Surviving Mars - Game Crashes Occasionaly While Saving DELETING FILE [Linux]

[Chef Niko]

Description
Game Crashes Occasionaly While Saving DELETING FILE


Linux


Steam

What is your game version?
1001569

Do you have Space Race installed?
Yes

Please explain your issue is in as much detail as possible.
Sometimes, when I save my game it crashes and DELETES the save file! As you might imagine, this is incredibly frustrating, as I have to rely on auto-saves, and lose a lot of time and effort.

According to the game log, it is a segmentation fault, and the OS kernel is logging it as a general protection fault. Unfortunately, I don't see a backtrace in the logs, so I can't look in to it much further myself. Hopefully they're included in the attached crash files though! EDIT: Apparently I'm not allowed to upload crash files here.

Can you replicate the issue?
Yes, though not consistently. Simply start playing a game, then save it.

Attachments
File(s) attached

 

[AndrewT]

EDIT: Apparently I'm not allowed to upload crash files here

Only certain file extensions are allowed to be attached. If you .zip or .rar them it should be fine.

 

[Chef Niko]

Ah, fair enough. Thank you for the info! Here's a zipped version of the crash files (.crash and .dmp) from today.

 

[AndrewT]

The error I see in there just before the crash is:

[LUA ERROR] attempt to index a boolean value
Mars/Lua/Hints.lua(773): <>
[C](-1): global procall
CommonLua/Core/cthreads.lua(17): global StaticMsg
CommonLua/Classes/MsgObj.lua(22): global Msg
Mars/Lua/Buildings/RocketBase.lua(453): <>
[C](-1): global sprocall
CommonLua/Classes/CommandObject.lua(118): <>

I don't think I've seen that before, but to me it might indicate a corrupted installation. I don't have explicit instructions for a clean reinstall for Linux, but basically you should uninstall the game from Steam, move any valued save games elsewhere, then delete the Steam folder for the game if still present, plus /home/[UserName]/.local/share/Surviving Mars/

Then install the game again and run a Steam Verify, then test for this problem before restoring those save game files.


BTW when you say the saves were deleted, was it just that they were not visible in th egame but were physically present in your file system? Or not there either?

 

[Phoenix Khaotica]

Thanks Andrew!

I had another crash today, and the preceding LUA error is present as well, which certainly makes them seem related. However, I'm not entirely sure because of the time difference. 0:23:08:53 vs 0:59:59:900. I don't know how exactly those logs are written, but I'm guessing the errors are over 30 minutes apart.

I tried to find the problem and fix the LUA error myself, but I couldn't find Hints.lua anywhere on my filesystem. I guess it's referring to pre-compiled code files. I'll try turning hints off as a way to work around this, but it should really be fixed, and shouldn't be too hard to do.

Sorry I didn't get you the exact error from the OS kernel. I meant to do that, but got busy with something else and missed the opportunity. However, it was a seg fault with ip=0, which as far as I understand means that the program tried to access memory but didn't use a valid memory address (or perhaps none at all). So, if that's the case, it will really need to be fixed in a game update as well.

From searching around on-line, I see there have been a lot of reports of the game crashing during save in the past, and claims that it has since been fixed. This makes me wonder if the windows code branch was fixed, but the other branches (linux and mac) were never checked. I hope not, but if so, it should be trivial to just port the fix from one branch to the other.

This install is only 4 days old, however I will re-install it and re-verify again tonight, as you suggested. A corrupted file or two is always a possibility, and certainly one of the easier solutions.

The specific save file that I was trying to save is fully gone from the file system every time. This makes sense to me, assuming the operation is interrupted before the new data gets written to disk. I've actually had this happen to me before in one of my own applications, so I started saving everything in to memory, then writing it to a fresh file, then removing the old file and updating the new file with the correct name. It's a few extra steps, but results in less data loss.

I'll get you some more info soon!

 

[Chef Niko]

I'm quite surprised by this, but I haven't had any crashes since re-installing the game. Between a journaled file system and a content manager like Steam, that shouldn't ever be necessary... but hey, I'm happy for an easy solution!