Phys X now crashes the game since the new update.

Hurray!

So...just to satisfy your curiosity, here's the actual explanation of the crash. The point of my giving this explanation is to show how obscure this stuff is. Yesterday afternoon I just got fortunate enough to catch the crash in the debugger so now I am pretty sure I know what it is. I'm going to do more research/investigation this weekend and hopefully a new patch will be pushed soon after that and fixes it. As you all know, the GPU particles feature is not 'officially' released yet as we are doing just this, testing. Because PS2 is such a massive massive game, unlike a single person game, it's impossible to test against every possibility until it is running against a live server with a huge population.

It's not like these problems happen during internal testing, if that was they case they would already be fixed. These are problems which only show up in the wild, with crazy amounts of activity happening.

The 'crash' was caused when the code accesses a 'null' pointer. If you don't know what that means, don't worry about it. How was a null pointer generated? The GPU physics code keeps a mirrored copy of every object in the world for the particles to interact with, both static objects (like terrain and buildings) and dynamic objects (like people and vehicles).

Every time an object is added to a mirrored scene a counter gets incremented and every time it is removed from the scene it is decremented. Somehow, and I have not yet figured out why, the code is trying to remove an object *twice*. The second time, it accesses a null pointer and it crashes. Why is this happening? I don't know yet, the way the code is designed it is not supposed to occur. But, with catching the crash in the debugger, I at least know that it did happen, and I know how to at least avoid it crashing there in the future. Now, there is a chance that will push the bug elsewhere or cause a new problem. Such is the nature and complexity of computer software. I'm going to research it as best I can this weekend.

Now, you may or may not understand any of that explanation. And I'm not going to go into any further detail. I just thought it would be interesting for you guys to get an explanation of the complexities involved in these kinds of things.

Until yesterday afternoon I had never successfully caught this crash in a debugger. Why it's happening more now, than it did before, I don't know. That is what we call the 'butterfly effect'. I didn't change anything in my code, but some other changes elsewhere in the code by other systems has caused this new use case to happen and the problem shows up now where as it didn't before.

This stuff is outrageously complex is what I'm trying to say.

Thanks,

John

An even better twist.. was running a GT430 w/phyics and while FPS was in the 20 range, it was stable. Installed a new FTX650 2gb and now crash every 10 minutes like others. Change the phyics line to 0 and back to being stable.

That's awesome to get an explanation for what is going on . I do love the physx effects but to have the game run for about half an hour seems silly to leave it on. Thanks John for throwing some info out there! keep up the awesome work and hopefully this bug will get worked out.

Turning off PhysX doesn't help either.

Thank you for the update. Looking forward to the update.

bump

Same issue here. Can the devs please include a download for people who want to enable it? I have afeeling that its a issue since the patch updating certain physx files in the PS dir. Can we replace them with the old ones to get it working again? In addition 314 series drivers causes instability in the game due to the way it handles the gpu making our gpus hotter than stock causing them to over volt due to a driver / issue with the updated graphics wrapper in the patch. Thanks in advance.

All of these .dll files have a few bytes either added or missing to them. (These are infact PHYSX/GRAPHICAL .dll files, please google if need be to check for yourself) I also remember a while ago it was mentioned that shortly after we were allowed to enable PhysX again they were doing an update to improve the look of it, adding more things. Perhaps that was added and caused these crashing issues ?

APEX_Framework_Legacy_x86.dll
APEX_DynamicSystem_x86.dll
APEX_ForceField_x86.dll
APEX_Destructible_LEGACY_x86.dll

This one has a different time stamp below in comparison to a PS2 install from Mid February on another computer.
APEX_ParticleIOS_x86.dll

I've been putting in work here to try and get this working. My system was FINE until I bought a 660 GTX just to use the PhysX in the game. Now it's crashing. I can't decide anymore whether the new nvidia drivers past 313 series cause this or if it's in addition to those .dll files I listed above.

I found the bug yesterday and have a fix for it. SOE will presumably push the fix as soon as they can. Thanks for your patience. FYI, I do not work for SOE; I'm just providing support.

Do you get commission for finding bugs?

he knows about pointers, he bloody well better get a commission

PhysX is not officially supported... IF it crashes the game the only option you have is to disable it and keep playing, I doubt they will push a fix out as soon as possible if it is not even released into the game properly....

You can either have it on and risk crashing or not have it!

Whilst Bug reporting is encouraged it is by no means guaranteed a reward but you may get some appreciation!

TextureQuality=0 crashes way faster than when running textures on high.
Is it possibly related to a texture issue, or is this another issue?

I work for NVIDIA; and bug fixes get pushed in the general course of things. The purpose of pushing things is to see if the bug is, in fact, truly fixed. Thanks for your help.

Isnt the major update supposed to be today?

I hope at the very least they push out the APEX files we had before the patch. I rather enjoyed the extras, and do miss them since they did not (to me) overwhelm the gameplay. Even without them, I have really come to prefer the 660ti over the HD7870 I had.

some of the new phys x particles for explosions and such now lag my game more than they used to, and they are ugly now!