fix(game): disable steam overlay #1

Wanted · 2024-02-15T00:48:57Z

Wanted commented

2024-02-15 00:48:57 +00:00

First-time contributor

Many issues were found related to the steam overlay:

GameOverlayRender.dll seems to interfere with com_error message windows by either neglecting to show them or crashing¹ the game. This is especially troublesome when it comes to overwriting game scripts as it does not notify of any script errors and will allow the player to proceed into playing the game in a broken state when it should instead return the to the lobby and provide a error message.
if any audio input device fails to initialize it will repeatedly log the error in Steam/GameOverlayRenderer.log. This file quickly grows to many Megabytes in size, leading to eventual instability and crashes. Most notably in iw6 is the ff read error message that happens when the game tries to load on-the-fly fastfiles, such as the player models. Despite the files having good integrity, the game has a chance of crashing during IO operations.
There is a chance for threads to become deadlocked making the game appear to be frozen. Where the game freezes is very random but appears to happen mostly around IO operations with fastfiles or player stats.

The crash is observed when the com_error ui element appears. This same crash was also reproduced by rapidly exiting lobby menus. The chance of this happening is very small, however having GameOverlayRender.dll loaded makes it much more likely to occur. In fact, it will occur 100% of the time when both the overlay is loaded and at least one audio input devices fails to detect input level. For this reason I commented the code where it is crashing, just as h1-mod has done for similar crashing post-game. ↩︎

Many issues were found related to the steam overlay: 1. `GameOverlayRender.dll` seems to interfere with com_error message windows by either neglecting to show them or crashing[^1] the game. This is especially troublesome when it comes to overwriting game scripts as it does not notify of any script errors and will allow the player to proceed into playing the game in a broken state when it should instead return the to the lobby and provide a error message. 2. if any audio input device fails to initialize it will repeatedly log the error in `Steam/GameOverlayRenderer.log`. This file quickly grows to many Megabytes in size, leading to eventual instability and crashes. Most notably in iw6 is the ff read error message that happens when the game tries to load on-the-fly fastfiles, such as the player models. Despite the files having good integrity, the game has a chance of crashing during IO operations. 3. There is a chance for threads to become deadlocked making the game appear to be frozen. Where the game freezes is very random but appears to happen mostly around IO operations with fastfiles or player stats. [^1]: The crash is observed when the com_error ui element appears. This same crash was also reproduced by rapidly exiting lobby menus. The chance of this happening is very small, however having `GameOverlayRender.dll` loaded makes it much more likely to occur. In fact, it will occur 100% of the time when both the overlay is loaded and at least one audio input devices fails to detect input level. For this reason I commented the code where it is crashing, just as h1-mod has done for similar crashing post-game.

Wanted added 1 commit 2024-02-15 00:48:58 +00:00

fix(game): disable steam overlay 69654049b3

- comment code that can crash in the lobby menus

Future commented

2024-02-15 10:01:50 +00:00

Completed via 94a290358e

Completed via https://git.alterware.dev/AlterWare/iw6-mod/commit/94a290358e34d8342ab04bb238be4f1f69dfa689

Future closed this pull request

2024-02-15 10:01:50 +00:00

Pull request closed

This pull request cannot be reopened because the branch was deleted.

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Reference: alterware/iw6-mod#1

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