EM Event Bosses Causing Enhanced Client To Crash

Khyro

There appears to be a serious issue with the Enhanced Client caused by the effects EM Event Bosses are using recently.

I would say 90% of the time (if not more), the Enhanced Client will completely lock up during an EM Event Boss. This has been occurring the last 1-2 months, so it is either a recent change to the bosses EM's are generating, or a change to the ability/coding of those abilities.

This is not an issue with just my system, as the most recent occurrence of this was tonight (10/27) on Lake Superior, when pretty much everyone using the Enhanced Client crashed during the boss fight.

This also does not appear to be every shard, so it is something specific being added to certain bosses, but I can tell you from my experience it has been the recent events on the following shards:

- Chesapeake
- Baja
- Pacific
- Lake Superior

I did not have this issue with recent events on Napa Valley or Europa.

This also occurs whether you have the Particle Filter graphics option toggled (I have tried it set to 'All', 'None', and 'Hide AoE' and it occurs on all 3 settings).

The crash seems related to an ability the boss does, but which ability it is I could not tell you.

The crash is also extremely severe, the client locks up completely and sometimes even the entire computer becomes unresponsive forcing you to do a hard reboot. One recent crash killed my video drivers and I lost all display to my monitors, forcing me to do a hard reboot.

This is the only error in the Windows Event Log, which I'm sure will not be helpful:

Maybe you can look at the bosses generated at the last several events for the shards listed above and see if there is a connection between abilities used and any recent changes.

If this was just a matter of toggling the Particle Filter, that would be one thing, but even with disabling everything possible, this still regularly occurs.

Tim

I've been away and missed the last couple of events but
Yes similar to what happenes to me and the wife so please fix.

Pawain

There were a lot of people at the event tonight.  And I heard a few complaining of crashing.

I didn't even see the Boss. There was a large burst when the Boss popped and a lot of the dead bodies were from the EC crash. Ask EM Thrixx what he did and why he is so evil to us.  hehe

TimSt

I noticed that the crash happens when the boss is using a screen wide strobe effect. During last Saturday's, 10/26, Pacific event the boss did not use the strobe effect and the client did not crash.

Khyro

Yea, it definitely seems related to a screen-wide effect. The strobe effect never used to lag me out, but maybe there is a recent change to the graphic or client that is causing it to lock up now.

The fire nova is notorious for killing the EC, but I don't believe it is that (although if Devs can change the graphic for all fire novas to the blue one Corgul now does, that would be amazing. Corgul is so much better for the EC now with that change).

Kyronix

Thanks for the report.  We are investigating!

MissE

Oceania too, was fixed now it is broken AGAIN. I thought it was just me.

This is the EC at the last EM event on Oceania with ALL area affects and particle detail turned off.  As you see it is not working at all.  And as you can see I am 'not responding' and 5 seconds after this screenie I was a black screen which stuck like that until the boss went down.  Oh yeah and I was dead too.

Khyro

Just an update:

- 10/29 Event on Great Lakes - Did not crash (Dark Father base mob type)
- 10/30 Event on Lake Superior - Did not crash (Slasher of Veils base mob type)

Neither appeared to have the strobe effect (though there were Crimson Dragons earlier in the event that did the Strobe, but it did not cause a crash).

I have a running theory on what might be causing the issue, but I need to do more tests. My current theory is the ground fire effect (an example seen above in MissE's screenshot), combined with a very large amount of players at the event.

Those ground fire abilities (and other area effects) will trigger a damage number window to appear over every mobile hit by it (and it ticks fast, so the screen is spammed with damage numbers). I believe this might be the culprit (or one of them) for the lag generated on the EC (100+ damage windows generated every second).

I actually made a change to the DamageWindow.lua UI file to filter out low values with the following change (line 75, and an appropriate end statement further down):



In this case I set DamageWindow.Threshold to a value of 5-10, depending on the encounter (10 is more aggressive but better results, 5 filters out most of it).

This has greatly improved the framerate at events when these effects are on screen; however I have not run into an adequate boss + player density to test against yet to see if that fixes the client crashing as well.

Even if it does, I don't know if that is a permanent solution going forward, as with that enabled you will not see any damage numbers below that set threshold (maybe it can be toggled with the 'Hide AoE' option or something, if it is indeed the cause of the UI crash).