Recent Recurring Problem: Crashing at Startup

[Mercucius]

Hey Everyone,

I've had some weird crashing problems for the last few days and wanted to see if anyone knows how to fix it:

Starting with a clean boot in Win7, I can log in no problem. If I log out and try to log back in, the Simu Wizard starts up and I see the following lines:

--- Lich v4.4.8 is active. Type ;help for usage info.

Please wait for connection to game server.


Welcome to GemStone IV (R) v5.10
Copyright 2013 Simutronics Corp.
All Rights Reserved
>
--- Lich: narost active.

At this point, I get the following Microsoft Visual C++ Runtime Library window:

"This application has requested the Runtime to terminate it in an unusual way.

Please contact the application's support team for more information."

I hit ok and get another window. This one is "Ruby interpreter (GUI) 1.8.7.352 [i386-mingw32]"

It's a typical window for when a program crashes in window (the one that asks if you want to check online for a solution).

And, of course, the Simu Wizard closes and I can't log on.

If a restart the PC, I can log in just fine but, as soon as I try to log on a second time without a reboot, I get the same problem...


Any thoughts?

[4a6c1]

Sorry I can't help you in this thread I just came to say your sig is hilarious.

[Mercucius]

Lol! Right? Just walked in on those two in Solhaven on the pier to River's Rest 5-10 years ago. Thought it was a classic Gemstone moment... was torn between that and:

Veltori whispers, "Whew, that was a close one."

* Veltori just bit the dust!
Veltori has the last of his life force drained from him!
* Veltori drops dead at your feet!

The light blue glow leaves Veltori.
The air calms down around Veltori.
The bright luminescence fades from around Veltori.
The powerful look leaves Veltori.
The silvery luminescence fades from around Veltori.

Veltori's body decays into compost.

* Veltori's soul has been lost to the demonic.

[wandererjs]

Signature is funny.

To your topic, I've been having the same issue. Windows7, 64 bit. I only started playing again about a month ago, but I've been seeing this message for the past week or so.

Happens on login... and I'd say it happens more often when character switching, but that's hard to say as a character switch is a login.

I don't boot myself; I log out cleanly with exit, close Stormfront, then open another Lich login session.

[Mercucius]

Ok, I think I figured out what's causing it: It's NAROST. I had one character logged in then tried to log in with a second character (on a second account). Repeatedly logged in to characters on second accounts until, inevitably, the crash began to happen. Once it did, I switched back to the window with the character from the first account and took NAROST out of the "favs" list. I was then able to log in with the second account without anymore crashes and loading NAROST manually did not cause any problems.

So it looks like something goes wrong when NAROST loads at login... definitely happens after a few character switches (loging on to a character on the same account while another is already logged in) BUT I've also seen it happen after a clean exit... could it be some kind of TSR issue? And why would it start all of a sudden? I've been doing these kinds of character switches since November and this just recently started happening (less than a week now).

[Nahkaev]

I have this same issue. it can take me upwards of 10 attempts to log in sometimes

[Tillmen]

So, does removing narost from your favs fix the problem?

[loxe]

i have this quite often, (it usually happens when i get logged off for inactivity), what i find fixes it is to log my character into the game using the simu game entry (not lich) then log off and then log in using lich.. works for me every time

[Tillmen]

i have this quite often, (it usually happens when i get logged off for inactivity), what i find fixes it is to log my character into the game using the simu game entry (not lich) then log off and then log in using lich.. works for me every time

I believe you're describing the problem of Stormfront settings going through Lich to the Simu server. When the setting data is too large and it goes through Lich, the Simu server disconnects you. I still haven't figured out why. As far as I can tell, Lich is sending the same thing the same way as Stormfront, but that can't actually be the case. This problem can be avoided just by setting Stormfront to save settings locally. What happens when you log in without Lich is that Stormfront successfully sends your settings to the Simu server, and it won't need to do so again next time you log in with Lich. Eventually, it will happen again though.

The problem this thread is about is an actual program crash, not a disconnect. While Ruby itself is fairly hard to crash, it becomes much easier with the addition of the gtk2 gem used to create windows. If this external compiled code crashes, Ruby crashes. Lich 4.4 uses Ruby 1.8 and a gtk2 gem that is 6 years old. That's 6 years without a bug fix. I don't know for sure that a current version of Lich and Ruby fixes this problem, but I'm going to go ahead and assume it does until someone reports this error on Lich 4.6. For Lich 4.4, it seems like you can avoid the crash just by not having any scripts start on login if they use gtk2 (create windows).

[Nahkaev]

this crash happens without regard to the location of my settings save.

The most reliable 'fix' i can find, is that when I log in and crash, if i move the crashed character using ANOTHER character before attempting to log in again, the next time the crashed character attempts to log in it will load correctly. This seems to work most of the time, only in very rare instances has it not cleared the problem.

I do not have narost in any of my favs.

I tried upgrading to ruby2.0 and the new lich- and made myself stick with it for a week, but all of my favs were completely fucked, my variables were all wrong, and i had to kill every one of my scripts and rerun it to get them to go (going through a list of tons of stuff like sorter, voodoo, rnum, numbecomma, lnet, uberbar, enchantnotes, keepalive... etc etc every time I log in is just silly.) When there's a more reliable path/guide for updating I'll take it but for now migrating from 4.4 breaks way too many things for it to be worth it.

[Tillmen]

Well, that does sound like a new problem, or possibly a very old problem. I fixed something that sounded similar to this a year or two ago. If you're using 4.4.22, then I'd say this is a new problem. However, I'm not updating Lich 4.4 anymore.

The only things that should break right now when upgrading to Lich 4.6 are some random scripts that need updated, and Drafix's aliases. I'm not really sure what to make of the problems you're describing. It sounds like maybe your favs were not completely fucked, since you had to kill the scripts they must have been started. It may have just been the startup lag from lnet (which was fixed) that made it look like nothing was working, and then killing lnet made things work again. I'm not sure how your variables would be wrong, or what variables you're talking about. They could be missing if something went wrong with importing the 4.4 settings, or if by variables you mean aliases and you had spaces in the alias trigger.

[Nahkaev]

http://i.imgur.com/9P2AnEY.png

not sure if that's helpful at all.

I have recently devised a workaround that seems to, knock on wood, so far be successful. I took ;lnet out of my favs and replaced it with a script that waits 20 seconds and then launches lnet.

[Nahkaev]

just wanted to follow up here, if anyone is having this issue that the fix I implemented has thus far been 100% effective.

;favs remove global lnet
;favs add global lnetlauncher

lnetlauncher.lic:

sleep 15
start_script 'lnet'