Oolite Bulletins

another_commander wrote:

Are any of the other testers experiencing problems using the function keys with v0.2 Experimental?

Nope... both versions are working fine here.

Oops. Abject apologies.

There's a little key lurking on my keyboard, which I'd never even noticed before, and which appears to be some sort of function lock. One press of that and everything's back to normal.

Sorry about that.

JD wrote:

There's a little key lurking on my keyboard, which I'd never even noticed before, and which appears to be some sort of function lock. One press of that and everything's back to normal.

Easily done. Funny though!

another_commander wrote:

It looks like we are missing information about what happens on Win XP 64 and Vista 64-bit systems though. The help of anyone with access to these OSs and ability to test would be greatly appreciated.

Vista 64 here (Windows 6.0.6002 Service Pack 2 64-bit). Had it crash to desktop the first time I tried to go to the commodities screen but was fine after that (could have been something to do with copying save data over). Now just had a crash to desktop in the middle of a rather busy war zone which I think was created by Factions.oxp -- which I only recently downloaded along with the related oxps, to see how interesting they were, so this was the first time I'd actually encountered a faction battle. Sudden pop-up "oolite.exe has stopped working". Whether this specifically was an issue with the 64-bit version, or just a case of it getting too busy, I'm not sure.

I've just tried several times to find a similar big battle in the 32-bit version but have thus far been unsuccessful.

I'll try the 64-bit again and see if there are any crashes in smaller fights.
EDIT: No issues in smaller fights thus far...

Thanks for the report Keeper. In case it crashes again in the future, please post here the contents of both Latest.log and stderr.txt, before restarting the game. Sometimes these two files contain the reason for the crash.

Also, if you believe that the crashes are related to big fights, you can recreate some using the Debug Console, available here. Make sure to have Basic-debug.oxp installed, launch console then launch Oolite. You should see a message from the console that is connected to Oolite v1.77.1. Then just issue these commands:
:spawn pirate and :spawn trader or :spawn police as many times as needed for a sizeable fighting population to appear. Then you can see what happens.

There was nothing in the log; I had checked that right away.

I normally would use the Test version rather than the Deployment version.

My batchfile for loading the 64-bit version is using the oolite.exe rather than the ooliteDeployment.exe, however the former doesn't seem to be a Test version. TAF is not there amongst other things. Pressing Shift-F to bring up the FPS display is also not working.

My loading batchfile:

JazHaz wrote:

... however the former doesn't seem to be a Test version. TAF is not there amongst other things. Pressing Shift-F to bring up the FPS display is also not working.

That's probably a result of the HUD not containing a definition for FPS display. TAF works fine here with oolite.exe. Try it without OXPs and you will probably find the same. You can also confirm that your exe is a test release one by examining the first line of the log file where both game version and operating system are recognized.

another_commander wrote:

That's probably a result of the HUD not containing a definition for FPS display.

Oops. He's using my HUD. I've never even tried using the FPS display so didn't realize I'd left any feature out!

Keeper wrote:

another_commander wrote:

That's probably a result of the HUD not containing a definition for FPS display.

Oops. He's using my HUD. I've never even tried using the FPS display so didn't realize I'd left any feature out!

Yes, sorted.


Oolite 1.77.1 64-bit test, Keeper HUD edited by JazHaz, on Flickr

Note for those running Oolite x64: We are aware of a problem with exceptions not working as expected on the 64-bit experimental version. The end result in 99% of the cases is transparent to end users, but the implications are quite important: When an exception occurs in the game, instead of it terminating gracefully (or as gracefully as we can hope it will), or doing something to handle the problem in case we have provided a method for handling it, it simply crashes.

To understand what I am referring to, try removing (renaming is also fine) the startextures.plist file from the Resources/Config folder and shift-start the game without any OXPs. Both 32-bit and 64-bit versions terminate immediately, but the 32-bit one logs a report about why it ended, while the 64-bit one just crashes leaving the log incomplete and without any report inside.

This is under investigation at the moment. It's a tricky problem to address.

Hi, new here,

old elite elite-commander

Im from Holland, 52 years

Just installted 64 bit version wit LOTS of add-ons from the wiki list and started from scratch:

Microsoft Windows 8
6.2.9200 Build 9200
AMD FX(tm)-6200 Six-Core Processor, 3800 MHz, 3 core('s), 6 logische processor(s)
BIOS-versie/datum American Megatrends Inc. V1.9, 14-8-2012
SMBIOS-versie 2.7
BaseBoard MSI
16 GB memory

All running well

Thanks for the report, HvH... and welcome aboard.

I think we have the exceptions crash problem solved. In order for this to happen, the entire package had to be rebuilt, so I would kindly ask that the new zip image gets tested just to ensure that there are no hidden problems. This one runs fine on my system and noticeably faster than its 32-bit brother. I hope and expect that this would be the last test iteration, so here is the new link:

Oolite Windows x64 test build 0.3.

The watermark does not contain the SSE2 tag anymore. This is because 64-bit programs by default use SSE2 instructions so there is no need to have it explicitly stated.

Feedback is, as always, most appreciated and welcome.

Edit: Screenshots comparing the average FPS of the 64 and 32 bit versions on my system, where the performance boost is evident.

Seems to run fine here (both the Deployment and Test builds).