Big Box Freeze Ups

[LogicalEgo]

1 minute ago, Jason Carr said:

Thank you @keltoigael; I do want to get those features integrated, especially multiple video playback. I'll look into that for the next version.

Fantastic, I will get started on the changes.

[NJDave71]

I will remove this from the Aeon Nox Theme as well and retest

[Jason Carr]

Just now, NJDave71 said:

I will remove this from the Aeon Nox Theme as well and retest

Wonderful; thank you @NJDave71.

[CriticalCid]

I’m kinda torn apart about this. I’ve had worked with eatkinola for months to get this plugin working and polished as I needed it and it’s hard to let go after such long time and I certainly don’t want to just throw it away, may it just be out of respect of eatkinolas dedication and hard work he had put into this. Also he wasn't online since saturday and probably doesn't even know about this issue, so I want to give him the chance and time to fix it.

Also we just have discovered this issue very recently and CZ V2 is out for what now? 4 months? So either it isn’t as big of a problem for most of the users as it appears to be or very recent changes in the LB Beta caused this behavior, it’s hard to verify that without extensive testing.

But I also agree that a native solution for this would be the best on the long run, so I highly appreciate that you want to add it!

As V1 is still freely available and just misses a few additions and fine-tuning compared to V2 (if you ignore the whole video engine) I’ll just put up a warning in the download description and wait until either eatkinola found the issue or you have added native support for these features, which hopefully shouldn't be too long

 

EDIT: It just came to my mind that it may be related to your latest changes of the star ratings as I also use the plug-in to display my own star rating banners inside the GamesDetailsView. I’ll remove that and let it run again through the night to see what happens.

[Jason Carr]

1 hour ago, CriticalCid said:

I’m kinda torn apart about this. I’ve had worked with eatkinola for months to get this plugin working and polished as I needed it and it’s hard to let go after such long time and I certainly don’t want to just throw it away, may it just be out of respect of eatkinolas dedication and hard work he had put into this. Also he wasn't online since saturday and probably doesn't even know about this issue, so I want to give him the chance and time to fix it.

Also we just have discovered this issue very recently and CZ V2 is out for what now? 4 months? So either it isn’t as big of a problem for most of the users as it appears to be or very recent changes in the LB Beta caused this behavior, it’s hard to verify that without extensive testing.

But I also agree that a native solution for this would be the best on the long run, so I highly appreciate that you want to add it!

As V1 is still freely available and just misses a few additions and fine-tuning compared to V2 (if you ignore the whole video engine) I’ll just put up a warning in the download description and wait until either eatkinola found the issue or you have added native support for these features, which hopefully shouldn't be too long

 

EDIT: It just came to my mind that it may be related to your latest changes of the star ratings as I also use the plug-in to display my own star rating banners inside the GamesDetailsView. I’ll remove that and let it run again through the night to see what happens.

I can certainly understand that, Cid. It's a frustrating situation to say the least. It is possible that I may be able to tag-team the code with @eatkinola to figure it out and get it fixed once and for all. Whether we end up dropping the plugin and integrating it into Big Box, or keeping the plugin and figuring out how to fix it, I will work with @eatkinola so that his work will not go to waste. He's obviously got good code in that plugin that we'd be foolish to throw away. I just would rather not have the stability issues in the mean time is all.

Though it seems like we've just discovered the issue, I have noted it as a recurring issue quite a few times in the past few months. It is surprising how few people actually report issues lol, but it has come up from time to time. The biggest challenge in this case is getting enough details from users who are experiencing lockups to identify that the theme or the plugin is the problem.

Per star ratings, certainly go ahead and test, but I'm 99% certain that the issue will have nothing to do with any changes we've made in the 7.15 betas.

I'm with you though if you still just want to put up a warning and wait on putting out an update. We'll get a proper solution going soon enough anyways.

[NJDave71]

I Remove the reference to ao.theme.dll and viola no freeze up.  Still testing 

[eatkinola]

When a freeze occurs, anything specific in the error message? Does the system get sluggish before freezing? Does the problem only exist with VLC? Thanks to Cid's help I did find a bad memory leak in Ao.Bigbox.Themer related to VLC. I had fixed it and sent Cid a new version for testing, but I presume that new version is also freezing?

[Jason Carr]

17 minutes ago, eatkinola said:

When a freeze occurs, anything specific in the error message? Does the system get sluggish before freezing? Does the problem only exist with VLC? Thanks to Cid's help I did find a bad memory leak in Ao.Bigbox.Themer related to VLC. I had fixed it and sent Cid a new version for testing, but I presume that new version is also freezing?

Thank you @eatkinola. I will do some more testing tomorrow to confirm these details. Hopefully everyone else can follow up as well. Is the version you gave @CriticalCid public? It could be a non-issue if theme developers just need to update to the latest version.

[eatkinola]

2 minutes ago, Jason Carr said:

Is the version you gave @CriticalCid public? It could be a non-issue if theme developers just need to update to the latest version.

The version I provided Cid is not public; I had just emailed it to him for testing. I wish it was as simple as updating, but I think @CriticalCid also noted freezes in the newer version I sent him. I'll go ahead and update Nostalgia tonight, which will contain the new version of the plugin in case anyone wants to test. I'll run Nostalgia in attract mode for awhile to see if it freezes.

[Jason Carr]

5 minutes ago, eatkinola said:

The version I provided Cid is not public; I had just emailed it to him for testing. I wish it was as simple as updating, but I think @CriticalCid also noted freezes in the newer version I sent him. I'll go ahead and update Nostalgia tonight, which will contain the new version of the plugin in case anyone wants to test. I'll run Nostalgia in attract mode for awhile to see if it freezes.

Gotcha, all sounds good. Thank you sir. If you're up for it, I'd love to work with you to either get this stuff integrated into Big Box or get the plugin all fixed up. We can tag-team the code if you'd be willing to share it.

[eatkinola]

15 minutes ago, Jason Carr said:

If you're up for it, I'd love to work with you to either get this stuff integrated into Big Box or get the plugin all fixed up. We can tag-team the code if you'd be willing to share it.

Sounds great. It'd be great to fix the plugin and would also be cool with me if you wanted to integrate any of it into Big Box. I'll pm the source later this week.

[Jason Carr]

Just now, eatkinola said:

Sounds great. It'd be great to fix the plugin and would also be cool with me if you wanted to integrate any of it into Big Box. I'll pm the source later this week.

Sweet. Thank you so much.

[LogicalEgo]

Integrated would be my personal preference. Every theme would benefit. 

[CriticalCid]

4 hours ago, eatkinola said:

The version I provided Cid is not public; I had just emailed it to him for testing. I wish it was as simple as updating, but I think @CriticalCid also noted freezes in the newer version I sent him. I'll go ahead and update Nostalgia tonight, which will contain the new version of the plugin in case anyone wants to test. I'll run Nostalgia in attract mode for awhile to see if it freezes.

The memory leak fix is public as I’ve released it with the just recently updated CriticalZone V2. The only thing missing in there is your latest addition of a try-catch block for another issue we’ve talked about (which was the original reason why I’ve tested it for stability in the first place). So yeah, it also freezes with the most recent versions. I’ve only tested it with VLC so far, so I will give it a try with WMP but I doubt that it will change anything as the versions that Aeon Nox and CityHunter are using are all pre-VLC integration. Also no error messages or anything. As I just let it ran over night each time I can't tell how it behaved right before the freeze. The only thing that I noticed is that it apparently happens when switching between Views as I can see parts of another View overlaying the currently active View, will make a screenshot when it happens again,

Oh and @Jason Carr you were right. The star ratings weren’t the issues as it still froze after I’ve removed it.

[NJDave71]

I pushed out a New version of Aeon Nox.  I have removed the ao.theme dll plugin and reverted back the the single Background video.   This really should be a feature of BigBox.  Hope to see a resolution.

 

Edited December 12, 2017 by NJDave71

[y2guru]

I just started Big Box with my own theme (Plain and Simple) and it locked up once the Theme Appeared, force closed the app and restarted with no issues.

[CriticalCid]

So I’ve tested the latest version of the plug-in 5 times since my last post.

I let it ran with WMP 4 times with around 10 to 20 hours on each run and it never froze.

I also let it ran once again with VLC and ... it froze. Based on the frozen clock that must've happened roughly 7 hours after I've started Attract Mode.

Here’s how it looks like every time for me when I find BigBox frozen. As I've said it must happen while changing between Views as I always see 2 different Views overlapping each other (enlarge the image to see it)

[Jason Carr]

9 hours ago, CriticalCid said:

So I’ve tested the latest version of the plug-in 5 times since my last post.

I let it ran with WMP 4 times with around 10 to 20 hours on each run and it never froze.

I also let it ran once again with VLC and ... it froze. Based on the frozen clock that must've happened roughly 7 hours after I've started Attract Mode.

Here’s how it looks like every time for me when I find BigBox frozen. As I've said it must happen while changing between Views as I always see 2 different Views overlapping each other (enlarge the image to see it)

This is in line with the same types of things we experienced back when we were dealing with all the VLC freeze-ups and developing the VLC engine for Big Box. Most likely it has to do with disposing and/or initializing VLC videos and the order that things are initialized. We have some stupid complicated code in place for the official Big Box code that ensures that everything happens in the right order. I'll share that code with @eatkinola to see if we can resolve it. I would still like to integrate the plugin code with Big Box though.

[Jason Carr]

On 12/12/2017 at 10:20 AM, y2guru said:

I just started Big Box with my own theme (Plain and Simple) and it locked up once the Theme Appeared, force closed the app and restarted with no issues.

I have seen it lock up once myself as well. It's so rare though that it's been a real pain to hunt down. I've been running it on three machines 24/7 since the release and it's only locked up once lol. Still trying to reproduce it with some extra logging that I've added to see if I can fix it and put out a quick fix release.