Online Player Crashes

Support
#1

Hey, it’s been a while since I’ve visited the forums, but this one is warranted.

I find that I often crash the online player when I do one shot sounds, especially when I spam them. Why spam them? Well that is easy, if a player is shooting a few magic missiles, well then, I hit it three times :slight_smile:

Then I might do a Yay, a Hazzah, or an Oooo immediately after.

And then my players complain that their player crashed.

Now, my friend just got a new HP laptop and I just helped him setup up our VTT (Maptool) and Syrinscape. we downloaded the latest version of the player from here, and I’ve been able to make it crash 5 times, just by doing what I am doing above.

Also, I have 30+ years in IT, so I’ve already made sure drivers were all up to date, and such.

So for now, I will just avoid all one shots, because I am not a fan of technology interrupting my story telling, but I hope that @benjamin can get some tech goblins on this matter, sooner than later.

Let me know if I can help at all. I’ll be happy to work with you to reproduce, if needed.

Thanks!

#2

AN hour later, I remotely connect into his PC and take a look around - everything is up to date, both with Windows and HP, and we test it again, to see if I can find out more on reproducing the crash, and for the life of me, I cannot get it to crash… Go figure.

So it crashed several times, we wait and hour and now it doesn’t crash at all. I asked if he rebooted the machine since the last time and he didn’t. I asked if he had any apps open before that he doesn’t now, and he didn’t…

I even changed servers in Syrinscape, and played the same exact stuff I was playing when it was crashing. No crashing…

I throw my hands up! LOL :slight_smile:

#3

Thinking:
I’m not quite sure how the online player works, but could it be that maybe the first time was when it was caching files locally, and that is why it didn’t crash the second time I tested it because the files were already resident on the local drive? Just trying to put my finger on the reason why initially it was crashing like crazy and then it suddenly stops all together. shrug

#4

Yep, this is a problem for me too. I use the Syrinscape extension for Fantasy Grounds and it had this problem due to the reasons above, but the extension author coded in a debouncer to avoid calling the API multiple times in a short amount of time.

1 Like
#5

The first time you use a sound in the online player the system needs to cache the file, which is why sometimes samples take slightly longer the first time you use them. If you spam the button before the app has had a chance to cache the file then you will be queuing the system up with multiple duplicated actions, which can cause performance issues.

The Player only needs to cache them the once, which is why the second time around everything would have worked properly. It just needs that first instance to be able to properly load.

1 Like
#6

Thanks all, there’s a good clue here that I can investigate.

1 Like
#7

We also find this an issue with Syrinscape. We using the Chat Triggers fantasy grounds extension, and we sometimes find triggering multiple sounds will crash some people’s online player (though not always everyone’s).

It seems to be to do with too many sounds, especially one-shots, triggered too close together. AFAIK I have the latest version of the extension, so I don’t think the debouncing has gone far enough. It’s odd that it crashes some people’s player and not others- implies that travel times and latencies are part of the equation too. I wonder if the Syrinscape devs can test triggering several one-shots simultaneously and see if they can make Syrinscape handle this gracefully rather than crashing out?

It’s a minor annoyance with a very good program that we know is still in beta. It’s about the only problem of any sort we’ve had with Syrinscape, so it would be super to fix it!

Cheers, Hywel Phillips