Oolite Bulletins

Twice now I have had Oolite quit for no apparant reason.

I am running it on an old Dell Inspirion 6000, 1.6Ghz with 2Gig Ram and XP (S/pack 3).

Built in video card details; Mobile Intel(R) 915GM/GMS,910GML Express Chipset Family.

No other software running except my wirless modem running with Outlook Express.

Always seems to happen as I near a Space Station/Planet and the graphics become more demanding.

It's a sod when you have just shot up a load of pirates and amassed a good amount of bounty/cash.

Any clues ?

Mrfirkin wrote:

Twice now I have had Oolite quit for no apparant reason.

I am running it on an old Dell Inspirion 6000, 1.6Ghz with 2Gig Ram and XP (S/pack 3).
Built in video card details; Mobile Intel(R) 915GM/GMS,910GML Express Chipset Family.
No other software running except my wirless modem running with Outlook Express.
Always seems to happen as I near a Space Station/Planet and the graphics become more demanding.
It's a sod when you have just shot up a load of pirates and amassed a good amount of bounty/cash.
Any clues ?

The technical people will be along shortly.
Meanwhile, I would suggest that you post your latest log. You can normally find it in:
C:/oolite/oolite.app/logs/latest.log

That should contain some clues as to what is causing the crash.

Oh, I almost forgot:
I know you have been around for a few days, but, as this is your first post.
Hi Mrfirkin, and welcome to the friendliest board this side of Riedquat™

Mrfirkin: Which version of Oolite are you running? May I recommend trying with the latest nightly build? I think we fixed one or two crashers since the release of the latest official version, v1.75.3.

Oh, and as Gimi said, the Latest.log after a crash would be useful. If immediately after the crash you see a non-empty file named stderr.txt in the game's root folder, please post its contents as well.

Hi Chaps,

Thanks for the welcome and advice. I'll dig out those files and upload them.

I have been playing Elite (C64, Amiga and PC) versions since 1986. Amazing how at 51 I'm still addicted!

This is the most amazing version I've ever seen. I only found out about it recently after a Google search looking for other Elite stuff.

Keep up the great work.

Cheers,

Paul.

Welcome aboard, Mrfirkin... you're in good company. I'm 57 and I've been addicted to the great game since the BBC version.

El Viejo wrote:

Welcome aboard, Mrfirkin... you're in good company. I'm 57 and I've been addicted to the great game since the BBC version.

Thanks El Viejo!

Yes, those years have slipped by too quickly. Must have been having too much fun playing Elite to have noticed!

Cheers,

Paul.

PS,

I am using the latest version by the way.... 1.7.53

another_commander wrote:

If immediately after the crash you see a non-empty file named stderr.txt in the game's root folder, please post its contents as well.

Hi AC.
For the benefit of my learning, what is stderr.txt, what does it contain and is it generated by all versions of Oolite. Is there a way of forcing it's creation. Never seen the file before.

stderr.txt is generated in windows systems only, due to the poor support for standard posix stuff on that platform.

To get the identical behaviour in Linux you can add " 2>~/stderr.txt" (the text inside the quotation marks) to the the end of your normal Oolite shortcut.


By the way, you can look up the system wide error log on Macs to get the equivalent information, so maybe there's an equivalent place on Linux systems I'm not aware of...


Hmm again, it's probably better to ask Getafix or Micha!

Gimi wrote:

Hi AC.
For the benefit of my learning, what is stderr.txt, what does it contain and is it generated by all versions of Oolite. Is there a way of forcing it's creation. Never seen the file before.

The file stderr.txt is not an Oolite file per se, it is an error diagnostics file that belongs to SDL. If you set Explorer to view oolite.app when you start Oolite, you will see two files appearing in the directory list: stderr.txt and stdout.txt. These two are the result of the SDL library re-directing the standard output and standard error streams to file instead of a command console. Many of the libraries we use send output to standard error in case of errors and the same happens when an assertion failure occurs, while generic messages may be outputted in standard out, although very rarely with the libraries we are using. If the program is exited normally and stderr.txt and stdout.txt are empty at the end of execution, they are erased automatically, which is why you normally don't see them, otherwise (such as in an abnormal program termination) they remain and their contents can be viewed. When we are asking for stderr.txt, we are looking basically for assertion failures or any other possible output send to standard error, since it generally helps pinpoint the source of error pretty nicely. These files appear on the Windows and should also be available on Linux versions of SDL (although I am not sure where Linux might be stroring them).

Gerenally, if you go in oolite.app while the program is running, you should be able to see these two files there. Under normal circumstances, they should both be 0 bytes long.

Edit: Looks like Kaks has got it right for stderr on Linux.

Thank you both. That was useful. I will be on the outlook for the file in the event of a crash.