[quake3] Continuing to have OpenAL crashes

[David Chait]

Note that the crashes you posted identified that a music 'stream' was null, 
and that code was certainly not checking for null, assuming a 'clean' call 
was being made.  Something fails in the music system at some point (your 
system 'hiccup' for any length of time or something?), and either AL itself 
is getting into a bad place, or that AL music code isn't handling some case 
properly (where, it sounds like, the music 'fails' or maybe runs out, tries 
to reload, fails to reload, and then has a null stream it tries to 
deref...).

I haven't spent much time in the Q3 openal code, but I've spent a LOT of 
time in AL code in other game engines (most notably Torque, but also in a 
custom realtime streaming video player).  There are edge conditions with the 
ping-ponging of queued buffers that the code needs to handle well, and I 
found some wacky conditions where numbers "didn't add up" and I just had to 
go on instinct of detecting what seemed to be a bad/incorrect situation and 
'resetting' more things than I thought I need to.. ;)  Gotta love when 
coding becomes a black art. ;)

-d

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "ewe2" <ewetoo at gmail.com>
To: <quake3 at icculus.org>
Sent: Thursday, June 15, 2006 11:01 AM
Subject: Re: [quake3] Continuing to have OpenAL crashes


| On 6/16/06, Tony J. White <tjw at webteam.net> wrote:
| > > ^3Restarted OpenAL music
|
| > Does that "Restarted OpenAL music" message spam in your console during 
play,
| > or just print twice right before the crash?
| >
| > I don't seem to be having this problem with my ppc mini (also running 
10.4.6),
| > but maybe I just haven't played for 40 minutes at a time yet.
|
| Ok, two things: firstly, i am testing the missionpack singleplayer
| levels, and the one it seems to really have trouble with is the
| overdose level. During that level, in fullscreen and outside the
| debugger the game seems to deal ok with openal restarts but gets
| progressively more trashed and eventually crashes, typically with the
| hit-sound beeping everywhere. I just tried a smaller level in the
| debugger and it crashed within minutes, with the typical segfault and
| no openal restart. I tried again with another small level and got
| through it but by that time the same problems were cropping up and it
| would have crashed had i not quit the game.
|
| So, to answer your question, it seems a matter of how badly the
| buffer(s) is trashed when that message pops up as to whether its
| impending doom or not. At least I'm starting to see that message
| instead of a straight crash every time. It seems less stable under the
| debugger for some reason.
|
| -- 
| Emacs is an alright OS, but it lacks a decent editor.
|