mouse/screen freeze

Hi,

I got GSB throught the Humble Bundle 4. Running on Kubuntu 11.10 64 bit with ATI graphics card.

The game runs very smooth, but I get random lockups of the mouse, keyboard and screen. This happened the first time after maybe 40 minutes during battle. Then after starting the game and just having entered options dialog. And a third time in windowed mode during battle.

When this happens the music continues playing, but there is no reaction by keyboard/mouse. I can still log in to the machine via ssh, but killing GSB does not unfreeze. xorg is at 100% CPU, unable to kill it. The only solution I found so far is to reboot (lucky I have ssh, so I can do that without hard reset).

Anyone else experiencing this? I cannot check on different linux hardware, as GSB does not appear to run on 1024x600 (netbook). Is this correct? Getting a “Could not set video mode” infobox.

Hmm, interesting… I’ll see if I can recreate it here.

Yes, unfortunately GSB requires 1024x768 minimum resolution.

In the meantime I just changed the y-resolution in the prefs.ini to 600 and it started and there was no clipping.

Will run the game on my netbook this weekend and will see if it freezes.

Otherwise I will post my hardware specs of the affected machine.

I encountered the same freeze on my netbook, also with ATI. The game continued running, but no mouse/keyboard interaction possible. Both computers run the ATI fglrx driver.

Now downloading the tar.gz from 16th (today).

I’m getting the same problem, happens about once every 30-40 minutes of play (I would guess memory leak, as it seems to happen quicker if i play more missions, like by using the fast forward). running a x86_64 kernel, geforce 9800gt w/ nvidia binary drivers. graphics and input stop updating but sound keeps playing, and computer is still responsive enough to launch a terminal and kill the game.

Edit: I just tried my first online battle and it’s even worse online, I can’t complete a single battle before freezing, offline i can generally get through 3-4

So I’m not the only one. And its not due to ATI.

Update: Also hangs with the humble 4 version from today, 16th (tar.gz)

How did you manage to get a terminal? For me Ctrl+Alt+F1 does not react.

Now that is strange… As “online” isn’t really on-line… All it does is download their ship configuration and then runs a local simulation and when it’s done posts the results. Odds are it’s because there were more ships and hitting some leak possibly… How much system ram do you have?? how much free before you run the game. Could you check how much ram GSB is using when you first start it, vs. after you run a mission, 2 missions, etc…?

I did fix a # of leaks in the original code (running it through valgrind).

You can try running the game in a window., However there is nothing explicitly deterring ctrl-alt-f1 so it should work even in full-screen. And I just tested on my system, and I can ctrl-alt-f1 to a console fine.

i’m using ctrl+alt+f1, not sure why it wouldn’t react for you.

For my ram, I have 8 gigs, I watched my ram usage this time while running and it was barely hitting 30% CPU/ 2% ram usage when it hangs, i couldnt see any noticable difference before and after battles, there’s no messages in the console either. (it’s like it’s not a actual crash, it just gets hung waiting for something)

not sure why it’s happening but I know how now, the game is actually still running just fine when it freezes, what’s happening is it’s losing the mouse and it seems the game pauses if the cursor isn’t “within” the screen. For some reason while running full screen after some time it just kinda loses the mouse and pauses forever (I can replicate this by playing windowed, waiting for it to freeze, then if i move the mouse out of the game and back in it unfreezes)

AHHH!!!
Yes… the game itself pauses when it loses focus. I’m wondering if something on your computer is grabbing the window focus.

I’ll see what I can do to workaround that.

I will have a look at the memory usage next time.

But for me its definately not only a loss of focus. I have KDE 4.7.4 (Kubuntu).

It once happended during a battle, the mouse froze but the battle continued. Ctrl+Alt+F1 didnt work, Alt+Tab didnt work, Alt+Enter not, nothing.
Will see if it happens with gnome as well.

I’m positive nothing is grabbing focus but I am running dual monitors (incase there might be an oddity causing it there), seperate x sessions though so the game shouldn’t even realize there’s a second screen. I did notice when running windowed too that even if the game still had focus it would pause if the mouse left the window bounds. The freeze when fullscreen isn’t from moving the mouse over to monitor 2, it’s trapping the mouse in monitor 1 properly, also i’ve had the “freeze” occur when my hands are completely off the controls (I let a battle play out while I was eating lunch and it froze then)

However, but the fact that you mentioned that “moving the mouse out/in” restarted the game, means that somehow the game is getting the “lost focus” event from the window manager.

What I have done is add a tweak to the even handling code that ignores the focus gain/loss when in full screen mode which should resolve the issue.

Thanks for helping identify this issue…