Reflecting projectiles with the shield randomly crashes ZC!

[XMuppetSB]

Okay, I think I've realized what's behind these random crashes in ZC. Whenever Link reflects a projectile with his shield, it sometimes causes ZC to crash, especially if the reflected projectile hits any enemy! And I think this might also be the case for the boomerang and the hookshot if the new boomerang/hookshot rule is applied.

[Saffith]

Can you tell if the type of weapon reflected makes any difference?

[XMuppetSB]

This crash sometimes happens with any kind of reflected weapon (rocks, fireballs, magic, swords, boss fireballs)

[Nicholas Steel]

This, this might explains some random crashes I had waaaaaaaaaaay back a couple 100 builds.

[erm2003]

You may want to look specifically into that rule that is mentioned in the first post. I was playing a 2.10 quest with build 1170 and had no problems using the mirror shield there.

[Gleeok]

Is there any way to get the crash probability up to say 50% or so? Is this happening only on newer quests, Is the mirror shield set to default or is it modified? Same for other properties.

[XMuppetSB]

Uh... I modified the mirror shield so that it would reflect sword beams, as well as boss fireballs. Plus, I modified all 3 shields so that they can reflect rocks.
Click the blue link in my signature to find my test quest (LOZ-Generation5.qst)

[Gleeok]

Yeah, but I'm not able to get a crash with your quest file.

[XMuppetSB]

Are you using the developer's source to play my test quest? Because I still get this random crash in build 1170. BTW, remember this thread that jman2050 posted (http://armageddongames.net/showthread.php?44917-Diagnosing-ZC-crash-bugs-How-YOU-can-help)? Well, maybe we should refer to that! Furthermore, as per the crash occurring randomly, it doesn't matter whether or not I edit any of the shield's reflect properties.

[Gleeok]

Try it in the newest build and if it still crashes can you try and narrow it down to the screen/projectile type/enemy that causes it?

[XMuppetSB]

Well, I would say that the magic is mostly behind this crash, but I have seen it happen with fireballs and sword beams. In addition, it could happen with any kind of enemy...

The point is... this is probably going to be one of the hardest critical bugs to fix...

[XMuppetSB]

Another note... this tends to happen when I leave ZC running for too long...
PS: jman2050, I'm having a very difficult time trying to figure out your method on diagnosing ZC/ZQuest crashes (http://armageddongames.net/showthread.php?44917-Diagnosing-ZC-crash-bugs-How-YOU-can-help)! I just don't understand that last step for some reason! What the hell am I supposed to rename the copy of the file 'user.dmp', and where do I copy it to?

[Saffith]

The name's not that important, it's just nice to have something less generic than user.dmp. Doesn't matter where you copy it, either; it just needs to be where you can find it to upload it.

[XMuppetSB]

Okay, but the problem is I'm not so sure how the heck this crash dump thing is supposed to work...

[Freedom]

it's just a record of the crash
mine was in microsoft/drwatson.

I had to zip it to get it to show as a downloadable file, I guess .dmp isn't something servers like to hand out.

all you have to do is, find it, copy it, and give Jman a copy

[jman2050]

The crash dump contains a record of all the information that led to the crash. The important part is that Visual Studio actually allows me to debug the crash dump as if it were an executable, and it's by that fashion that I can take a look at where the crash occured. By cross-referencing in the information in the crash file with the executable itself I can get a ballpark figure of where a crash occurs in ZC and go from there. Of course, this only applies to crashes within ZC itself. If something is screwed up in one of the many libraries ZC uses then things get a bit more dicey.

Point is, I need an uploaded copy of that crash dump in order to perform the diagnostic. Beyond that the user need not do anything else.

[Gleeok]

I didn't know VS could do that. That's pretty neat. Does it give you info from the call stack also?

[jman2050]

It only really gives you the complete goods if the dump uses a debug build. I have to be a bit more creative dealing with release builds (mostly dealing with stuff like disassembled listing files and a hex editor at times) in order to find out where the crash occurs.

[XMuppetSB]

Due to almost 2 months of no activity, I guess I'll put this on hold indefinitely...
If anybody else is still getting this crash, let me know.;)

[Saffith]

If you were still seeing this, it might be fixed now.

[XMuppetSB]

If you were still seeing this, it might be fixed now.

Well, I haven't been seeing any stability issues with the newly updated allegro.dll file here lately... But now I'm getting a new computer since I broke my old computer (like an idiot), plus, I took out the hard drive from my old computer (a Windows XP) and took it to Best Buy to have Geek Squad transfer everything off of it to the new computer (which is a Windows 7)