While the frequent BSODs have been solved, there is one more that I get every time. Whenever I take a mission where it says "Go to such and such station, we will give you cargo when you get there, come back, blah blah blah," and get to the destination station with my cargo bay full, the station tanks and won't initialize for me. Now, I haven't tried this with my bays only partway full, but when they're empty, it works fine. Same for when they're full and I have to buy it.

Another interesting bug I had was in sector 5, station 2, where I tried to load up some cargo with an empty cargo bay...but the station kept saying it was full, the mission bots did as well. DOn't have a clue what that's about, eventually bought a second wraith and it worked fine for me. Though I did get pwned by those bastard bots(good work on the AI btw a1k0n).

EDIT: Fnucking typos

Humpy, this matches exactly with what i have expirienced with the black screen. it seems that sometimes if it has to store cargo in the station hold, it locks up. As long as i have enough space in my cargo hold for all of the cargo i never lock up.

reference lunitary's "the stations dont seem to like to give cargo thread" for more information on this topic.

I've been getting BSODs too. But it only seems to happen with commerce missions.

ok, having tested this for umm wow 4 hours now, and spoken to everyone who posted a "oh no i just locked in the station' on the chat, i have a fairly good working theory as to where the bug is.

the bug seems to appear in the lower level trade missions, anything where you have to go collect cargo in an amount less than 9 and bring it back will cause a BSoD if you dont have enough room in your cargo hold to carry it. oddly enough i cant seem to get it on my missions, which at lvl 8 trade all have more than 9 cargo. yet when my dad was on with his lvl 0 character on the exact same computer he got it several times.

it does not seem to occur on any other missions, not even the ones where you go and buy the cargo to bring back. just the ones where they GIVE it to you.

For what it's worth, I managed to get the cargo that was supposed to be given to me AFTER I logged off and logged back on again from the black screen of death. But by then the mission was off course messed up and aborted, so I had free cargo on my hands.

Haha, yeah....that's what happens to me too. I've made a point never to be carrying cargo if they are going to give it to me, but what about my cargo bay being locked up? The station had enough room...but I tried to load the cargo and it said it was full..

PS: not seeing the thread was due to sleepiness...I fell asleep at my compo last night

ok, update 3. I am now able to occasionally reproduce the bug, but I cant seem to get it all the time. I was able to get it on a couple of 15 wigit missions while trying for it, still cant get it every time tho. not sure what i'm doing differently. I'm gonna continue to experement with this, started a log of EVERY action i take for every cargo retrieve mission. i'll look for common factors.

Devs, just as a note, if you know what is causing this and just havent had a chance to fix it, please let me know, i dont want to spend time tracing something that you allready found.

the sector 5 station 2 thing seems to be something different. It might be related but i havent been able to get it at all. i think someone else had it last night, i remember 2 or 3 people mentioning it.

We haven't identified this problem yet, so by all means continue testing. Thanks for your persistence.

ok will do. i'll keep you posted

ok a1k0n, need some more information it appears.

Obviously it isnt a cargo overflow thats causing it, because i've had plenty of missiosn where it dumped the cargo ont he station and didnt bug.
soooo

How are the missions generated for trade,
do you have a table of full missions where everything is spelled out in advance? then just pick one from a range based on the level of the character?

or is it a random choice of framework that then fills in some variables based on your level, eg:
your level determines your % chance of getting a mission "frame"
then once it has the basic frames it then populates the destination sector, amount of cargo, and time based on some algorythms that take your level into account.

anyway here is why i'm asking,
I ran pickup missions by docking/undocking untill i would get one, most of them work, cargo in my ship or not. once i found one that did bug i went back to the staion it started from and looked for another mission with a mission description that looked identical several times, having the following statistics i recieved the following results.

Using the character test181
I
Started in 2
recieved mission to collect cargo from 12 with the following wording
"We need you to bring back a shipment of cargo from sector 12. There is a reward for fast delivery"
Accepted the mission, the missionbot messages me then tells me that i need to collect 3 purified waters, and if i do it in 5:20 i will get a bonus.
then went to the buy screen. I loaded 5 proprietary serco electronics onto my bus.
Undocked
Flew to 12
Docked.

the first 3 times i BSoD's (you have no idea how long it took to find the exact same wording again)
i thought i had it, but when i found it a fourth time, it let me dock even tho i followed the same steps.
If i pick a mission with a different wording (say for instance it tells me that there might be more work for me when i'm done) i dont get the BSoD.

Whatever bug is eating your code it is HARD to track.

In any event is there any easy way for you to include a mission# on the mission accept screen that would reference the mission or the mission "frame" specifically. Since all my other theories have been blown to hell i'm wondering if there is a specific subset of the "go get the cargo" missions thats causeing the problem, but trying to get the same exact mission again is kinda tough since we have no reference.

ok, new post, I prolly could edit an above post but i'd rathar have a timeline to work with.

I have not found anyone who has gotten a BSoD on anything but a mission to "retrive the cargo, it will be given to you at sector ##"

After getting a few myself and interviewing anyone who said they had one, I'd ask anyone who had a BSoD, or who got one to try to remember the following 4 things,

1. what sectors did it concern, where were you picking it up and where was it going back to.
2. was there a timed bonus for completing the mission
3. did you have cargo in your hold when you got the bug
4. was it part of a string of missions, ie was it the 2nd or third mission? if it was the first mission, did the description say 'ther emight be more work availible when you are done"

so far these seem to be the most common denominators. Most of the people i spoke to answered the following

1. the home sectors, 1 2 and 3 were involved either as pickup or destination.
(this could be cause most people trade in the home areas for safety however)
2. Yes, most if not all had a timed bonus. some people couldnt remember for sure.
3. the answer to this one has varied so much that i now doubt it's a link to the bug, but it seems MOST had some but not all cargo spaces filled. However I have bugged with full, empty and partially filled cargo holds.
4. unfortunately most people couldnt remember the answer to this one. tho at least 2 said it was a mission farther into a string, and i have gotten it on the first leg of a cargo mission.

Hope some of this information helps devs. i'll continue to collect data.

Update:
I created a new char (test007) for this problem. I successfully recreated the BSoD while running /verbose6 and submitted my errors.log file to Ray and Andy.

Ray is able to reproduce this and knows precisely what the problem (probably) is. Thanks guys. It seems likely that we can drop in a fix without deploying a new client or even restarting the server; Ray's testing now...

Coolness!

thank you god (er a1k0n/ray)

just for my own curiosity, did it have something to do with the bonus timer?

It's fixed on the server now.

No! It was an extremely obscure floating point to int conversion problem which caused the black screen of death for even more obscure reasons. Lua represents all its numbers as double precision floating point numbers, and there's some difference in conversion in borderline cases (large integers) on the production servers Athlon CPUs and the Pentiums we're using for testing here, so we didn't have the same problem here.

woohoo!! no more BSoD!!!

/me gives the devs a big hug.