Game Development Community

TGEA 1.7.1 AFX and Advanced Camera - Multi Player crash

by Brett Canter · in Torque Game Engine Advanced · 07/23/2009 (9:37 am) · 1 replies

Hey guys - I've been working diligently to track down a multiplayer crash and I'm having absolutely no luck. Before I get to the crash description, I'm working with TGEA 1.7.1 using AFX and the Advanced Camera resource. We've modified the stock game quite a bit, to the point that it looks similar to a Diablo clone with our own custom spells.

Here's the situation. I create a multiplayer game by hosting one of our custom levels. I launch a second instance of the game on the same PC, query the LAN, and then connect to the hosted game. The loading gets past the datablocks and objects, and the last line in my log is from line 94 of missionDownload.cs:

Mission lighting done

The new player appears on the server, and is even rendered, however at this point the client gets an unhandled exception. I've tried many times to debug and follow the code to the crash, but the truly frustrating part is that if I use a breakpoint and step through the scripts, the player can connect and play as I'd expect! It's only when I let the game go its natural course (with no breakpoint intervention) will it crash. I've starting to add many debug statements to the scripts but I was curious if anyone else had ever dealt with an issue like this? Thanks!

Brett

#1
07/23/2009 (10:43 am)
I knew as soon as I posted this thread, I'd figure out the problem. We have this crazy, flickering light effect in our level, and by removing it multiplayer began working fine. My first indication that this might be the problem is that the game lags out almost to the point where it's unplayable if you are lucky enough to connect to the server. I started thinking performance and the first thing to go was the lighting effect. Bingo :) Officially I guess we can chalk this up to some kind of syncing issue?