GZDoom Crash on Starting Dragon Sector

[Daryn]

We are running into this issue now, with trying to start a new game with Dragon Sector. Here is what is happening.

We can load the pk3 up with ZDL and with Project Brutality ahead of it. When the game starts up, selecting new game, then choosing a skill level and confirming starts loading Map01. Then it crashes out and generates a report. I thought perhaps that PB was the culprit, but removing it from the load list so that only Dragon Sector is there results in the same thing. Every once in a blue moon, when starting a new game via the menu, the load will actually succeed. But most of the time, it's a crash.

I've tried with version 4.10 and then reverting to 4.9. Both exhibit the same behavior. Now, the interesting bit, is if I bypass the menu by just having ZDL start on Map01 with my preferred skill level, both of these versions will load the map just fine.

I started to think about what we did in the last week that might've led to this, and the only thing I could think of was that we updated GZDoom.

I reverted back to version 4.7.1 and tried starting and playing the maps, with and without PB. No crash.

Also of note, I tried with both Vulkan, which crashes and generates a report, and with OGL, which crashes hard to desktop and does not.

Another thing that may be partly related is the symptom I had when I did get them to load in 4.10. If I jumped to a different map, I might get a vulkan out of memory error.

The PK3 file can be downloaded here. We'll update the release if we learn something in here is causing the crash, but we need your help.

https://www.moddb.com/mods/dragon-secto ... tor-remake

For completion sake, here is also the raw test pk3 from earlier today.

https://ln5.sync.com/dl/e99ed6660/78fyw ... x-8r7viqpw

The crash reports are below. I have two more, but they're 56KB and the forum won't let me upload them.

Thanks. I hope you guys can help us drill down into what's going on. For now, we're just recommending people load into the maps directly or use 4.7.1.

On a personal note, I honestly can't thank you all enough for the hard work on GZDoom. We've been able to take our ideas and make them happen. It's been really rewarding for the both of us. But without GZDoom to build on, none of this would have happened.

[Daryn]

Hi guys. I wanted to add some more info as I've just discovered something. I am able to load the mapset with or without mods, in 4.10 from the main menu, if I load skill 3 or below. Skill 4 or above and the crash happens. I went back and tested this on 4.7.1 and all skills load. The workaround of loading into the map directly still works.

So if you've been trying to reproduce it, and can't, that may be the missing piece.

[PlayerLin]

Not sure if this info useful or not, I tried run this mod with latest dev build g4.11pre-76(or even the earliest one I can download, g4.11pre-24), when screen melt finished/near finish after choose new game and difficulty, I got GZDoom.exe went frozen with Windows' crash report message(In OpenGL renderer, the game will went glitched state if in Vulkan renderer for some reasons: I can see the bunny cursor if I hit ESC when the screen frozen on finished melt but it still totally frozen with nothing, I have kill it via task manager).

And if I went Map01 via console(Map map01), same results happened. The only way I can get Map01 loaded properly is: Load the other map(like Map02) first, then use console to load Map01 and it loads properly.
Of course change the screen wipe type to other(just not Melt) can just load the Map01 fine, via Menu or console command.

[Daryn]

Thanks for posting this here @PlayerLin. I was going to relay this info from your post in my release thread. Hopefully this will help narrow things down. I can confirm that on 4.10 release, changing the screen wipe setting to anything other than Melt also works. No load issues after making that change.

[CandiceJoy]

I've tracked down the offending bit of code and notified the developer of said code I'd fix it myself, but it's in a part of the engine I'm wholly unfamiliar with, and it's brand-new to boot.

[Daryn]

I've tracked down the offending bit of code and notified the developer of said code I'd fix it myself, but it's in a part of the engine I'm wholly unfamiliar with, and it's brand-new to boot.

Awesome! Thank you so much. Is there a ticket I could look at, out of curiosity?

[CandiceJoy]

I've tracked down the offending bit of code and notified the developer of said code I'd fix it myself, but it's in a part of the engine I'm wholly unfamiliar with, and it's brand-new to boot.

Awesome! Thank you so much. Is there a ticket I could look at, out of curiosity?

No, but you can open one on GitHub https://github.com/ZDoom/GZDoom/issues

[Graf Zahl]

This looks like an out of GPU memory condition to me. I can't start the game at all, it either crashes deep inside the GL driver or with Vulkan when mapping a buffer fails.

[Daryn]

This looks like an out of GPU memory condition to me. I can't start the game at all, it either crashes deep inside the GL driver or with Vulkan when mapping a buffer fails.

Thanks, Graf for looking at it. Interesting that you're not able to get into the game at all. So the amount of GPU memory seems to be a factor in how far it gets, then? Anything else that you need from me?

[Graf Zahl]

No. I can't do anything here. I got a rather low spec Geforce GTX 1060 3GB so if you have anything better it's no surprise that it crashes earlier for me.

[Daryn]

No. I can't do anything here. I got a rather low spec Geforce GTX 1060 3GB so if you have anything better it's no surprise that it crashes earlier for me.

What's odd though is 4.7.1 doesn't exhibit this behavior. It's something that's changed between then and now. We're bundling 4.7.1 for our full pack, but that's going to be problematic going forward as I'm looking forward to digging into IQM. You guys are putting a lot of work into adding these new features, and, hehe, I want to use them.

Either way, I hope someone's able to nail this down.

All the best, guys. I mean it. You guys have given us a wonderful platform to let our creativity run wild.

[Daryn]

I did a bit of playing around here, watching my VRAM use as I tried to get the crash to happen. If I start the game along with PB and have the screen wipe effect set to Burn, I load into map 1 on Brutal difficulty with 2.3GB of VRAM usage. If I set the effect to Melt and try the same thing, the VRAM usage is 2.4GB right before the crash, which then drops it to 0.8GB. Marisa told me she was using a 6x scale for textures, which brought it up to nearly 8GB. I'm using just default settings for texture scaling.

Maybe that intel will be helpful.

[Marisa the Magician]

Without any kind of scaling, total system VRAM usage goes past 3GB on load, so there's that. Without texture precaching it's more like 2.4GB.

Have you checked if the usage is any different with 4.7.1? It's likely that some change in how resources are loaded drove memory usage higher.

[Daryn]

Without any kind of scaling, total system VRAM usage goes past 3GB on load, so there's that. Without texture precaching it's more like 2.4GB.

Have you checked if the usage is any different with 4.7.1? It's likely that some change in how resources are loaded drove memory usage higher.

I just tried this on 4.7.1. Total VRAM usage in my case at the menu was 1.4GB. Loaded into map 1 brought it to 2.5GB. Adding gl_precache took that to 6.3GB. So, it seems like for me at least, on the nominal side, 4.7.1 actually uses more VRAM. 4.10 with gl_precache was about the same, though. The numbers I'm getting vary by about 100MB, depending on what else is going on with my system, but they're all in that general area.

[Graf Zahl]

You will have to reduce the resource load with such numbers. Not everybody has 8+ GB graphics cards and GZDoom's texture management is not made for it, i.e. there is no eviction logic if something exceeds the available RAM.