Tf2: New Weapons Disabled Due To Crash

[Mana 3,867]

On Wednesday Valve released an update which introduced a number of crash bugs for Linux servers (perhaps some in Windows too).

On Friday they attempted to fix this by releasing two updates (one required, one optional)

- Fixed a Linux dedicated server crash caused by the Replay director

- Crash would happen whether the server was capturing Replays or not

However those updates did not fix the crashes.

To decrease server crashes The Cowmangler and Righteous Bison are disabled.

There are still other crash issues for Valve to fix but in the meantine this should decrease the number of crashes.

[DrkEagle 15]

Man I hope Valve fixes this soon. Disabling the weapons has really put a dent on the servers this weekend so far, well, stocks 3 and west payloads are both dead. Every other Lotus server seems fine :/

[Tappy 8]

The weapons suck anyways, and resulted in a spam war in 2Fort, I won't miss them.

[luftwaffles 0]

So the new weapons will not be available? Is this permanent?

Other servers are running the new weapons without issues...what gives?

[DrkEagle 15]

So the new weapons will not be available? Is this permanent?

Other servers are running the new weapons without issues...what gives?

They're:

1. Probably running on Windows servers.

2. Don't really care that the server might crash as often.

Expect the issue to be fixed sometime this week after x attempts by Valve. (They're 0-2 so far.)

[SneekySneeky033 1]

Let's leave them turned off. Rocket spam is bad enough as it is without it filling the screen with huge particle effects, too.

[Sock 0]

Let's leave them turned off. Rocket spam is bad enough as it is without it filling the screen with huge particle effects, too.

After the Cow Mangler was nerfed to hell, most everyone swapped back to the other launchers, and there's typically only 1-2 soldiers per team now.

[legendslayer 1]

After the Cow Mangler was nerfed to hell, most everyone swapped back to the other launchers, and there's typically only 1-2 soldiers per team now.

It desevered to 4 second sentry disable is pretty screwed up

I'm not favoring engineer here i play sniper and heavy but that's just pretty crude to the engiee

and really screws over some game play, Plus they still didn't get rid off that effect

Plus i don't like it cause if i stand in the explosion i get momentary lag T.T

Which is lame cause i get 200 frames with the game maxed

To heavy partical effect

[Sock 0]

It desevered to 4 second sentry disable is pretty screwed up

I'm not favoring engineer here i play sniper and heavy but that's just pretty crude to the engiee

and really screws over some game play, Plus they still didn't get rid off that effect

Plus i don't like it cause if i stand in the explosion i get momentary lag T.T

Which is lame cause i get 200 frames with the game maxed

To heavy partical effect

The laser guns only do 20% damage to buildings. A soldier by himself with the laser guns isn't going to be able to take out the engi's nest. The building disable makes it great for support, and not much else - besides, if they have enough buddies to take it out while it's disabled, it was probably gonna go down anyways.Graphics-wise, I've had no problems at all with it. No FPS drops, no crashes, nothing.

[DrkEagle 15]

That's sad. Still no fix yet. Even though they're disabled, the servers still crash, just not as much I guess.

[Mana 3,867]

That's sad. Still no fix yet. Even though they're disabled, the servers still crash, just not as much I guess.

Valve quite literally do not know why their code is crashing. Despite the fact that their own servers are crashing (as they are Linux) and even though a bunch of admins sent them memory dumps. Oh and infact they have their own system which uploads all minidumps from crashing servers to them. But oh wait! Their minidump uploader fails sometimes and causes the server to freeze after crashing so it does not auto restart. That leads to servers being down until an admin can restart them manually.

Let me quote Valve:

Fletcher Dunn <[email protected]> to hlds_linux

We are still working nonstop on the linux server crash. We found and fixed several other problems in the process. I don't believe any of them are the cause(s) of the crash(es) that have been going on since the 22nd.

Fletcher Dunn <[email protected]> to hlds_linux

Hey guys,

A status update on the crashes. I have identified what I think are 3 different problems.

1.) There's a bug in the replay system due to a flaw in libcurl using a signal to handle DNS timeout. You can avoid this bug by using IP addresses in your replay config, rather than DNS names. We will have a software workaround in the next update or so that essentially does this same thing automatically.

2.) There's a random memory scribble. It will manifest itself as "double free" or "memory corruption" crash, depending on your OS. Some have theorized than this is due to the Dr. G weapons. We cannot confirm this.

3.) There is a hang. From what information I have gathered, the last thing in the log is something along the lines of "PreMinidumpCallback: updating dump comment." In other words, it is hanging while attempting to report the crash. This is particularly disastrous because it not only will it interfere with auto-restart scripts (unless you have some sort of watchdog), but it prevents the crash report from being generated and submitted, which of course would help us fix it.

A random memory scribble can cause all sorts of behaviour, so it's possible that #2 is the real bug, and #3 just a side effect that sometimes attends the main bug.

We have not been able to reproduce any of these issues internally, and we have had several playtests. (We, the actual developers, not a separate QA department and not a group of interns, playtest the game every day, on Windows and Linux servers.) However, our dedicated servers have experienced the hang.

It has been very difficult to track down and fix these crashes because we seem to have several regressed all at once, and at least one of the problems is interfering with the normal reporting mechanism. If anyone is able to save a dump file (they usually go to /tmp/dumps), I would be great if you could post them in some webspace and post a URL where they may be downloaded. Or, if your console log shows that it was uploaded, please post the report ID. The output will look something like this:

PreMinidumpCallback: updating dump comment

Uploading dump (in-process) [proxy '']

/tmp/dumps/crash_20110723191817_1.dmp

success = yes

response: CrashID=bp-445d6055-e9e7-420a-93b8-688a92110723

Grabs of GDB stack traces, etc with raw addresses, are not totally useless, but they are definitely much less useful. Even with symbols, a stack trace does not have as much data as a dump has. So if we could get some actual dumps, that would be really great.

These crashes continue to be our top priority.

- Fletch

Don't get me wrong though. Despite the fact that I have to babysit the servers quite intensely now due to these crashes/hangs. I am not mad at Valve or at Mr Fletcher Dunn. Infact I am quite happy that he is posting on the list and answering questions. Valve rarely did this before and I am now grateful. On top of that the HL1/CS1.6 users should also be happy that Alfred Reynolds is back and fixing bugs for that old game and actually talking to people on the list once again.

So in all, the situation sucks and looks quite unprofessional on Valve's part. These crashes are having a negative impact on the popularity of some of our servers, but atleast they are actively trying to fix these issues (and in process are fixing other outstanding crashes/bugs).

Not to mention that demoman bot crash fix is pretty cool, this has been going on for probably half a year now (now fix the engineer bot crashes too please!).