Co-op appears to be fixed!

[ReCycled]

In its last iteration, co-op would go through 3 levels and then would crash on the 4th as it tried to advance. Then it would reset itself back to Base1 and go thru the same routine. Was on it today and someone had already done 2 levels but I managed another 4 levels before I quit. And nothing odd happened while I was playing.

Fingers crossed....
  

[ReCycled]

Spoke too soon. Still the same problem with 3 levels and then crash...,
Bummer.
 

[QwazyWabbit]

Old bug somewhere in all the co-op modes. The mods all share the same genetic defects from the old game code. I think it's related to the maps. LOX crashes in co-op mode after 3 or 4 maps IIRC, I can't remember exactly. It's been a while since I tried to track it down. I "fixed several different server crashing bugs in coop mode" back in 2005 but I didn't list the specific changes in my change notes. I will have to diff the source to find the specifics. Some of the cinematic events might be related to this bug.

[ReCycled]

I can't tell you how many strange things happen on this server. When you're on the level (3rd usually) which will be the one that ultimately crashes, as soon as the level starts you find that the "talk" function has stopped working, your weapon change doesn't work so you're stuck with one weapon and your fov is forced back to 90. Completely random and non-sensical things.
Today I was in Co-op on apparently the 3rd level. I have a bind that functions as "give grenades". As soon as I hit it the console came back with the message "no racial insults". I hit it again a few times and got the same repeated message. And no grenades. I didn't know "give grenades" was a racial insult.
I give up......
  

[QwazyWabbit]

Could be the game version that TP is using "gamedate = May 28 2008"

And or its running the R1Q2 server, Rich has disable the viewing of the *.cin and the *.pcx.


X7

Can't view cinematics in DM mode either but IIRC, there was something about level.next pointing to a .cin or something. I can't remember now. I will have to do some diffing & debugging this weekend to come up with anything more specific. Suffice to say, all the mods that would do a coop mode will exhibit the same problems.

[QwazyWabbit]

I can't tell you how many strange things happen on this server. When you're on the level (3rd usually) which will be the one that ultimately crashes, as soon as the level starts you find that the "talk" function has stopped working, your weapon change doesn't work so you're stuck with one weapon and your fov is forced back to 90. Completely random and non-sensical things.
Today I was in Co-op on apparently the 3rd level. I have a bind that functions as "give grenades". As soon as I hit it the console came back with the message "no racial insults". I hit it again a few times and got the same repeated message. And no grenades. I didn't know "give grenades" was a racial insult.
I give up......
  

The q2admin proxy is malfunctioning when the game DLL is in coop mode. It starts by censoring everything and degenerates until there's a crash of the server.  You might be able to get more stability out of the mod if you don't run q2admin on top of it.

[PANTONE 7717C]

Hey Recycled, I may have found a weird solution that will hopefully bypass the crash that usually occurs upon exiting unit1. If it doesn't then it's very unlikely that the crash has anything to do with the maps, which I suspect.
What I did was make a set of entity overrides that merge the maps of the first unit (base1, base2, base3) with the maps of the second unit (bunk1, ware2, ware2), creating one unit of six maps.
By merging the first two units the game will not reset the unit-spawnflags at the end, so if you use the exit elevator in base2 it will now immediately take you to bunk1 without intermission and reset, as if it's a normal level change within one unit.

(geek info:)
From base2:
"classname" "target_changelevel"
"map" "eou1_.cin+*bunk1$start"

"eou1_.cin+" - tells the game to include the cinematic.
"*" - the asterisk is what tells the game to reset the spawnflags and causes it to pause at the intermission camera.
"$start" - just tells the game that players should spawn at a certain group of coopspawns.

While it's safe to take out the cinematic (to rule it out) there will be problems if you take out the "*". One of the problems is that there are such things as crosslevel events. (You trigger something that is going to take effect in some other map.)
If the game does not reset the spawnflags after a unit-exit then the crosslevel events from both unit1 and unit2 will take place simultaneously and you'll get helpmessages and extra monsters that you shouldn't see yet.

You can have up to eight crosslevel events for one unit.
trigger1 = "spawnflags 1"
trigger2 = "spawnflags 2"
trigger3 = "spawnflags 4"
trigger4 = "spawnflags 8"
trigger5 = "spawnflags 16"
trigger6 = "spawnflags 32"
trigger7 = "spawnflags 64"
trigger8 = "spawnflags 128"

Originally unit1 only uses one crosslevel event and unit2 also has only one so they could easily be merged. As exspected both were set to "trigger1=spawnflags 1". So to keep them apart I had to change the spawnflags for the unit2 maps to "trigger2=spawnflags 2".  In fact I had to make changes to bunk1, ware1 and ware2 because they're now all linked to unit1.

I'll send quadz the files and hopefully he tries it out. It's worth the shot I think...

[PANTONE 7717C]

Damnit! I was just on the coop server and it started to restart whenever I changed a level (didn't matter which level).
Then I get a 'connection reset by peer.'
I didn't notice any changes on the server yet but with these random(?) crashes my possible fix won't matter much as it only fixes the crash at the end of the 3rd map. Maybe the server-restart script needs to be looked into? The soon as I hit the changelevel-trigger it decides to reset itself and kicks me off.

I give up......
  

I give up too.....
 

[ReCycled]

Hey Pan - thanks for the creative thinking around the Co-op problems. Merging the start levels was a good try, but I've started the session at other levels (Fact1 for example) and it will crash after 3 levels there as well. It doesn't seem to matter what you do, the invisible "counter" comes on and your time is limited. In spite of this there are still some regulars who occasionally show up and will play regardless. I remember when the level thing was non-existent but cheats were also wide open. So its a double-edged sword.
I wonder if we put on one of the non-Id co-op maps, what that would do. Say "Satyr" or "1492". Just the change of variety would be welcome.
 

[Pr0c3550r]

I haven't read the entire thread.

But, if co-op is still crashing like a while back, just re install the silly thing.

[QwazyWabbit]

Remove the q2admin overlay DLL to take it out of the picture. Run the straight game DLL for a while to see if it behaves.
The last time I ran a vanilla coop server it crashed due to some bugs in q2admin. Running 3.21 server and plain vanilla game DLL runs coop just fine.

[QwazyWabbit]

I don't know how WallFly is implemented, I suspect it is an external process.

Q2Admin is the source of the malfunction, at least in vanilla coop. I just completed a full game in coop mode from beginning to end without a crash, Q2 3.21 server engine and the 3.21 release of the game dll.

Q2Admin is a proxy DLL, it is named gamei386.so on Linux systems and the actual game DLL is renamed to gamei386.real.so and Q2Admin loads the game DLL. Q2Admin then filters everything that happens between the game and the engine.

In Windows, Q2admin is named gamex86.dll and the game is named gamex86.real.dll.