Project Reality Forums

Good Afternoon,

Is it me or does it seem like every PR server is crashing every other round/map nowadays?

I've played so much of Fallujah I'm about sick of it. It seems that there are only 4 or 5 maps regularly played because various ones crash the server regularly. I haven't played Marlin INS in ages it seems.

You seem to be very observant swampfox, many have not noticed but you did. You should consider applying for Scotland yard or the FBI.

Sarcasm aside yes this has been noticed and there are already quite a few threads on it already.

Two things I noticed recently that causes a lot of server crashes...

One is mapvoting, I think that is one of the reasons why PRTA got rid of it

Two is I recall R-DEV Rabbit saying something about playing maps with two similar textures in a row, and I've noticed it myself. I always try to urge server admins to do the same.

Not the fix to end all fixes, but it reduces the amount of server crashes IMO.

Acecombatzer0 wrote:Two things I noticed recently that causes a lot of server crashes...

One is mapvoting, I think that is one of the reasons why PRTA got rid of it

Two is I recall R-DEV Rabbit saying something about playing maps with two similar textures in a row, and I've noticed it myself. I always try to urge server admins to do the same.

Not the fix to end all fixes, but it reduces the amount of server crashes IMO.

PRTA EU still keeps crashing very often - more often than other servers despite the fact they don't run mapvotes. 1-4 games and it's usually done. It crashed today twice in a row.

Other servers (FCV, HOG to my experience) can run like 7+ games and then crash. I heard that if server has bad CPU, the kits on the ground cause some kind of "loop" and cause the server crash. IDK if that is even near the truth, just keep hearing all kind of interesting theories

I haven't played PR multiplayer in like 3 weeks, so I'm not sure how it is atm.

But I'm sure most players here strongly believe FCV crashes the most, then HOG, then PRTA (That's my experience, and my honest opinion but I don't know the statistics)

Unsure about CIA and the other servers

Alright


Let me be a bit of a dickhead and say what everyone are thinking.
Perhaps the Admins, developers and server admins should stop requesting and adding new gadgets to the game and start testing what is causing the ever worsening playability issue.

Since I have yet to experience any server crash two games in a row I would start looking at memory problems.
A good place to start would also be the version that people can remember worked without crashes.

Well, unfortunately it's not that simple.
We've already spent quite some time and effort trying to figure out what causes the crashes. If these crashes had been easy to solve, we would have fixed them already.
Also: Developer != Developer. A guy spending his time with mapping usually can not easily start debugging python methods. Keep that in mind when suggesting we should shift our focus, we can not simply hire more coders (to make that clear, we only consist of volunteers).

There is also a lot of voodoo around where people mention several cures to these crashes like avoiding certain features. From my personal experience they are usually nonsense. If the DEV team knows about certain features crashing the servers we inform the server admin team immediately. However, we are still more than happy if admins provide us with observations like that, especially if they provide strong statistical evidence.
In that particular example, I don't think Mapvotes cause any instabilities, we at NEW use them all the time and experience about the same number of crashes. If anything crashes the servers it's more the multitude of our functionality, not a particular instance.

But to make this clear: yes, the dev team is aware of the crashes and we do our best to figure out the causes.

Yeah the Voodoo stuff is rife. It's like when you used to play some games and thought bashing a button would make you increase your luck or something like this. (Oldschool RPGs).

But have you gone back to versions that worked? What is the latest that did work if you have done this.

I don't know if this was Dev top secret information, but one of the devs told me it had to do with the Refractor engine's limitations with handling memory server-side. Essentially, the server never dumps, or at least does a poor job of dumping information from the server memory. After a while (5-6 maps), the server crashes because it can't hold all of these limes. It sounds like a rather sensible cause for the issue, as the people who wrote the engine probably didn't plan on huge maps, objects, etc etc having to be loaded constantly.

I could be completely wrong, but someone definitely said that to me at one point in the last 6 months. The cause was known, but a fix was not.

PricelineNegotiator wrote:I don't know if this was Dev top secret information, but one of the devs told me it had to do with the Refractor engine's limitations with handling memory server-side. Essentially, the server never dumps, or at least does a poor job of dumping information from the server memory. After a while (5-6 maps), the server crashes because it can't hold all of these limes. It sounds like a rather sensible cause for the issue, as the people who wrote the engine probably didn't plan on huge maps, objects, etc etc having to be loaded constantly.

I could be completely wrong, but someone definitely said that to me at one point in the last 6 months. The cause was known, but a fix was not.

This is precisely what I alluded to in my post but I would expect anyone with minimal knowledge to be able to test this and would fit with the ever increasing size of maps, variation and so on.

Adding even more without optimizing anything, hacking the source-code or god knows what the issue is just going to get worse, if this is true.

By the way, I think we're down to 3-4 maps nowdays.

I used to play this game most during 0.8-0.9. I can't remember many crashes back then.
The maps were a bit smaller, there were some quite simple maps.

But I think the biggest difference is the smaller amount of variation and fewer assets.
Battlefield 2 had to load alot of different maps too, they weren't that small. But the server had to remember fewer asset locations.

Speculating in how memory works and what gets flushed after what is always difficult (some people love doing it in simple console games to achieve all sorts of cool effects) but I would start by trying to run perhaps somewhat less detailed maps with few or no variations between the teams and disabling certain assets.

One server should follow my advice or some similar advice by someone who knows more about this game and see how it goes.


For example: Run only US vs MEC maps (to be safe, the older ones that didn't crash like K-desert) with minimal vehicles and disable the majority of assets you can place except for fobs and what ever you deem absolutely necessary. Then run the server for one day and see if it crashes.

Stolt_Yugoslav wrote: One server should follow my advice or some similar advice by someone who knows more about this game and see how it goes.

For example: Run only US vs MEC maps (to be safe, the older ones that didn't crash like K-desert) with minimal vehicles and disable the majority of assets you can place except for fobs and what ever you deem absolutely necessary. Then run the server for one day and see if it crashes.

Great idea in theory, however getting the relatively small PR population to consistently get on that server has historically been an issue.

[R-DEV]Psyrus wrote:Great idea in theory, however getting the relatively small PR population to consistently get on that server has historically been an issue.

It seems like an issue that will not be solved unless the source code is released. There is only placating the the issues weaknesses, not solving it outright currently.

Meh.

Have servers based not on what maps you like but on map variations that can use the same resources.

Stop updating the game. Seriously. By updating I mean adding more and more fancy maps, equipment, teams, etc.
That's where we could start. The fact that the devs even could get where they have is a miracle considering the limited foundation that existed.

But it might be time to stop, or even regress.

Stolt_Yugoslav wrote:Meh.

Have servers based not on what maps you like but on map variations that can use the same resources.

Stop updating the game. Seriously. By updating I mean adding more and more fancy maps, equipment, teams, etc.
That's where we could start. The fact that the devs even could get where they have is a miracle considering the limited foundation that existed.

But it might be time to stop, or even regress.

Nope.

This is what made PR what it is now.. The continues development. And it will have to keep being developed because that is what keeps people interested and not bored. A lot of shit is still coming our way to play with.

Polish Faction, WW2, Falklands, New maps, More

I'm not gonna take advice to stop develop from a random dickhead( your words) as yourself. We are volunteers and we do our best to make a stable and optimized game. But developing new stuff is a whole lot more fun then bug fixing. This is why most mods never go past their first release. Meanwhile we spend an insane amount of time debugging and fixing stuff for months.

So yeah, don't waste your breath. Your advice is going to be ignored . all of your suggestions are speculations as you say yourself and all of your debugging methods will just provide more placebo statistics that are useless. So unless anyone here has the technical knowledge to actually help us out or provide us with new debugging tools then I suggest this becomes another locked 'server crashes everywhere ' thread.

And if AAA studios with millions of dollars and hundreds of developers that spend 8h on it, can deliver more broken games for 50bucks then I'd concider yourself some what lucky with a 10y old mod.

Tdlr: we are always working on fixing the game. As much as we will always keep working on new content and features for even more possible bugs.

One very important note here:
One of the main reasons why debugging is hard is because most of the crashes happen very deep in the BF2 engine. These aren't crashes because some developer used a wrong texture or some coder forgot a semicolon (they also exist but they are spotted and fixed rather easily)
We got a few ideas why they happen but without access to the BF2 source code it's incredibly hard to debug and even harder to fix. Keep in mind we're a mod, we didn't develop BF2.
BF2 already had a few problems with servercrashes, they were simply rare because BF2:Vanilla was far less complex.