Bug 210525 – games-fps/rtcw engine freezes at fire zombie

• Product: Gentoo Linux
• Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

[Description Andreas Dehmel 2008-02-17 21:26:53 UTC]

RtCW freezes on my machine quite consistently when a fire zombie does its flame attack (usually after a couple of seconds). I tried "emulating" this by giving myself the flamethrower, but couldn't reproduce it that way, it only seems to happen with the fire zombie. The engine appears to hang in an infinite loop, it eats 100% CPU on my AMD-X2 machine (according to top). I can kill wolfsp.exe easily (no -9 required) and apparently without ill effects on the X-server or my session (no weird behaviour or crashes later on). Up to this point the game was 100% stable, but once a fire zombie starts its attack, it's a goner. I'm running an up-to-date multilib 64-bit system with 4GB RAM, kernel 2.6.22-r8 and nvidia-drivers-100.14.19 (card is a 7900GS). RtCW is version 1.41b, as in the current portage tree, the retail type is the "Extended Edition"; there are no warnings on the console and I'm 100% sure I copied all *.pk3-files over (I had the game running just fine on an older machine, BTW). I also have games like Doom3/Quake4 running natively without any problems on this machine, likewise stuff like Far Cry or Prey via Wine, so I don't think there's anything fundamentally wrong with my system. I also tried:

- disabling all OpenGL extensions (r_allowExtensions="0")
- changing sampling rate and mixahead size
- using the wolfconfig.cfg-file from my working installation (except for things like r_lastValidRenderer)
- checking all *.pk3-files for errors (unzip -t); they're all fine.

No change.
Can anyone reproduce this on an up-to-date system? For the necessary steps see below under "Reproducibility".


Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.start the game with cheats enabled: "rtcwsp +set sv_cheats 1"
2.bring down the console (~) and type "/spdevmap crypt2"
3.give yourself all weapons so you won't have a hard time surviving until the first fire zombie: (console) "/give all"
4.straight ahead, up the stairs and left, past the moving coffins, look over the bridge where some soldiers are fighting off zombies. A fire zombie will appear there shortly and attack (stay away from the action)

[Comment 1 Andreas Dehmel 2008-02-17 21:27:58 UTC]

Created attachment 143814 [details]
Output of emerge --info

[Comment 2 Michael Boone 2008-03-16 11:10:08 UTC]

I can second this bug, same architecture, although not sure if it is a gentoo bug, it also appears on my ubuntu installation.

[Comment 3 Andreas Dehmel 2008-03-16 18:36:19 UTC]

It's a relief that it doesn't just happen on my machine. And I agree that it's in all likelihood not bug in the Gentoo environment but some incompatibility of the RtCW engine with newer Linux environments (or hardware) in general. But I thought the Gentoo bugzilla was a good starting place to get some feedback regarding reproducibility. NB: I installed the game under WINE and finished it without problems in the interim.
Is there a chance that someone of the Gentoo team brings this to id's attention (Timothee Besset would probably be the one to talk to)? I think they're one of the very few companies "mad" enough to actually do something about this in such an old game, but I estimate the chances of an end user like myself getting through rather slim, it'd be better if a representative of a Linux distribution addressed them.

[Comment 4 David Hayes 2008-06-17 12:20:57 UTC]

Same Here :(

Q6600 4GB ram, 8600GT

[Comment 5 Nick Leippe 2009-09-20 06:29:54 UTC]

Still happening, exactly as described.

AMD 3800+ (X2 Dual core)
7300GT 256MB PCIe
4GB ram
kernel 2.6.30-r5
nvidia 185.18.31
Asus A8N-e w/nvidia CK804 and ALC850 (snd_intel8x0) audio

Could this be an alsa oss-emulation issue?

[Comment 6 Nick Leippe 2010-02-22 07:49:18 UTC]

This continues to happen with my SB Live! 5.1 PCI card--which I've used before in this machine to play Q3A many, many times.

2.6.31-gentoo-r6
gcc-4.3.4
glibc-2.10.1-r1
nvidia-drivers-190.53.r1
xorg-server-1.7.5
7300GT

There are no errors reported by the rtcw console output.

Since it happens w/both intel_8x0 and emu10k1, it's probably not the lack of audio hardware mixing that's at fault since the emu10k1 card supports hw mixing.

So, not sure where the problem lies.

[Comment 7 CJ Kucera 2011-08-12 00:54:22 UTC]

I started encountering this too, and on the advice of http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=117684 I went ahead and compiled some replacement .so files from the rtcw SDK.  This cleared up the problem for me, so perhaps that'd be an option, rather than just using the prebuilt binaries.  It's a shame that the SDK doesn't actually let you build the main game binary.

[Comment 8 Arfrever Frehtes Taifersar Arahesis 2019-12-09 05:47:27 UTC]

https://gitweb.gentoo.org/repo/gentoo.git/commit/?id=010852d13e7f1c59bc11ab2e3efe806dfacebaf4

commit 010852d13e7f1c59bc11ab2e3efe806dfacebaf4
Author:     Aaron Bauman <[e-mail]>
AuthorDate: 2019-12-08 21:13:32 +0000
Commit:     Aaron Bauman <[e-mail]>
CommitDate: 2019-12-08 21:13:32 +0000

    games-*/*: drop last-rited pkgs
    
    Bug: https://bugs.gentoo.org/515926
    Bug: https://bugs.gentoo.org/510960
    
    Signed-off-by: Aaron Bauman <[e-mail]>

 games-fps/rtcw/Manifest                            |   2 -
 games-fps/rtcw/files/wolf-ded.rc                   |  24 ---
 games-fps/rtcw/metadata.xml                        |  11 --
 games-fps/rtcw/rtcw-1.41b.ebuild                   |  93 ---------