progress. So you are not restricted to modding, but also can ask the programmers for modifications of the game itself, adding new functionalities (within reasonable limits, of course).

As for Charlie's OXPs: Yes, most of it comes down to typos that as a result make one of his plists not executable (worse in more recent versions than in 1.65, which is pretty forgiving in that matter). In Orb.oxp things seem to be more serious. I also had a small argument at the time with Charlie, because I believe due to some flaws in the game's handling of AIs at least parts of the OXP simply can't work as he intends it to do.