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EQ2 Browser Crash Issue - Info requestFollow

#1 Feb 27 2012 at 10:53 AM Rating: Excellent
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I'm trying to get this looked at again, but I need information. None of us can reproduce it, and we can't troubleshoot what we can't reproduce.

What are you doing when it crashes? Are you using any custom UI? What link are you trying to click through to?
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#2 Feb 27 2012 at 11:07 AM Rating: Excellent
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I've never had this happen, so I'll be no help. Also, posting this was of no help either. But I gotta +1 some way!

Smiley: grin
#3 Feb 27 2012 at 11:32 AM Rating: Excellent
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Nadenu wrote:
I've never had this happen, so I'll be no help. Also, posting this was of no help either. But I gotta +1 some way!

Smiley: grin


Heh, actually it's of some help, because it seems to only happen to a small percentage of players. But whomever they are they REALLY want to use ZAM....
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#4 Feb 27 2012 at 1:20 PM Rating: Excellent
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Also, if you do have this happen and get an EQ2 crash log because of it, that might have vital info that could help.

I've never been able to reproduce this issue but I've heard from smatterings of people who have. Detailed information is what we need.. if you have a crashlog (can email this to calthine@allakhazam.com and cyliena@allakhazam.com), or see a certain ad/ad type before the crash, if it's on a certain type of page on our site, etc... anything can be useful!

Edited, Feb 27th 2012 2:21pm by Cyliena
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#5 Feb 27 2012 at 1:41 PM Rating: Decent
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Happens to my guild mates and I on a pretty frequent basis. Give us a couple of days and hopefully I'll have steps to reproduce this.

Usually this is what happens:

  • We click a link from a custom UI (Fetish Nightfall, Profit, Drums, etc) to Zam for a quest or an item.
  • The in-game browser window opens and the page from Zam starts to display.
  • The game freezes and reacts pretty much like a jpg. Nothing is clickable, nothing moves, nothing highlights, etc.
  • We do Ctrl-Alt-Del, pull up Task Manager, and kill the game.


In the case of me and my wife, when it happens to one of us, the other one can see us go linkdead and then log off while we're still waiting for the game to become responsive again.

But like I said, give us a few days and hopefully we'll have some reproducible steps.

Thanks!

Edited, Feb 27th 2012 2:54pm by Dethdlr
#6 Feb 27 2012 at 4:01 PM Rating: Excellent
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Wonder if it has something to do with the custom UI's. I don't use one and it never happens to me.
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#7 Feb 27 2012 at 7:56 PM Rating: Decent
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I thought this would take us longer but it looks like my guild got to work pretty quick. Here are steps to recreate this on a very consistent basis:

Log in to EQ2 using either Fetish Nightfall, Profit Reborn or Drums UI.

Open the Quest Journal

Select a Quest

Click the custom button to launch Zam and load up the quest that you have selected.

Sometimes this will work once. Most of the time it locks up the first try for me. For a few others, if they close their in-game browser window and click the button again, once the page loads, the game freezes.

One of our guild mates who could make this crash repeatedly put in place a proxy to block the adds. The same steps worked every time once the proxy was in place with no freezing. He believes he's tracked it down to AdChoices ads that cause it to freeze every time.

We haven't tried this yet with the default UI but I believe that's next on our list. May even have that info later tonight.

It doesn't actually "crash" the game so I don't believe I can get a crash log. When it happens, you have to go to task manager and kill the process.

We're still doing some more research but let me know if there are other specific details that would help.

Thanks
#8 Feb 27 2012 at 8:52 PM Rating: Excellent
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Can you make it happen without a custom UI?

We do not use an ad service - can you pinpoint specific ads causing it?
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#9 Feb 27 2012 at 10:58 PM Rating: Decent
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I can try it with the default UI tomorrow.

The AdChoices ads my guildmate was talking about are the ones with the triangle in the upper right corner that says AdChoices when you put your cursor over them. I'm pretty sure I had it crash with other ones as well though.

Also, most people who seem to be experiencing this are running Windows 7. No clue if it's related.

Edited, Feb 27th 2012 11:59pm by Dethdlr
#10 Feb 28 2012 at 10:40 AM Rating: Decent
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Little extra info I didn't include yet.

Those with the issue are using the full install, not streaming. That doesn't mean the problem doesn't exist with the streaming client, just means we haven't tried it that way. It shouldn't make a difference but figured the more info the better when tracking down something elusive like this.

These are the steps to reproduce this from scratch:

  1. Do a full install of Everquest 2 on a Windows 7 machine.
  2. Install the DrumsUI or Profit-Reborn custom UI
  3. Log into EQ2
  4. Open the Quest journal
  5. Click the icon to load that quest on Zam (make sure you're not logged into Zam in the in-game browser window and if you are, log out)
  6. Wait for the page to load, move your cursor around on the browser window, give it about 30 seconds, then close the browser window
  7. Repeat steps 5 and 6 a few times


I have some guildmates that could do those steps while running Windows XP with no problems. But for those of us running Windows 7, the four of us that tried could make this freeze the game client consistently within a minute of trying using Fetish Nightfall, DrumsUI or Profit-Reborn. Fetish Nightfall is a bit harder to install these days which is why I didn't suggest trying that in the steps above.

Can someone at Zam can try this and let me know if it freezes the game or not? As I said, we've got four people able to reproduce this behavior within a minute so hopefully these are the repro steps you guys need to track down what's going on. If not, let me know and we'll keep searching. :)

Thanks!
#11 Feb 28 2012 at 11:02 AM Rating: Excellent
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I've passed this up to the devs. They've a lot going on right now, so please be patient :)
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#12 Feb 28 2012 at 11:13 AM Rating: Excellent
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Dethdlr wrote:


  1. Do a full install of Everquest 2 on a Windows 7 machine.
  2. Install the DrumsUI or Profit-Reborn custom UI



Which version of Windows 7 and 32-/64-bit?
Does it happen vanilla without any UI Mods?
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#13 Feb 28 2012 at 11:39 AM Rating: Excellent
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I got it to work once with Drums. The other time the game locked up long after I'd shut the browser, just before /camp desktop finished.

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#14 Feb 28 2012 at 11:56 AM Rating: Decent
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acprog wrote:
Dethdlr wrote:


  1. Do a full install of Everquest 2 on a Windows 7 machine.
  2. Install the DrumsUI or Profit-Reborn custom UI



Which version of Windows 7 and 32-/64-bit?
Does it happen vanilla without any UI Mods?


Happens with Windows 7 Professional 64 bit and Windows 7 Ultimate 64 bit. I'll have to ask tonight to see if there are any other variations of Windows 7 involved.

Not sure if it happens without UI mods. UI mods are the main reason we load up Zam the way we do. All we have to do is click a single button and there's the quest data or the item data with no typing involved. With the vanilla UI we would have to type the info manually to get there each time we want to look something up.

I'll try to test it with the vanilla UI tonight though to see how that effects it.

Edited, Feb 28th 2012 12:59pm by Dethdlr
#15 Feb 28 2012 at 2:03 PM Rating: Excellent
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Here's instructions to make a EQ2 ZAM macro button. It will search for whatever you have targeted :) That should allow you to bypass the custom UI buttons to reproduce this.

http://eq2.zam.com/forum.html?forum=19&mid=1241809153123902862
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#16 Feb 28 2012 at 5:13 PM Rating: Decent
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That "might" cause the problems we're seeing. The testing we've been doing has been with quests, not items or NPCs. I should be able to see tonight though.
#17 Feb 28 2012 at 5:18 PM Rating: Excellent
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Dethdlr wrote:
That "might" cause the problems we're seeing. The testing we've been doing has been with quests, not items or NPCs. I should be able to see tonight though.


The Drums ZAM button goes right to that search page, only with a quest name filled in. I suspect the page doesn't matter.
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#18 Feb 28 2012 at 5:46 PM Rating: Excellent
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So this only happens if you click the custom UI quest links to open the browser, but not if you use /browser and navigate through the site itself? I use the default quest journal so I can't test that out myself, but using /browser has never crashed me. (I'm also using Win XP 64-bit so that may be a difference as well, as you noted)

Edited, Feb 28th 2012 6:47pm by Cyliena
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#19 Feb 28 2012 at 6:54 PM Rating: Decent
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Ran several tests tonight.

Logged in with a premium account and a custom UI and it still froze.

Logged in with the default UI and a premium account. Typed /browser eq2.zam.com. Searched for "Finding the Dain". Clicked on "Finding the Dain" in the search results. Quest write up page loaded to 98% and the game froze. Had to kill it with task manager.

Logged in with the default UI and a premium account and did the same steps as above and had the exact same results.

Because I don't consider two times to be proof, I logged in with the default UI and a premium account and tried those same steps a third time. Worked like a charm. Logged out of the premium account and it worked like a charm. No matter what I tried, I couldn't get the game to freeze.

Didn't have a chance to do much more testing but I'm not done yet. Will continue to do more testing to see if I can find some sort of pattern. But something to keep in mind is that the other pages seemed to work. It wasn't until I went to a quest write up page that it froze. I'm going to continue to use the quest write up for "Finding the Dain" just to be consistent.

Hope to have more info in the coming days but I'm out of time tonight. :(
#20 Feb 28 2012 at 7:20 PM Rating: Excellent
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Where I'm finding an anomaly is I had one occurrence where I could not get it to lock up no matter what I did, including go to quest pages, until I had closed the browser and was camping. The browser wasn't even open.

I wish we could find error logs on this.
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#21 Feb 28 2012 at 7:26 PM Rating: Excellent
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Okay so my crazy theory based on it only being quest pages is maybe sometimes our location button could be causing it. Since it's inconsistent however I'm not so sure it'll pan out.

So, humor me and try to freeze up on these pages:

http://eq2.zam.com/wiki/TestPage1
http://eq2.zam.com/wiki/TestPage2
http://eq2.zam.com/wiki/TestPage3

If it can happen (or not happen) on all three then it's definitely not the location button. If it is the location button then the second one would be most likely to freeze you up.

Edited, Feb 28th 2012 8:28pm by Cyliena
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#22 Feb 28 2012 at 7:47 PM Rating: Excellent
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Repro'd one try of four on "Finding the Dain" on the default UI, logged out. I tried to click a COPY button. Interesting, the page had loaded completely, but then seemed to reload.

No crash on Cyliena's test pages 4 tries.

Now I'm logged into my account, been all over the site with no issues. edit: and posted this from in-game.

The one time I locked up I had Firefox open in the background, so I'll ask: Does anyone have any other browsers open when this happens?

Edited, Feb 28th 2012 8:47pm by Calthine
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#23 Feb 28 2012 at 7:51 PM Rating: Excellent
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I just had it lockup on Massively. http://massively.joystiq.com/ I was seeing the loading circle flicker and went to http://massively.joystiq.com/2012/02/28/eqii-producer-teases-march-update-info-promises-more-communicat/ and the page loaded to 93% and it locked up.

No browser open in the background.




Edited, Feb 28th 2012 8:53pm by Calthine
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#24 Feb 28 2012 at 9:30 PM Rating: Excellent
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The only thing I can add as someone that's never froze or locked up is: I don't use a custom UI, I don't use any macros to open the browser to certain pages and I have ads showing on Zam when I use it. I just type /browser and then search for what I'm looking for. Also, I always start out with either the name of the quest or the particular World Event, where I'm trying to make sure I have all the quests done. The only time I might look up an NPC is after I've searched the quest. I'm also using Windows 7 64-bit. Oh, and the ingame browser's homepage is set to eq2.zam.com, if that matters.
#25 Feb 28 2012 at 9:31 PM Rating: Excellent
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And another thing, I never have any programs open in the background. I'm not much of a multi-tasking gamer. No other browsers, no ACT, no IM's, nothing.
#26 Feb 28 2012 at 9:41 PM Rating: Decent
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Tried those test links with the default UI. I always play full screen btw, don't think I mentioned that before. Nothing running in the background, ACT, other browsers, etc. for any of the tests I've done.

I went to and back from test links 1 and 3 over 10 times and couldn't get it to freeze. Link 2, I got it to freeze after about 4 or 5 tries the first time. Restarted and tried it again and it probably took me 8 or 9 tries to get it to lock up. Not really much in the way of conclusive evidence there unfortunately.

For me, it seems to still freeze a lot more frequently at the quest write ups than anything else that I've tried. I'm done testing for the night but not for good. Will do some more tests tomorrow or the next day.

Thanks for sticking in there with me and trying to track this down. :)

Edited, Feb 29th 2012 12:34am by Dethdlr
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