Intermittent crashing with EQPlayNice and Innerspace

[myxiplx]

Heya,

Following on from the discussion in this thread: http://www.lavishsoft.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=3728. I appreciate this could be a horrible bug to track down, and that you're most likely busy. I do have a workaround that so far gets me working again every time (details at the bottom).

I'm finding that most of the time, EQPlayNice and InnerSpace work fine together. I'm loading WinEQ2 first, then Innerspace and they play great together for dual boxing. However, every so often, usually after a client crash I find I can't launch the game.

The bug
Every so often I'm getting client crashes (usually while tabbed out to another window). When that happens, or when I quit one session, getting back into the game can be a pain. It doesn't happen every time, and I can get a variety of crash symptoms, with different ones happening apparently at random.

One time I found EQ loaded, and both EQPlayNice and IS were running, but InnerSpace hadn't been able to run any of it's scripts. Running them manually from the console later worked fine though. However, that's only happened once, the more common errors are:

- Logon prompt saying I need to login to use EQPlayNice
Both programs are still running however, and according to the system tray tooltip, are registered for some time. The login prompt can also come up when I have another session already running with both EQPlaynice and InnerSpace running. It's very rare I can login here, less than 1 time in 10. Cancelling sometimes lets me load the game, when that happens InnerSpace works, but EQplaynice hasn't loaded.

- Error saying EQPlayNice failed to initialise

- Lavish crash. One has been posted in the thread above, but just now I had one referring to a different dll:

Code: Select all

Software: Inner Space Kernel 1.09 Build 4602 (Sat Dec 08 14:39:30 2007)
Crash: 0x03026327: Exception 0xc0000005 writing to address 0x00000000 in module IS-Kernel.dll

It seems to happen far less often if I keep the focus on the game (both while playing, and while loading). If I have another program in focus as I'm launching everquest, it'll crash on load probably 4 times out of 5. If I keep focus on EQ, it's the other way round - it'll only crash if the game has crashed earlier. I'm trying to spot some kind of pattern, or a definate way to cause this crashing, but so far it's not easy. I can go a week without crashes, then get three in one night. Sometimes I can re-load EQ fine, other days I have to quit all the sessions and start again.

My Workaround Fix
The only consistent thing I've found is that a guaranteed fix to get me back in the game with everything running is:

- Quit all sessions, WinEQ and Innerspace
- Re-run the Innerspace installer
- Load WinEQ2
- Start Innerspace, let it patch itself
- Re-launch the game, don't swop focus to anything else as it loads.

That has a 100% success rate so far.

I suspect there's a dll clash, or a timing clash / race condition here somewhere, and that it's affecting EQPlayNice. Sorry this is such a wooly error report. Just making a note of things really so it's logged and on the off chance you spot something that might be causing all this.

[myxiplx]

PS. Nearly forgot: When the game is going to crash on launch, there's a noticable delay. I normally get the first EQ spash screen 2-3 seconds after launching it from IS. If it's going to crash there's a 10-15 second delay, then I get a login prompt or crash message.

[Lax]

Yeah, it's a timing issue. I'll have to patch EQPlayNice for this at some point. It was never really fully intended to be used with Inner Space, as the majority of EQ players using Inner Space would want to use ISXEQ (macroquest for IS) and would prefer to use ISXEQFPS (MQ2FPS for IS) instead of EQPlayNice. I don't have time to do this right now as I have to head back to the hospital shortly for family emergency sort of stuff, but I'll take care of it as soon as I can.

[myxiplx]

No rush bud, family comes first. Like I said I have a workaround. Good to hear you know what it is though