Most crashes are caught by the game's own fatal handlers, which write a
dump of thread stacks only; the launcher could only copy it after the
game had exited. A crash on a freed or overwritten object then showed
the faulting registers but not the object or the list it came from.
- game_fatal_dump: the game's MiniDumpWriteDump import points at
ReSkate. Before the game writes its dump, the crash reporter takes its
own of the still-running game for the faulting thread; the game's dump
follows as before. Reports say capture.source "game-fatal-handler".
- The reporter's dumps include the memory the stacks point at
(MiniDumpWithIndirectlyReferencedMemory), a few MB more a report.
- The shared report says who asked for the dump (protocol version 4).
- Tests: a game-handler crash is captured with a heap block only its
stack points at; ReSkate's own capture keeps it too.
Players reported the game hanging for about a second while skating. A
profile showed the memory line in the log walking every heap
(HeapSummary) on the client thread, 0.5 to 2 s every two minutes. An
audit of everything that runs on the game's update and render threads
found more of the same, and Sentry's top crashes had causes of ours.
Freezes:
- Memory log line: no heap walk or thread snapshot; the GPU part and the
write happen on a thread of their own.
- Profile database: synchronous=NORMAL in WAL mode. A save is still kept
when the game crashes; every play event no longer waits for the disk
inside the game's hooks.
- ReSkate's own preferences and values (menu clicks, session sliders,
Discord) are saved by a background writer in order; reads see a value
until it is saved.
- Input: the foreground window and the keyboard are sampled on a thread
of their own (GetAncestor and GetAsyncKeyState stalled the client tick
40-50 ms when another program held Windows' lock); flight input uses
the sample; ClipCursor at most twice a second while a menu has the
pointer.
- Hooks installed while the game runs go in one transaction per place
(HookBatch): throwdowns, remote players, the party, Hall of Meat.
- Off the update thread: the host's map package lookup (one table read in
the background, not the Mods folder per offer), the trainer's map file
and settings save, Board Break's settings save, mod music playlists and
their covers, the Spotify station covers.
- Off the render thread: the Modding page's and the deck card's Mods
folder reads. The overlay's three startup waits share five seconds.
- Less work per frame: Steam names reused while one a frame is asked
again, 2 friends a tick, steam_api64.dll checked once per process,
cosmetic names read in place rather than a system call per character,
an outfit load no longer copies the inventory per slot, the throwdown
type scan runs at background priority over resident memory, the Board
Break deck label is kept a minute.
Crashes:
- Render-resource pool: the metadata fields are written to the state
owner only. The other renderer is 0x2daa00 bytes, and +0x11aae28 is far
past its end (store_field crash; heap corruption in every release).
- Other players' skateboard effects: a stale skateboard component is no
longer followed, and the joint lookup is walked with a bound first (an
endless loop in reused memory ended in GameStall).
- Launcher: Oodle decodes into the buffer it asks for with corrupt data
possible, and its assertions no longer stop the process (heap corruption
in the store-copy scan; a breakpoint in oo2core).
Timings (Send performance timings):
- A frame of half a second or more in a level is sent as game.freeze:
where the time went (ReSkate's tick, the game's frame, or outside it),
whether the renderer kept presenting, and ReSkate's busiest zones.
- Closing the game sends the level session it was in.
Music after a connection drop:
- Spotify device: an account Spotify could not be reached with is kept and
tried again (3 s doubling to a minute); a session that drops is taken
up again. Only an account Spotify refuses is asked for anew.
- YouTube playlist pictures that could not be fetched are tried again,
from 30 s to 10 minutes apart.
The renderer gives each frame 131,072 shader-visible descriptors past a persistent 120,000, in
heaps of 333,333. Dense custom maps (the Los Santos City sublevels, San Andreas) draw more than
that in a frame, and the renderer wrote past the end of the heap: shaders read garbage
descriptors, which faulted or hung the GPU (page faults at nonsense addresses, in draws, texture
fetches and ray tracing alike). ReSkate now patches the device setup at boot so each heap is
D3D12's 1,000,000 and a frame may use 524,288; heaps are 644,288 descriptors. LS-B2, LS-B3 and
San Andreas (210,000 a frame at its peak) now hold.
Also in this change:
- Memory: perf memory owners/heap/gpu/report, a ledger of who commits the game's RAM; the
render-resource pool no longer allocates its 115 MB twice; the EadpErrorsData arena is
capped at 32 MiB (EA's error reporting is blocked anyway).
- Crash reports: tagged with the map, destination, graphics card and driver version (protocol
v3), so Sentry can group GPU hangs by map and card.
- GPU diagnostics (--gpu-diagnostics): a fuller DRED report, the device-removal and video
memory watches, a large-draw watch, a record of which game code made and freed each GPU heap
and resource, checks of every GPU address bound, and a meter of each descriptor heap's use.
- World pools: peak use of entity pages, render instances and spatial blocks in the log.
- dingosdk_mod_mesh_check: checks every MeshSet a mod ships against its geometry; the MeshSet
reader now knows static meshes' layout.
Crash dumps now go to the project's own Sentry server. The launcher's
out-of-process helper is unchanged; only where it posts and what it expects
back are:
- The default endpoint is the Sentry project's minidump URL. Report
attributes travel as Sentry tags, with the release as reskate@<version>.
- An upload counts as accepted when the server answers with an event ID.
- "backtrace" is "crash_report" throughout: the namespace, files, CMake
targets, DINGOSDK_CRASH_REPORT_URL, DINGOSDK_BUILD_CRASH_REPORT_TESTS and
the RESKATE_CRASH_REPORT_URL override.
Performance timings are new, and off unless "Send performance timings" is
ticked in the launcher's settings (RESKATE_TRACING=1). A small tracer
(Engine/Core/Debug/trace.h) posts each finished step to Sentry as a
transaction from a background thread; the launcher and the game it starts
share one trace. Timed: the update check, the Steam download, Thunderstore
installs, the mod merge, starting the game, the launch up to the first
playable level, each level load, joining a session, fetching the identity
lists, and the time spent in each level with its average frame rate and
long frames. Turning crash reports off turns timings off too.
AyeZeeBB