Bug#1086770: vcmi: Very unstable package

[Johannes Schauer Marin Rodrigues]

Hi Alex,

thank you for your elaborate bug report.

Quoting Alex Henry (2024-11-05 18:53:13)
> I have played VCMI for about an hour yesterday and have run into numerous
> crashes-to-desktop during basic, normal game-play. These include a reproducible
> crash where pressing the space-bar during combat will crash-to-desktop with a
> 100% chance, every time.

that's this bug: https://github.com/vcmi/vcmi/issues/4067

This should be fixed in vcmi 1.5.3.

Indeed I must admit that I wasn't aware of this hotkey and always used my mouse
to let units wait.

> The other crashes happened frequently too, every 10 or 20 minutes or so, also
> usually after some input-action, suggesting a thorough lack of testing and
> polish.

Are you playing with any mods enabled? I have been playing the campaign
yesterday for over an hour without any crashes.

> Considering every crash causes anywhere from 5 to 10 or more minutes of data
> loss, I'll argue that this package is unusable for anyone but the most
> patient of users who don't mind having 50% of their progress lost frequently
> while playing a video-game past the 1.0 mile-stone (which won't be many).
> 
> I have played earlier versions of VCMI and it was not anywhere as unstable as
> this and as such I'd recommend the maintainers block this package from
> reaching stable. I have tried version 1.5.7 too from the project's official
> "stable" PPA and also ran into a crash within minutes of launching the game.

I'm currently preparing an upload of version 1.5.7 to unstable. I'll test that
as well and see if I can reproduce your observations.

> I do apologize to the maintainers for not providing specific logs and
> detailed reports of each individual bug but:
> 
> 1. I have not collected every crash-log and it would be more time-consuming to
> do so than I could do right now, considering the sheer number of crashes.
> 2. The individual issues are not the problem: I could continue playing, just by
> avoiding pressing space during combat, for example. The problem is the overall
> lack of stability in the entire package that renders this pretty much
> unplayable, in my opinion, to the extent I feel the need to write this.
> 
> While I have not tested it recently, I do believe the 1.1 version in stable
> does not suffer from this trouble-some lack of polish and I would suggest that
> migration be blocked until at least 1.5.8 is released in the future and
> properly tested. Consider making this a "serious" bug, if applicable.

I think it would be useful to look at some of your crash logs, even better with
the dbg package installed and then with gdb. As I didn't run into any crash
(other than the spacebar issue) I'm puzzled what the underlying issue of our
differing experiences could be.

After I uploaded 1.5.7 to unstable, would you have the time to upload some
crash logs with backtraces as issues to upstream? Feel free to @-mention me.
I'm "josch" on github.

Thanks!

cheers, josch
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