Dear maintainers, I have played VCMI for about an hour yesterday and have run into numerous crashes-to-desktop during basic, normal game-play. These include a reproducible crash where pressing the space-bar during combat will crash-to-desktop with a 100% chance, every time. The other crashes happened frequently too, every 10 or 20 minutes or so, also usually after some input-action, suggesting a thorough lack of testing and polish. Considering every crash causes anywhere from 5 to 10 or more minutes of data loss, I'll argue that this package is unusable for anyone but the most patient of users who don't mind having 50% of their progress lost frequently while playing a video-game past the 1.0 mile-stone (which won't be many). I have played earlier versions of VCMI and it was not anywhere as unstable as this and as such I'd recommend the maintainers block this package from reaching stable. I have tried version 1.5.7 too from the project's official "stable" PPA and also ran into a crash within minutes of launching the game. I do apologize to the maintainers for not providing specific logs and detailed reports of each individual bug but: 1. I have not collected every crash-log and it would be more time-consuming to do so than I could do right now, considering the sheer number of crashes. 2. The individual issues are not the problem: I could continue playing, just by avoiding pressing space during combat, for example. The problem is the overall lack of stability in the entire package that renders this pretty much unplayable, in my opinion, to the extent I feel the need to write this. While I have not tested it recently, I do believe the 1.1 version in stable does not suffer from this trouble-some lack of polish and I would suggest that migration be blocked until at least 1.5.8 is released in the future and properly tested. Consider making this a "serious" bug, if applicable. My system is fairly up-to-date but I can't rule out some dependency issue. If that's the case, this report still applies as dependencies would need to be up- dated. Big thanks to the Debian Games team for the continued work in making sure we can game on the freest platform there is! Cheers.
Hi Alex, thank you for your elaborate bug report. Quoting Alex Henry (2024-11-05 18:53:13) that's this bug: https://github.com/vcmi/vcmi/issues/4067 This should be fixed in vcmi 1.5.3. Indeed I must admit that I wasn't aware of this hotkey and always used my mouse to let units wait. Are you playing with any mods enabled? I have been playing the campaign yesterday for over an hour without any crashes. I'm currently preparing an upload of version 1.5.7 to unstable. I'll test that as well and see if I can reproduce your observations. I think it would be useful to look at some of your crash logs, even better with the dbg package installed and then with gdb. As I didn't run into any crash (other than the spacebar issue) I'm puzzled what the underlying issue of our differing experiences could be. After I uploaded 1.5.7 to unstable, would you have the time to upload some crash logs with backtraces as issues to upstream? Feel free to @-mention me. I'm "josch" on github. Thanks! cheers, josch
Hi Johannes! Thank you for your work on Debian and VCMI! I was not playing with anything other than the internal VCMI packages that come installed by default. I tried to play one or two random-scenarios but had to give up mid-way through. I do believe the instability of the package to be a series of different bugs, not a single underlying issue as the game would immediately crash in response to specific actions (which I've failed to document, both in-side and out-side of combat). I cannot promise that I'll have the time to test any further but if you remind me when you upload 1.5.7, I'll try to find time if I'm able. Here's a couple wild-guesses: #1: Could be a problem with a specific version of a library. You could try ensuring the package depends on the latest versions of all packages. I did notice I had to update one or two packages to install 1.5.7 from the PPA. As I said earlier, my system is otherwise fairly up-to-date, I believe. #2: Could have been some sort of compatibility issue with my previous configuration files? If I'm able to test the next version, I'll have to remember to do a clean install. I'm not even sure if I had any previous files but wouldn't hurt to make sure, next time around. I'll suggest again you consider bumping this bug-report severity so the package won't migrate to stable. I'm sure users would prefer an out-dated but playable version of the engine than be stuck with a version that crashes every 10-20 minutes and loses progress (at least for some users) for an entire stable cycle.
Hi Alex, Quoting Alex Henry (2024-11-06 16:58:24) I just uploaded a new version of vcmi to unstable. Could you give it another whirl? Before uploading, I played across multiple scenarios in the campaign over several days. I did not observe a single crash. Maybe this version has most issues fixed? Thanks! cheers, josch