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Re: crush of the program [message #8276 is a reply to message #8274]

Tue, 27 February 2007 23:09

mr_ped
Messages: 825
Registered: November 2005
Location: Czech Republic - Praha

Experienced Contributor

Yes, it's quite common with larger game projects (maybe even with non-game project, but I have mostly experience with computer games).

The reasons may vary horribly.
- compiler error - very very very unlikely, but I did have seen already some. Search everything else 10 times before you start to search for this one.
- usage of uninitialized/corrupted memory - in debug mode you get all kind of those helpers like 0xCCCCCCCC for allocated memory or 0xFDFDFDFD for deleted one, same allocation addresses, etc... in release you get random garbage and never really knows what to expect. Also allocated memory in debug mode has some guardians space which may catch occasional memory overruns, in release it's much easier to corrupt your memory.
If your bug in code works nicely with for example 0xCC.. value, so you don't notice it, it may go crazy in release with the random values it will hit.
- race conditions in multi-threaded apps. (very hard to debug)
- bad definitions of variables (bad usage of volatile variables)
- and many many more...

Do you have some idea which part of code is crashing?
May you publish it here?
Maybe I will have some idea (and maybe not, those bugs are sometimes extremely difficult to catch, depends on overall quality of code and available resources).

Also if you manage to get stack/memory/code dump of crash, it may be worth to compare it with symbol table to see if it does crash always on the same place, and examine the exact reason of crash.

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