FYI - Interesting position by Turbine

magill · #1 10-19-2012, 01:36 PM

Since Turbine has encountered nothing but troubles following the RoR release and the subsequent Hotfix, they have become quite militant in their demands to "Disable all plugins."

In the new "Official discussion: http://forums.lotro.com/showthread.p...Oct-17-Hotfix)
Post #16 by Mirthgar from Turbine Customer Techincal Support is instructive...

Quote:

Mirthgar

Quote:

Originally Posted by Sapience
ALL plugins.You should be running no plugins. Disable them all.

I'll add to this, anyone encountering issues disabling plugins, or even with them disabled are still running into issues, on occasion it's necessary to remove all plugin related files. There is an easy way to test the game with no plugins or files relating to them at all:

Click on the Windows "Start" button > "Documents" (My Documents on XP) find and rename the folder 'The Lord of the Rings Online' to "OLDThe Lord of the Rings Online" and relaunch.

Remember to include your dxdiag's folks as noted in the OP.

Of course, the one particularly interesting side effect of this action is to eliminate your UserPreferences.ini file.... creating a new one for you with all defaults.

bsmorgan · #2 10-19-2012, 01:53 PM

If the client is crashing, it does help to know what is causing the crash. I have no problems with disabling all plugins to see if that eliminates the crash. What I don't agree with is having just one thread for crashes (without plugins). There should be two threads, one for crashes without plugins and one for crashes because of plugins. Different information needs to be gathered for each type of crash and obviously different solutions for each.

I also have a problem with the attitudes of some of the Turbine employees. Plugins should not be treated as warts to be removed. The "sandbox" that plugins play in is provided by Turbine. The "sandbox" should not leak "sand" and cause the client to crash. Turbine is just as responsible for fixing the "sandbox" as they are fixing the playground in which it sits.

Brad

Stever1388 · #3 10-19-2012, 04:48 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by bsmorgan

If the client is crashing, it does help to know what is causing the crash. I have no problems with disabling all plugins to see if that eliminates the crash. What I don't agree with is having just one thread for crashes (without plugins). There should be two threads, one for crashes without plugins and one for crashes because of plugins. Different information needs to be gathered for each type of crash and obviously different solutions for each.

I also have a problem with the attitudes of some of the Turbine employees. Plugins should not be treated as warts to be removed. The "sandbox" that plugins play in is provided by Turbine. The "sandbox" should not leak "sand" and cause the client to crash. Turbine is just a responsible for fixing the "sandbox" as they are fixing the playground in which it sits.

Brad

They get around this by saying Plugins are Beta features, and thus they don't have to hold them to the same standard that you'd expect from Live features (like raids, instances, crafting, game performance).

The 2nd thread about plugins crashing should happen in the Plugins forums so that the authors can find out what is causing the crash so they can work around it and tell Turbine what is going on. Turbine doesn't have many resources on Plugins so they won't actively be fixing a problem.

It does suck, but it's the way it is. We either have Plugins with little to no support, or we don't have plugins at all.

scrappy · #4 10-20-2012, 08:57 AM

has anybody identified the plugins that are causing the crashes?

bsmorgan · #5 10-20-2012, 09:50 AM

I have identified AltInventory. I have also fixed AltInventory to crash much less often by removing the output to chat in the unload function. I say much less often because it is apparently still crashing for some people with the line removed. Its working for me with this one line change.

I attempted to collect information in the Turbine General forums but the thread very quickly gets buried with all the activity there. I guess I could remove the tutorial I wrote on how to find the "guilty party" using a binary search and just post something in the Lua thread or we could do it here. Which place do you think is best?

Brad

scrappy · #6 10-20-2012, 07:10 PM

i've played around with my plugin, and I cannot get my game to crash when only my plugin (predict in game time) is loaded... but lotro does crash when i have all my usual plugins loaded, altinventory, buffbars, tonicbars, minstrelbuffs, travelwindow, raidhelper, and others.

if there's some code or an algorithm to find problem plugins, then please post a link to the info. I love my plugins, and i hate unloading ALL plugins (see Sapience's comments above) when only 1 or a few are having issues. :/

moebius92 · #7 10-23-2012, 10:40 AM

If you want to check the memory usage of the plugins, grab a copy of Eval and run /ee gcinfo(). (Although apparently gcinfo()'s been deprecated and you should be using collectgarbage("count").) Or write a script to print out the equivalent.

The highest number I've seen it get to was around 100 MBs, and quite frankly that was because my vitals display handles target effects - which has a memory leak (only if you get effects on a target) I haven't figured out how to avoid. Also, it happened after running several instance skirmishes in a row, so we're talking about a large number of mobs and players with a large number of DoTs and debuffs being targeted.