Dachannien
May 10th, 2007, 08:26
Found three issues during this evening's session with FG to report, using 2.0.11. One or two of these may be serious problems, although it's possible that the problem is somewhere other than FG.
1. Entire token catalog shared with players. Upon opening their token boxes, my players reported being able to see all of the custom tokens I had added in the "host" folder on my machine, instead of only the "shared" tokens. The tokens appeared in the top-level token bag on their machines (that is, they opened the token box and they were all shown right there). On my machine, the tokens appeared correctly within the structure of directories/bags I had set up. After I restarted the server (see #3 below), they were no longer able to see the extra tokens.
Unfortunately, I don't have any more specific data on this issue. Here are some things that we had done during the session before we noticed what was happening - they may or may not be related, but I figure a little crappy info is better than none at all: One of my players also uses the Full version. I had started preloading a map to my players before everyone was present. One player joined while the map was preloading. Don't know whether it shared the map with him or not. Added a new image to the campaign's images folder while FG was running and the players were connected. Shared that image with them right afterwards.
2. 100% CPU utilization while tabbed out. At one point, I needed to drop an image into the campaign's images folder. The image was obtained from an attachment in Thunderbird. I tabbed out to Thunderbird, right-clicked the attachment and picked "save as", and in the "save as" dialog where you choose where to save the image, it was clear that nearly all of the CPU time was going somewhere else. Files in the current directory were listed verrry slowly, and things were generally lagging while I was tabbed out. When I tabbed back in to FG, it appeared that everything in FG was running normally.
I was running Thunderbird and Firefox at the time, along with a few miscellaneous tray items. None had ever given me any problems before, even when running large DirectX apps alongside them and tabbing out.
3. Possible memory or resource leak. Late in the session - after FG had been running for about 3.5 hours - it became clear that something seriously bad was going on on my machine. In FG, the cursor in the chat box was shown twice as thick as normal, and the bullet points in the text in one of my story entries were blinking rapidly. A small area at the edge of one of the images (I had two large images open at the time) was blinking in time with the chat box cursor. Clicking outside the chat box to get rid of the cursor caused the other blinking to stop.
However, within a couple minutes, it became clear that things were getting worse. When I right-clicked on a die, one of the "how many dice" options was displayed as a solid white square instead of the normal icon. A couple of tooltips had a small solid black box displayed where part of the text was supposed to be.
I tabbed over to Firefox (which was also running), and an image that was shown in that browser window was instead displayed as a solid black box. When I tabbed back to FG, all the text in the chat window had disappeared and the two maps I had open were no longer visible, although I hadn't closed them. Typing /save in the chat window caused the text to reappear when it scrolled everything up by one line to display "campaign saved".
Suspecting that things were going horribly wrong, I told my players I needed to exit FG and restart it. This is where things went really bad. Upon re-entering FG, it complained with the "FG has crashed, there's a backup here" dialog. When I clicked OK and entered FG, however, it appeared that the entire campaign had been blanked out, as in the db.xml file was empty. I exited, but the backup was nowhere to be seen. (Fortunately, I had a fairly recent campaign backup saved elsewhere, so my players only lost the evening's edits while I lost part of the past week's planning.)
Even worse, however, the problem extended beyond FG. I exited the other programs I was running at the time - Firefox and Thunderbird - and rebooted my computer. When I restarted and ran Thunderbird, it was no longer able to find my profile, as if some important file had been corrupted when Thunderbird exited. (I was able to recover everything, and took the opportunity to upgrade Thunderbird, so no worries there.)
Anyway, this could become a serious problem for some folks if it's actually a problem with FG itself and not a problem solely on my machine. Unfortunately, I don't really have any good leads for tracking down a problem. All I can say is that we had six players connected to the server, and we had looked at maybe five or six large (roughly 1600x2000) maps during the evening and a number of tokens (including the "share all the custom tokens" issue listed above). None of my players had problems with the CPU utilization or with the resource leak, but I had viewed a couple of extra images in FG that I hadn't shared with them, so it's possible that it could have happened later on their machines as well.
In case it helps any: Win2000 SP4 nVidia 7600GT AGP running NGOHQ 97.92 drivers Athlon XP 3200+ 1GB memory 1920x1440 resolution
Sorry for the long-winded post. Let me know if there's anything else I can do to help track down these bugs. Thanks! :)
1. Entire token catalog shared with players. Upon opening their token boxes, my players reported being able to see all of the custom tokens I had added in the "host" folder on my machine, instead of only the "shared" tokens. The tokens appeared in the top-level token bag on their machines (that is, they opened the token box and they were all shown right there). On my machine, the tokens appeared correctly within the structure of directories/bags I had set up. After I restarted the server (see #3 below), they were no longer able to see the extra tokens.
Unfortunately, I don't have any more specific data on this issue. Here are some things that we had done during the session before we noticed what was happening - they may or may not be related, but I figure a little crappy info is better than none at all: One of my players also uses the Full version. I had started preloading a map to my players before everyone was present. One player joined while the map was preloading. Don't know whether it shared the map with him or not. Added a new image to the campaign's images folder while FG was running and the players were connected. Shared that image with them right afterwards.
2. 100% CPU utilization while tabbed out. At one point, I needed to drop an image into the campaign's images folder. The image was obtained from an attachment in Thunderbird. I tabbed out to Thunderbird, right-clicked the attachment and picked "save as", and in the "save as" dialog where you choose where to save the image, it was clear that nearly all of the CPU time was going somewhere else. Files in the current directory were listed verrry slowly, and things were generally lagging while I was tabbed out. When I tabbed back in to FG, it appeared that everything in FG was running normally.
I was running Thunderbird and Firefox at the time, along with a few miscellaneous tray items. None had ever given me any problems before, even when running large DirectX apps alongside them and tabbing out.
3. Possible memory or resource leak. Late in the session - after FG had been running for about 3.5 hours - it became clear that something seriously bad was going on on my machine. In FG, the cursor in the chat box was shown twice as thick as normal, and the bullet points in the text in one of my story entries were blinking rapidly. A small area at the edge of one of the images (I had two large images open at the time) was blinking in time with the chat box cursor. Clicking outside the chat box to get rid of the cursor caused the other blinking to stop.
However, within a couple minutes, it became clear that things were getting worse. When I right-clicked on a die, one of the "how many dice" options was displayed as a solid white square instead of the normal icon. A couple of tooltips had a small solid black box displayed where part of the text was supposed to be.
I tabbed over to Firefox (which was also running), and an image that was shown in that browser window was instead displayed as a solid black box. When I tabbed back to FG, all the text in the chat window had disappeared and the two maps I had open were no longer visible, although I hadn't closed them. Typing /save in the chat window caused the text to reappear when it scrolled everything up by one line to display "campaign saved".
Suspecting that things were going horribly wrong, I told my players I needed to exit FG and restart it. This is where things went really bad. Upon re-entering FG, it complained with the "FG has crashed, there's a backup here" dialog. When I clicked OK and entered FG, however, it appeared that the entire campaign had been blanked out, as in the db.xml file was empty. I exited, but the backup was nowhere to be seen. (Fortunately, I had a fairly recent campaign backup saved elsewhere, so my players only lost the evening's edits while I lost part of the past week's planning.)
Even worse, however, the problem extended beyond FG. I exited the other programs I was running at the time - Firefox and Thunderbird - and rebooted my computer. When I restarted and ran Thunderbird, it was no longer able to find my profile, as if some important file had been corrupted when Thunderbird exited. (I was able to recover everything, and took the opportunity to upgrade Thunderbird, so no worries there.)
Anyway, this could become a serious problem for some folks if it's actually a problem with FG itself and not a problem solely on my machine. Unfortunately, I don't really have any good leads for tracking down a problem. All I can say is that we had six players connected to the server, and we had looked at maybe five or six large (roughly 1600x2000) maps during the evening and a number of tokens (including the "share all the custom tokens" issue listed above). None of my players had problems with the CPU utilization or with the resource leak, but I had viewed a couple of extra images in FG that I hadn't shared with them, so it's possible that it could have happened later on their machines as well.
In case it helps any: Win2000 SP4 nVidia 7600GT AGP running NGOHQ 97.92 drivers Athlon XP 3200+ 1GB memory 1920x1440 resolution
Sorry for the long-winded post. Let me know if there's anything else I can do to help track down these bugs. Thanks! :)