Anyone else still need a SUR generator?
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Well I need some help to find out why, and I attached two of my faulty surs, if anyone can try them out and confim that they are not failing in your machines, it would be helpful.
Don’t forget it’s multi-part surs I am making, I haven’t yet tried single-part surs.
And as I said, vanilla surs on the same ships are fine for over 12 hours - I can’t explain that.
LS - I am shooting in the dark with the two Sort settings in Sur Builder, I haven’t found your explanation as to what they affect. And secondary sort, and what happens when it is disabled?
So I just tried all combinations until I got sur parts for all groups.
By the way some surs I made manually using Sur Splicer failed immediately, so have some confidence in Sur Builder as a superior tool. Just wish …!!!
Any help appreciated.
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The model’s points are sorted twice to attempt to reduce the ‘lines inside of the model’ problem. The first one is to get the first 3 farthest points. The second one sorts the rest according to the distance from the first 3 points. It didn’t always work though since the inside/outside of the mesh checking would occasionally fail.
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LancerSolurus wrote:
The model’s points are sorted twice to attempt to reduce the ‘lines inside of the model’ problem. The first one is to get the first 3 farthest points. The second one sorts the rest according to the distance from the first 3 points. It didn’t always work though since the inside/outside of the mesh checking would occasionally fail.Ah, OK that gives a clue then - this problem was also in the two exporters, v1.1 and more in v1.2 - and in surs generated badly by those, the surs fail.
Bejaymac advised importing the sur files into MilkShape, hiding the top of each sur part and looking inside for these problems.
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StarTrader wrote:
OK - have you all tried extended testing? Give your ship and sur to NPCs attacking a base and let them be killed in waves until you get a crash. Or hopefully not.All my attempts fail, some take up to 20-30 minutes but they all fail, testing them one at a time.
When I change the same ship’s sur to a vanilla one (not even resizing), the game runs for over 12 hours without problems.
I’ve not tried single-part surs, I would like to get to the bottom of this problem.
Here are a couple of the surs that fail, you can try them on one of your small ships and let me know if you also crash - then maybe we can diagnose together, or if you don’t get a failure for several hours, then it has to be my laptop environment…
Thanks in advance.
Am I being ostracised or did this request just slip by unnoticed?
If anyone would be kind enough to test these two surs in the zip below for at least overnight I would be very grateful? They fail for me within 30 minutes.
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I’m sorry ST for being lazy when it comes to an important subject as this - which really is, for it’s always good to get one step forward in the direction of the perfect SUR file…
…Just a recommendation. Considering these are multi-part SURs, I think more people would volunteer to test if you included the CMP files as well - after all the object names have to match for the SUR to work. I don’t know about the what’s and whatnot’s when testing the SUR as a base or when given to npc’s, but for a player ship I know the SUR names must match the CMP names - and building a dummy CMP would take considerable effort for testing purposes.
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Yes you’re right BBalazs - slipped my mind.
They should still work on the root part, because the vanilla surs obviously only attach the root part, all I did was to rename the vanilla sur.
Anyway here are the ship cmps, surs and mat files too.
The intention as you say is to understand why a sur made with Sur Builder might fail so we can prevent it.
It could be something else on my PC, and this is why I would appreciate someone testing these surs for several hours for me.
Many thanks.
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I can now confirm that single-part surs for the same two ships also fail within 30 minutes.
Sad.
Retested yet again with vanilla surs - all runs well for over 3 hours.
Here are the single-part surs if anyone would please test these and the multi-part ones (the ship cmps are the same) I would appreciate the help, it would tell me if the crashes are genuine or if it is indeed my setup.
The only thing I can think to cause this type of crash after a certain amount of time is perhaps large numbers of error messages accumulating in a hidden FL Server log or buffer?
Does anyone know where there is such a log/buffer? I don’t mean C:\FL-Server-errors.log, I know about that one and there is nothing in it.
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I have tried the DevilRay multipart .sur yesterday evening and after I came back 1 1/4 hours later the server had crashed and the client deconnected. So there really seems to be some problem with your .surs. Maybe I should try some of mine over a longer period of time…
Also I have had random crashes with vanilla models only for some time, and they get a lot less frequent when I remove the rh gunship from play (only npc references).
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Very many thanks, Quarks, much appreciated.
Yes you see, this is my point - I don’t think people are testing their new surs long enough.
If someone else can also do the same testing and get back to me then we can see if it is just me and you that have the problems.
Also if anyone can please generate their own new surs for the two ships and test them successfully (at least 4 hours please guys), then I can test them again, and if they are good on my machine too, then we might be able to see the problems that Sur Builder might cause and avoid them.
Can anyone tell me if such a hidden error log or error buffer exists where sur errors might be accumulating and causing the FL Server crashes?
And how to expose it?
Or is there another way to get the same result and see what is failing?
That might give us all a big help to find the causes of problems (not only sur-related) more quickly.
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How are you testing them? Putting them on npc ships or sitting in space with a player ship?
The only time the UnderVerse had a bad sur is when we first released 2.22 a year and a half ago. Pvp worked fine, which is how we tested everything. This was a large train (vanilla ship) converted for players to use.
Turns out what made it crash was when an npc got through the shield. The first time they tapped directly on the hull, server crashed. Players had no such effect.
Just saying this to help you test your surs more quickly, at least for this effect.
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StarTrader wrote:
OK - have you all tried extended testing? Give your ship and sur to NPCs attacking a base and let them be killed in waves until you get a crash. Or hopefully not.Irrespective of how many surs we have made, none of the ones I have made with sur builder worked for more than 2 hours for me. Of the many surs that I made manually, using Sur Splicer, most of them worked from the first try and continued to work.
In this case with the Sur Builder surs, the problem may not show in the game for a long time, because we probably would not blast the same number of the same type of ship before going to another system.
But then there are rare crashes maybe many days apart, and we don’t know the reason.
So in my case I want to be sure the surs are not the cause.
Since I can run the same testing encounter cleanly for more than 12 hours using vanilla surs, this means I can test my surs, one at a time, in the same encounter and if it fails within an hour then it is a bad sur.
This is what is happening, so I would be very grateful if others can test my ships and surs in the same way and confirm they fail (or do not fail).
It is in all our interests to find out why the surs are not reliable, so that the kings of progamming among us can have more information to make a better sur generator tool - unless other modders don’t want one?
Thanks guys.
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So, just to give you some more information, I ran four LS sur generated ships in a system, in groups of 20 by themselves, for 6 hours where they continuously blew each other up without a crash.
I’ll download your models and surs and see if I get the same results.
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Thanks Sushi.
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To speed things up a bit for me…
Would anyone please make me a pair of surs for the two ships in my zip using Sur Builder and let me have them back so I can test them?
Thanks.
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There you are.
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Many thanks, Quarks! Phew, you’re a fast one on a good day!
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Quarks -
I am sad (but also glad) to say that…
Sadly both surs fail within 3 to 10 minutes in the same way mine do!
I tried them one at a time, and ran the test 3 times for each sur. Same system, same encounter, just changed difficulty to select the right ship and sur.
Very many thanks for making them.
Hopefully Sushi can also confirm that mine fail on his machine, and I’ll see what I can do to take it on from there.
Many thanks in advance guys.
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Started the NPC test now. It’s just an empty system, with one base, and those two models and surs continuously blowing each other up.
edit: 1hr30min in : no crashes
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Since I have this problem, too…I just jeplaced the li_fighter’s model with Startrader’s ship and edited the loadouts, then edited the manhattan pop zone, nothing else. So usually there should not be any problem.
