Client Crashes During Startup

[Qweesdy]

Hi,

After latest update the client reaches "Loading 23%" and crashes. Nothing I do (deleting/create new world, disabling anything and everything in options, ....) makes any difference.

When it crashes, the logs say it's trying to parse "data\/models/ground\/Atmosphere.mesh.xml" (note: yes, the directory separators are all screwed up like this) and starts crapping its pants with "org.xml.sax.SAXParseException; linenumber: 6; columnNumber: 22; The markup in the document following the root element must be well formed".

Essentially, an XML file isn't valid/well formed.

After this, rather than stopping because it can't continue, it goes into a"let's crash continuously in a grand loop of mental retardation" spiral while repeatedly trying to display a "critical error" dialog box that is impossible to see normally (because it's behind the game's window).

Note that (after using "control+alt+delete" to make it possible to see the dialog box) the dialog box tries to blame Intel; because apparently recent products from the graphics manufacturer with the largest market share, running the latest video drivers, on an OS (Windows 8.1) that is so rare that the game doesn't recognise it, must be the cause of a bad XML file(!)

 

[Qweesdy]

Hi,

So, experimenting...

I took a look at that XML file, and it was missing about 10 lines at the top causing a bunch of "end tag with missing starting tag" problems. I copied the file from an older install of StarMade and that seemed to fix the problem, except...

It stopped at 26% (with the same "let's crash continuously in a grand loop of mental retardation" spiral) complaining about a different XML file (a character mesh or something). I copied that file from an older install of StarMade and that seemed to fix this problem; except...

It stopped at 27% (with the same "let's crash continuously" spiral) complaining that a third XML file didn't exist. Currently I'm doing a "download everything all over again" thing so I don't have to manually fix every frigging file.

While I'm waiting for everything to download again I figured it might help if I summarized all the bugs/problems here:

a) Either the official version downloaded from StarMade's server is full of corrupt XML files; or the installer/updater is a piece of crap that fails to ensure that the downloaded files haven't been "corrupted in transit" (e.g. check CRCs for each file); or the installer/updater is corrupting files after checking they're correct; or some combination of 2 or more of these options.

b) The game knows what was wrong (and says in the logs if the user is masochistic enough to go hunting for the right log file), but fails to include this information in the "critical error" dialog box.

c) The "critical error" dialog box is hidden and mostly useless (because it's hidden, the user sits there waiting for "loading" to increase without any idea that the game has already crashed).

d) The "critical error" dialog box falsely attempts to imply that Intel is the problem; even though (at least on my machine) it never has been for any game, including StarMade, regardless of whether the driver is the latest or not.

e) The game doesn't correctly stop on the first error (causing a "let's crash continuously in a grand loop of mental retardation" spiral).

f) Meshes are stored as insanely bloated XML puss; which (as compared to a binary file format) increases download times, increases disk space wasted, increases disk IO during game startup and adds a whole pile of unnecessary parsing overhead during game startup. Note that the total of "*.mesh.xml" files currently adds up to several hundred MiB (over 20% of the downloaded files); and because these files contain thousands of lines of meaningless numbers the typical lame excuse for using XML ("human readability") does not apply.

 

[DrTarDIS]

COuld also be HDD failure (seek or write, bad sectors) or bad ram pages, or an unstable v-rail in your PSU. There's a lot of reasons instruction-sets can fail Your windows CD/DVD should have a ramtest program you can boot and run.
DO tell if redownloading everything, or maybe starting a new install directory, fixes yer issue.

 

[Qweesdy]

Hi,

DO tell if redownloading everything, or maybe starting a new install directory, fixes yer issue.

I did start from a new install originally (and I think that's part of why I'm having trouble - instead of reusing good files from the previous install it's downloading new files for everything and screwing some of them up). Note that the files don't contain random bytes like you'd expect for faulty RAM, but are missing data at the start of the file, or are empty files, or the files are missing entirely.

I've re-downloaded everything, and this time the XML files are fine and the game runs; but the block textures are all wrong (e.g. the glass on the spawn shop uses the "salvager computer" texture and the undeathenators are using "cannon module" texture, the ship mode and ship cores are alternating between several different textures (dirt, rock, etc) because they're animated, etc.

COuld also be HDD failure (seek or write, bad sectors) or bad ram pages, or an unstable v-rail in your PSU. There's a lot of reasons instruction-sets can fail Your windows CD/DVD should have a ramtest program you can boot and run.

Everything else (all other games, files, applications, downloads, etc) are perfectly stable and show no signs of issues. I'm currently running memtest86+ on that computer (it takes a while as there's 32 GiB of RAM, but it's done one pass and shows no sign of any problem so far); and highly doubt it's hard disk (as it's a mechanical disk and they're full of "SMART" to detect problems before they happen, and checksums, etc to detect problems if they happen, and if problems got past all that it wouldn't suddenly effect multiple files from one application and nothing else).

I'm also downloading the "StarMade developer build" on this computer (while the other computer is doing the memory test), because it's a single zip file containing everything and I can bypass StarMade's installer. Note that I expect that the file corruption problem is the installer itself (e.g. downloading many files at the same time and having race conditions or something), or the server that I'm downloading files from. The rest of the problems (extremely poor error handling, etc) are just the way StarMade has always been.

 

[SmilingDemon]

the complete models folder is about 39MB hardly 20 % of the install download (more like 7%)
and those files are simple txt files ... can be opened with notepad ++ easily readable.
so i do assume something goes very wrong on your end

 

[DrTarDIS]

Hi,



I did start from a new install originally (and I think that's part of why I'm having trouble - instead of reusing good files from the previous install it's downloading new files for everything and screwing some of them up). Note that the files don't contain random bytes like you'd expect for faulty RAM, but are missing data at the start of the file, or are empty files, or the files are missing entirely.

I've re-downloaded everything, and this time the XML files are fine and the game runs; but the block textures are all wrong (e.g. the glass on the spawn shop uses the "salvager computer" texture and the undeathenators are using "cannon module" texture, the ship mode and ship cores are alternating between several different textures (dirt, rock, etc) because they're animated, etc.



Everything else (all other games, files, applications, downloads, etc) are perfectly stable and show no signs of issues. I'm currently running memtest86+ on that computer (it takes a while as there's 32 GiB of RAM, but it's done one pass and shows no sign of any problem so far); and highly doubt it's hard disk (as it's a mechanical disk and they're full of "SMART" to detect problems before they happen, and checksums, etc to detect problems if they happen, and if problems got past all that it wouldn't suddenly effect multiple files from one application and nothing else).

I'm also downloading the "StarMade developer build" on this computer (while the other computer is doing the memory test), because it's a single zip file containing everything and I can bypass StarMade's installer. Note that I expect that the file corruption problem is the installer itself (e.g. downloading many files at the same time and having race conditions or something), or the server that I'm downloading files from. The rest of the problems (extremely poor error handling, etc) are just the way StarMade has always been.

Have you checked that all your thermals are sub-70?
Tried right-click "run as admin" for the launcher&installing?

 

[Qweesdy]

Hi,

the complete models folder is about 39MB hardly 20 % of the install download (more like 7%)
and those files are simple txt files ... can be opened with notepad ++ easily readable.
so i do assume something goes very wrong on your end

You're right; but it's even more strange.

I downloaded from the "*.zip" development build and copied those files on top of the existing install, and it fixed nothing (same dodgy textures as before). Then I changed the name of the directory and unpacked the "*.zip" into a new/empty directory; and that fixed everything.

Then I compared the old (dodgy) directory's contents with the new (working) directory's contents; and... The old directory has a whole bunch of extra mesh files, like "cate 1 human.mesh.xml" (12 MiB), "proxy-body.mesh.xml" (10 Mib), "proxy-body-old.mesh.xml" (10 Mib), etc; which don't exist in the new (working) directory. These extra mesh files look like perfectly valid (well formed) XML and contain the same stuff all the normal mesh files do. With the extra files that shouldn't exist, it does add up to over 200 MiB of mesh files. I'm not sure what else the installer downloaded - if it's only extra mesh files, or extra files of all kinds.

Note that while it's at least plausible that something (e.g. faulty RAM, failing hard disk) might corrupt files; I think it's extremely improbably that these things can make valid XML files appear out of thin air. If I had to guess, I'd suspect someone was/is changing the files on the server while I'm downloading, causing me to get "half old, half new".

and those files are simple txt files ... can be opened with notepad ++ easily readable.

The XML mesh files are "viewable with a text editor", but being able to view something and being able to understand/read it are 2 very different things. For a simple example, open that "data/models/ground/Atmosphere.mesh.xml" file (the file I first had problems with) in a text editor and see if you can figure out what shape it describes - Is it a sphere? Is it a banana? Is it the shape of a monkey riding a unicorn while playing a trumpet? That one file alone is over 51 thousand lines (and 2.72 Mib of "OS disk cache") of idiotic bloat that the game has to chew through every time it starts up. If you estimate it as "three 32-bit floats per line for 51 thousand lines" it could be about 600 KiB instead (about 4 to 5 times smaller) and probably 100 times faster to parse too.

 

[SmilingDemon]

I've re-downloaded everything, and this time the XML files are fine and the game runs; but the block textures are all wrong (e.g. the glass on the spawn shop uses the "salvager computer" texture and the undeathenators are using "cannon module" texture, the ship mode and ship cores are alternating between several different textures (dirt, rock, etc) because they're animated, etc.

in that case you simply did update over an very old install and the new texture files didnt got uncompressed on download ... that did happen a long time ago. not sure if that is a steam thing or not .. i never could reproduce that problem.

thousands of lines of meaningless numbers

if you talk about meaningless i did assume it was obvious garbage the files did contain ...
only because we both have no clue what to do with the files content doesnt mean its meaning less

 

[Qweesdy]

Hi,

in that case you simply did update over an very old install and the new texture files didnt got uncompressed on download ... that did happen a long time ago. not sure if that is a steam thing or not .. i never could reproduce that problem.

I can say it's not a Steam thing - I got this game before it was available on Steam, and won't ever switch it over to Steam if I've got any kind of choice. I'm using "StarMade [Launcher v16]".

if you talk about meaningless i did assume it was obvious garbage the files did contain ...
only because we both have no clue what to do with the files content doesnt mean its meaning less

I'm fairly sure nobody is ever going to (e.g.) try to edit meshes with a text editor - I'd assume there's 3D modelling software (e.g. Blender) that's used to edit the meshes in a user-friendly way, where the only thing that matters is that the 3D modelling software and the game's software can understand the files.

 

[Crusade]

With the old model files - it seems you might of accidentally installed an older version of the game, then when you updated, it kept the old models, or breaking them - causing them to become malformed. To be sure, try creating a totally new install using the new launcher. New directory, new executable.
See how that goes.

A little more info. The XML files are 3d models in the OgreXML format. Specifically ogre 1.8 iirc. Yes you can view, and even edit them in a text editor, but they are very easy to break.

Some issues also arise with certain cards being unable to actually display models/shaders properly, though i believe this is to do with a shader model version mismatch, and Intel, up to about 3rd i-series CPUs, had partial shader model and openGL support. Leading to model and loading issues with Starmade.

But yeah, try a new install, let the launcher download the correct version and see how you go.

 

[SmilingDemon]

And use the new Launcher and not the old Java one (select download new launcher) StarMade

 

[DukeofRealms]

but the block textures are all wrong (e.g. the glass on the spawn shop uses the "salvager computer" texture and the undeathenators are using "cannon module" texture, the ship mode and ship cores are alternating between several different textures (dirt, rock, etc) because they're animated, etc.

This sounds like you're using an outdated texture pack, which usually occurs by downloading an old SM version and then updating (as someone here suggested may have happened). Please ensure you are using the default, official texture pack.