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Magician Joined: 18 Dec 2006 Posts: 317 Location: Denmark

I hope you are working at bugfixes, Zugg.

After upgrading from 1.? some weeks ago I have made a new session and moved a lot of scripts there plus adding new ones. Today I try to connect and CMUD blows up with some human unreadable exception. You may think that this application is short on bugs but that is NOT THE CASE! I have had so many problems with CMUD that I have had it several times and actually I have used more time getting CMUD to work than actually playing muds ever since the beta came out way back last year.

Problem with CMUD is that it's simply not stable - it's way too easy to get exceptions and there is no way to tell what went wrong. Then when you post the problem you find that it's difficult to tell exactly what went wrong because all you have is a lousy stack of machine code lines and if you have a whole system of triggers, variables, aliases and so on it's hard to be sure exactly where things went wrong.

I think before you add any more functionality or get too deep in your favorite mud you should make CMUD more robust. I don't care if it blows up if it tells me what went wrong but when I get no feedback from it I cannot help myself and I cannot post my problem because people will ask me what I did to get it and I will not be able to answer. And very important - I DON'T want to try to connect and simply get thrown out with no possibility of correcting anything. Right now I have to start from scratch for what I know. That's just not cool, Zugg - that's making CMUD an obstacle and not a helpful tool to enhance my mud experience as it should.

Wizard Joined: 03 Mar 2001 Posts: 1127 Location: London

Maybe lock this thread and refer to the last rant?
http://forums.zuggsoft.com/forums/viewtopic.php?p=121869

Magician Joined: 18 Dec 2006 Posts: 317 Location: Denmark

Well, I experience many problems with CMUD and today I just got one of the more serious. It's not easy to keep up a positive mind when you have yet to see the positve outcome of switching from zMUD to CMUD. I have worked a lot of hours to make things work, but it seems every time I get near something useable something is released that makes everything explode. Last time the problem was that upgrading to 2.18 was not exactly painless. Actually I have not recovered yet. I tried but then ended up in my present situation where I cannot even get to change anything as CMUD blows up before I get the chance...

Things is CMUD is blowing up a lot of times for me and I am not doing anything out of the ordinary really. I have a lot of scripts, variables and triggers but they should not be able to blow up CMUD. The application is simply not stable. And as I mentioned too, there is no help when it happens.

So while I am impressed that you remembered my last post I am not so impressed by your suggestion which leads nowhere...

Posted: Fri Jan 18, 2008 1:29 am

If you make a separate post about each issue you are having, the good people who frequent these forums can better help you.

Generalized complaints without any specifics don't give us anything to even try to resolve.

Perhaps if you separate your scripts into various classes you can disable them in groups, and then, by process of elimination, figure out which ones exactly are messing things up for you.

Help us to help you please.

Posted: Fri Jan 18, 2008 3:42 am

I can only echo shalimar's sentiment. We can help you determine the cause of a problem, or at least a figure out a way to determine the cause of a problem, but there's not much we can do without more details.

Also, exceptions aren't human-unreadable, they're just user-unreadable. It's a fact of life that the developer of a closed-source program will understand stack traces better than its users. If the dumps weren't useful for the developer, there'd be no point in having the crash reporting tool that CMUD has. If you can't send your crash reports over the net, use the option to save them to a file and post each separate bug, with its report, in its own thread. They're more useful than you'd think, provided you can also give some information about what you did to make it happen.

Posted: Fri Jan 18, 2008 5:00 am

Zugg is doing what he can to make things more stable. He's just one person in a two person company. He's not getting paid to fix anything. The only pay he gets is when someone buys any one of his products. And when you buy a product, you take it as in "as-is." You have access to the forums. You can tell if there are still bugs that need to be worked on. It's because of people reporting those bugs that Zugg will get them fixed. But it's not easy. And unless you want to contribute to fixing all the bugs, you really shouldn't complain.

Don't say that because you are a customer, you have a right to complain. You may have the right, but it doesn't help matters when all you aren't doing much to help the situation. Zugg has already said he's working on bug fixes towards the end of the month. He's not ignoring anything, but he has a real life, too.

To reiterate what shalimar and Fang have said, regardless of what you can or can't read, post what issue you had. What you were doing. Also, go through your classes, disable each one, see if you can narrow it down to just one class that's causing the problem. I've been able to report bugs much better by doing similar things. I exported all my classes and imported each one until I found out which one was causing trouble. In the meantime, give Zugg a break.

Charneus

Magician Joined: 18 Dec 2006 Posts: 317 Location: Denmark

shalimar : I generally agree with you but my main problem right now is that I get an access violation exception when I start my session - I really don't do anything. At other times I've got the same exception suddenly but not knowing exactly what caused it - might have been a trigger or something looping indefinitely. Most of the times it's hard to tell what I did because they don't occur at the same time over and over so it's difficult to force it.

Fang Xianfu : I often do send feedback on the exception but what happens thereafter I have no idea about. And yes, I hope they help Zugg somehow, but it doesn't help me so I can work my way around the problem.

charneus : I do believe Zugg does all he can but as you say he has to do everything himself and I do believe he has taken too much of a mouthful with this one. A better strategy in my oppinion when making CMUD would be to make it solid from the start and then add features in a quantity that he will be able to maintain it. I think he did it the other way around - making a lot of features with bugs and then try to make it stable. I don't think you've seen me asking my money back, have you? I'd love to pay more for this product if it meant improving it's robustness. I really don't think it's acceptable to get as many exceptions as I have. Being a robust application I'd say meant that it would not explode because of a "bad trigger" or something. If I can make a script that kills CMUD I think I have found a bug in the application - not in my script.

Do remember that I post complaints in here because I'd like to keep on using CMUD. If I didn't I would just uninstall and forget all about it instead but after the first time I installed zMUD I have yet to find another client that satisfies my needs. I do think however that Zugg should keep CMUD a little more simple and focus on the quality of it instead. Having 5 different scripting languages and a huge library of functions which satisfies every thinkable problem with several solutions might be a nice-to-have for some but it also introduces a lot of maintenance and as long as he is the the only developer to do this job I think he should be very careful before introducing new functionality - it's not easy to take out again later.

Apprentice Joined: 03 Nov 2007 Posts: 132

Posting complaints is fine and we've all had our moments of frustration but your complaints aren't helping to actually fix anything because you're speaking too generically. You need to start narrowing down these AVs.

For example, you say you get an access violation when you start your session. Are all of your settings enabled when you start the session? Have you tried starting the session with them disabled? Do you get the violation when you just start a session that has no settings at all? Try to narrow down the circumstances that are present when you get the error.

Or you can just keep complaining of course but doing so is not going to actually help anything.

Magician Joined: 18 Dec 2006 Posts: 317 Location: Denmark

Malach, do you have any suggestions about how I get to disbale settings before starting the session? I'd love to hear it beacuse I feel shut out from my scripts right now.

And yes I am speaking generally because CMUD blowing up constantly is a general problem - If properly programmed CMUD should not allow scripts to shut down its engine. This is not a function which doesn't return the expected result or a trigger that doesn't fire or something. If you guys don't have these sorts of problem maybe CMUD just doesn't run well on my PC - what do I know. All I know is that I have absolutely no clue about what's wrong and that is why I can't "help you to help me". If I could I would, believe me. As soon as CMUD blows up I have to restart it. I can let it live but it will not work properly anymore.

So my question to you guys is: Do you see these exceptions? It's always the same access violations exception I think. I tried reinstalling CMUD and starting a new session from scratch only copy/pasting text into it to make sure I didn't get any "bad" settings over and still things blow up now even resulting in me not getting the session started, not even in offline mode.

Wizard Joined: 11 Jul 2002 Posts: 1265 Location: USA

Suggestions on loading a dead settings file? Yeah I've done it a lot in beta testing...

First you need a new blank session.
Then you open that session in off-line mode.
Next open the package editor and click file open.
Select the main package file for your dead session.
Edit to your hearts content. Hopefully that is...

Failing that the package files are actually database files from sql lite 2 I THINK that is the name, Vijilante mentioned opening packages in it before in a thread somewhere as have others.

Magician Joined: 18 Dec 2006 Posts: 317 Location: Denmark

Thanks, that kinda worked but I couldn't see any problems in the scripts and all I got out of it was that the new session got the same problem as the original. Tried it a few times, also disabling triggers. I've seen an annoying line in the buttom of settings lately telling me that package is readonly. I fixed a problem like that lately but have forgot what I did. Can anyone tell me how to do?

Anyway, I see the scripts now but only use it seems is for me to copy what I's like to keep over in a new session that will hopefully not self-destroy like this one. It's not quite saving my day... Sad

Wizard Joined: 11 Jul 2002 Posts: 1265 Location: USA

Well, you can try disabling all of your classes when you first load the package.

I mentioned a while back in the beta forum I had troubles with my status bars when I was using @\package\class\varname syntax in them. I always get the / and the \ mixed up but it was the correct one.
Anyway I ended up making a main copy and a test copy. I would do what I told you on the copy to open it then I would delete one of my main root classes and try to load the session again. Eventually I found the problem and Zugg fixed it... Good luck.

Posted: Fri Jan 18, 2008 7:22 pm

It's slashes and not backslashes in variable names if I remember rightly.

You don't actually need to start a new session to edit your package - just close the sessions dialogue and use the untitled session. Using new session is useful, though - see if the problem occurs with no packages loaded. Then load your package and see if it starts. If you can determine that you really have created a Session Destroyer package, then sending it to Zugg will be useful because he can use it to reproduce the problem on his end. You could also try making a copy of the package and deleting things in it until it stops breaking your session - once that happens, you've found what's causing the problem.

Magician Joined: 18 Dec 2006 Posts: 317 Location: Denmark

Seems my problem was caused by a corrupt layout file. Zugg have actually mentioned this possibility in his manual under troubleshooting - didn't mention that you would get a hard excetion like that in your head. How about handling this problem more gracefully, Zugg?

Magician Joined: 18 Dec 2006 Posts: 317 Location: Denmark

Great! Messed my layout up again! Any solutions? Must be something triggering it...

Posted: Fri Jan 18, 2008 10:30 pm

Try checking to see if you have any code that modifies window layouts, or create capture windows. Another possibility is to do an Export All and reimport from a blank session. If the default windows generated are a little off, it may suggests the your packages may have stored some wonky window or module info.

Glad your making progress though.

If you get a good layout, try using the lock layout to prevent the good layout from being modified. Finally a back up of a good layout file will at least get you up and running quickly if you run into a problem again.

Magician Joined: 18 Dec 2006 Posts: 317 Location: Denmark

I do use the construction below to move certain messages from main window to another. Can this really cause the problem?

#CAP Gweth
#GAG

Posted: Fri Jan 18, 2008 11:27 pm

Basically, the only way scripts can affect the layout is by creating or destroying windows. So, assuming that it's your scripts that are screwing up your layout, that's why.

Magician Joined: 18 Dec 2006 Posts: 317 Location: Denmark

Can we agree on calling that a bug then? Smile

EDIT: As I understand the command and how I see it work is that it moves text to the given window and creates the window if it doesn't exist already. Maybe the bug is that CMUD gets confused sometime thinking that there is no window and tries to create a new one while the other is still existing... Just guessing, but I have always used several windows and captured text from the main window so that COULD explain why I get all those exceptions while others rarely do. Not sure how many people uses this option.

Enchanter Joined: 09 Sep 2007 Posts: 605

I created all my 5 child windows manually and I have multiple triggers with #CAP+#GAG in their scripts - everything runs fine. Also I have Auto-save layout turned on and lock layout turned off.

Enchanter Joined: 10 Oct 2000 Posts: 698

I'm using 2.14 still. I really haven't had any major problems. One issue I noticed was that when I selected a child window and then pressed the settings button, sometimes the editor opened showing the settings for the main window and no other windows. I fixed that issue by deleting my existing .mud files for all of my four child windows created by zMUD and then being careful to add and save them in the layout and saving a settings file to be associated with the main window one at a time. Finally, I locked the layout and haven't had any problems since.

I'd suggest that you might try to set up your layout in offline mode and make sure the windows show correctly in the settings editor before adding settings to the empty settings file. I tried to reproduce my original problem but I couldn't and by that time the next version was already released. I apologize for adding 2.14 information to this post; I'm just trying to help.

Magician Joined: 18 Dec 2006 Posts: 317 Location: Denmark

Well, help is great. Very Happy

I wonder if many of my problems have really been layout-based. It's the same exception and I do filter and then something that runs well in an ok layout could suddenly explode when layout was corrupt. As I've told before it has been hard to figure out why things go wrong sometimes which has made it hard for me to be specific about my problems.

Novice Joined: 22 Feb 2002 Posts: 48 Location: Latvia

Hi
Just my two cents.

Im having additional two windows plus status window information that captures and gags lines from main mud window
using stuff like
#CAP infos
#GAG
#WINDOW infos some info here

And I'm having no other problem than my layout not staying the same when I close the mud,
but that's due to Setting File being unreadable, afaik that is a known issue and will be fixed. No crashes
or anything connected with layout. I do happen to have crashes, but that's somehow connected with
settings editor, that as well is a known problem to my info on 2.18 and hopefully will be fixed.

Wanderer Joined: 04 Aug 2001 Posts: 79 Location: USA

I've been having a problem with my Cmud 2.18 and Cmud Pro 2.18 clients with regard to layouts.

I have one session running that uses the status window that is positioned at the top of my screen.

As soon as I try to run another session the whole thing goes haywire, Status window goes full screen, I lose the main screen and a status window tries to get created on the right side of the screen but just seems to loop over and over again.

So right now I am unable to run two sessions, one with status window and one without.

Magician Joined: 18 Dec 2006 Posts: 317 Location: Denmark

Well, I've had some problems with triggers and variables created in scripts which somehow was created outside the main window too. When this happened I was always in trouble so layouts probably can't be blamed for all my problems. I have yet to see if these problems occur in 2.18. If they do I will be posting when it happens to me. I don't suppose anyone out there know about the problem?