Forums » Bugs
Client Freezing when Locust/Chaos/Capital swarms are out in sector
This has happened periodically over the course of the last several years (originally reported here), but recently has been happening more frequently again so I decided to take another stab at debugging it. When there are swarms out in a sector, my own or another players, locust, chaos, or capital, my client sometimes freezes entirely, and my machine stops responding to any input, including OS-level commands like change desktop or cmd-q or cmd-option-escape. Sometimes the freeze resolves itself within 5-10 seconds and everything goes back to normal, sometimes it persists and I'm forced to hard reset my machine.
I replicated this with no plugins installed on a freshly downloaded and installed client. Also, I have 2 macbooks and it happens on both (2019 MacBook Pro running macOS Ventura 13.1, 2016 MacBook Pro running macOS Monterey 12.6.3). I'm using the OpenGL 4 GKGL driver now, last I remember I tried using the Vulkan (Metal) GKGL driver but the issue was present while running that as well but I am now unable to switch to it (when I try to do so, client restarts and gets stuck on the NAOS engine screen, same when I modify config.ini to change the driver). I've also tried toying with various graphics settings to no avail.
As you can imagine, this is a very frustrating bug to deal with, so I'm hoping I can get some help on how to debug this. Thanks in advance.
I replicated this with no plugins installed on a freshly downloaded and installed client. Also, I have 2 macbooks and it happens on both (2019 MacBook Pro running macOS Ventura 13.1, 2016 MacBook Pro running macOS Monterey 12.6.3). I'm using the OpenGL 4 GKGL driver now, last I remember I tried using the Vulkan (Metal) GKGL driver but the issue was present while running that as well but I am now unable to switch to it (when I try to do so, client restarts and gets stuck on the NAOS engine screen, same when I modify config.ini to change the driver). I've also tried toying with various graphics settings to no avail.
As you can imagine, this is a very frustrating bug to deal with, so I'm hoping I can get some help on how to debug this. Thanks in advance.
Sometimes the freeze resolves itself within 5-10 seconds and everything goes back to normal, sometimes it persists and I'm forced to hard reset my machine.
Hmm. Anything that requires a hard-reset of your machine is a catastrophic driver/OS-level bug of some kind. I can tell you that it isn't "the game", but it may well be the game triggering some kind of bug, deep in the OS.
A "user-level" application causing a full system freeze is basically a catastrophic outcome on any modern operating system. It should never be able to happen, for security reasons alone.
The trouble with our trying to debug these things is basically that we're trying to work around a "black box" problem.
Normally we would report this kind of issue to the vendor. On Windows, we could immediately ping Microsoft, NVIDIA, AMD or Intel and get them to look into the issue. But Apple is a bit of a mess. The last time we tried reporting a GPU driver bug, they suggested we spend $5,000 to get a higher level of "support" from them. Which is a bit.. hilarious.
Anyway, it's kind of a "good sign", in a way, that you're experiencing the problem across multiple generations of Macs. We have some upcoming development, to try and get the build system working better for the Mac version.
When we're doing this, we'll try to reproduce the problem you're seeing, and.. see if we can come up with a workaround. I can't promise anything, because again, this is us just turning knobs on a black box and hoping for a different outcome, with no idea of what is wrong and no actual ability to fix (or even debug) the underlying OS/driver issue.
What would be extremely helpful is if you can nail down an exact reproduction case. Some set of conditions or situations that results in a reproducible problem as close to 100% of the time as possible.
Even with a full reproduction case, it won't be trivial for us to "do something", but we'll at least have a starting point?
Hmm. Anything that requires a hard-reset of your machine is a catastrophic driver/OS-level bug of some kind. I can tell you that it isn't "the game", but it may well be the game triggering some kind of bug, deep in the OS.
A "user-level" application causing a full system freeze is basically a catastrophic outcome on any modern operating system. It should never be able to happen, for security reasons alone.
The trouble with our trying to debug these things is basically that we're trying to work around a "black box" problem.
Normally we would report this kind of issue to the vendor. On Windows, we could immediately ping Microsoft, NVIDIA, AMD or Intel and get them to look into the issue. But Apple is a bit of a mess. The last time we tried reporting a GPU driver bug, they suggested we spend $5,000 to get a higher level of "support" from them. Which is a bit.. hilarious.
Anyway, it's kind of a "good sign", in a way, that you're experiencing the problem across multiple generations of Macs. We have some upcoming development, to try and get the build system working better for the Mac version.
When we're doing this, we'll try to reproduce the problem you're seeing, and.. see if we can come up with a workaround. I can't promise anything, because again, this is us just turning knobs on a black box and hoping for a different outcome, with no idea of what is wrong and no actual ability to fix (or even debug) the underlying OS/driver issue.
What would be extremely helpful is if you can nail down an exact reproduction case. Some set of conditions or situations that results in a reproducible problem as close to 100% of the time as possible.
Even with a full reproduction case, it won't be trivial for us to "do something", but we'll at least have a starting point?
Yeah, it makes sense that it is some kind of driver/OS-level bug, and I understand it is difficult for you to debug. Thanks for looking into it, I will do the best I can to create an exact reproduction case.