Random crashes; 1.4 on Ubuntu

[megane]

OK, this has been going on for... a long time. Like, since 1.3.13 at least. However, I've only now figured out how to get info beyond "Wesnoth crashes every once in a while."

Basically, for reasons unknown to me, Wesnoth will occasionally crash. Sometimes it just vanishes, with no effect on anything else; sometimes, however, it will cause my X session to die, or even a full-on freeze (something I've never seen any other program manage to do to Ubuntu). The only hint I can provide as to what causes it is that, most of the time, it happens when a unit is in the midst of an attack animation; also, it seems to happen more often (but not only) when I have other programs, such as Firefox, running alongside Wesnoth. Aside from that, I'm stumped.

I'm running Wesnoth v1.4 on Ubuntu 7.10. This is the result of the backtrace:

Code: Select all

20080315 21:18:13 error engine: could not de-serialize unit: 'load_game_failed: Attempt to de-serialize an empty unit' (this line is repeated a whole bunch of times over)

Program received signal SIGILL, Illegal instruction.
[Switching to Thread -1217870144 (LWP 11568)]
0xb7a963de in std::istream::sentry::sentry () from /usr/lib/libstdc++.so.6
(gdb) bt
#0  0xb7a963de in std::istream::sentry::sentry () from /usr/lib/libstdc++.so.6
#1  0xb7a971a0 in std::istream::_M_extract<long> ()
   from /usr/lib/libstdc++.so.6
#2  0xb7a972f9 in std::istream::operator>> () from /usr/lib/libstdc++.so.6
#3  0x0806e076 in lexical_cast_default<int, std::string> ()
#4  0x083a227d in utils::string_bool ()
#5  0x083fd654 in preferences::music_on ()
#6  0x0841c044 in sound::music_thinker::process ()
#7  0x083c9c42 in events::pump ()
#8  0x0827c009 in play_controller::play_slice ()
#9  0x082864a0 in playmp_controller::play_network_turn ()
#10 0x082868b1 in playmp_controller::play_side ()
#11 0x0828a4d8 in playsingle_controller::play_turn ()
#12 0x0828c359 in playsingle_controller::play_scenario ()
#13 0x0826d137 in playmp_scenario ()
#14 0x0826f933 in play_game ()
#15 0x0820287e in enter_wait_mode ()
#16 0x08202db9 in enter_lobby_mode ()
#17 0x08203f80 in mp::start_client ()
#18 0x0805d3f3 in (anonymous namespace)::game_controller::play_multiplayer ()
#19 0x0806b1d9 in play_game ()
#20 0x0806c3c2 in main ()
(gdb) 

I realize this isn't a whole lot of info to go on; please let me know if there's anything I should do to find out more.

[AI]

the first line means a [unit] tag without a valid type, but does this happen regardless of what add-on you are or are not using?

[megane]

Yes, I assume the first line means nothing; it happens with Default as well.

[megane]

I don't mean to be pushy, but could somebody at least point me in the right direction here? I've been trying to play TRoW, and I'm having to play every other turn two or three times due to Wesnoth crashing halfway through.

[Mist]

Well, I've been holding back because I'm not an linux expert, but that backtrace shows a crash in glibc. So my sugestion would be : get a new glibc and compile wesnoth using it.
Turning of sounds might work as well, judging from backtrace that crash happens when the game plays 'hit' sound

[megane]

Well, neither of the above helped (note in particular that my sound is almost always turned off) ^^;

However, I finally got a screen capture of the other problem which has been happening constantly (which is hopefully related and useful for diagnosis). Basically, staticky-looking bars of random colors will appear across the Wesnoth window; when a part of the screen is redrawn, that part is cleared, but they remain everywhere else, as you can see in the attachment. Again, this appears to happen completely at random, though I noticed that this graphical glitch often occurs soon before a crash (though, really, Wesnoth crashes so often that the same could be said of pretty much anything).

[doofus-01]

I don't have any bright ideas, but it doesn't look like anyone else does either. So here it goes:

I have been having a lot of freezes, not related to Wesnoth, and read somewhere that a bad graphics card/driver, bad memory, or a bad ethernet card/driver can cause these things to happen. This would probably cause other programs to crash as well, but do you notice high CPU or memory usage or anything like that? You mentioned it happens more often with other programs running.

When I freeze up, no errors are logged so you probably have a very different problem and this won't help you, but one never knows...