Ryzom

Not a whine or a flame, a serious question. There doesn't actually appear to be any official *support* for technical issues here. While I appreciate my fellow players who have taken the time to respond to any questions and the GMs who get to assist clueless and frustrated folks like me out, the few official posts I see tend to be along the same lines as the GM responses in game.

Namely:
-relog
-run ryzom_recover
-reboot
-reinstall
-Hmmm... have you emailed technical-NA@ryzom .com?

Case in point, I ran a google search for the string "Access Violation exception generated" including quotes. Every single thread it pulled up was a Ryzom thread. Lots of people with the same issue. As far as I could see, no official answers ever given.

When many people have the same problems, should there not be some sort of official tech answer? "If you are getting Error X, then do Resolve Y" kind of deals? At least an idea of where to start?

Why not start a sticky thread for the most common errors, such as the Access violation one, or the OpenGL/Radeon thing, or even the Shard not Available downtime message?

It just seems like a lot of people have the same questions and every single person has to start over at square one every time and hope they chose the right keyword combo in their thread title to get a little attention.

As for Access Violation errors:
http://www.ryzom.fr/forum/showthread.php?t=7535
http://www.ryzom.fr/forum/showthread.php?t=7565&page=1&pp=10
http://ryzom.com/forum/showthread.php?t=624&page=11&pp=10 probably close to a dozen or more instances of it here.
http://forum.mdo-games.de/vbulletin/archive/index.php/t-79023.html I can't read German. Similar thread on the French side
http://www.ryzom-game.info/forum_thread_610_0.html&setmedia=0

There are even instances cached from the open beta forums. I'm going to go with the idea that this is a well-known and well documented issue dating back to at least September through multiple systems in multiple patches.

So, official Ryzom technical answer please. What causes it?

How do I fix it?

Thanks for your patience. (emailing a copy of the last portion of the letter and the tech questions to the ryzom tech support email as well)

Tin.

tinpony wrote:Not a whine or a flame, a serious question. There doesn't actually appear to be any official *support* for technical issues here. While I appreciate my fellow players who have taken the time to respond to any questions and the GMs who get to assist clueless and frustrated folks like me out, the few official posts I see tend to be along the same lines as the GM responses in game.

Namely:
-relog
-run ryzom_recover
-reboot
-reinstall
-Hmmm... have you emailed technical-NA@ryzom .com?

Case in point, I ran a google search for the string "Access Violation exception generated" including quotes. Every single thread it pulled up was a Ryzom thread. Lots of people with the same issue. As far as I could see, no official answers ever given.

When many people have the same problems, should there not be some sort of official tech answer? "If you are getting Error X, then do Resolve Y" kind of deals? At least an idea of where to start?

Why not start a sticky thread for the most common errors, such as the Access violation one, or the OpenGL/Radeon thing, or even the Shard not Available downtime message?

It just seems like a lot of people have the same questions and every single person has to start over at square one every time and hope they chose the right keyword combo in their thread title to get a little attention.

As for Access Violation errors:
http://www.ryzom.fr/forum/showthread.php?t=7535
http://www.ryzom.fr/forum/showthread.php?t=7565&page=1&pp=10
http://ryzom.com/forum/showthread.php?t=624&page=11&pp=10 probably close to a dozen or more instances of it here.
http://forum.mdo-games.de/vbulletin/archive/index.php/t-79023.html I can't read German. Similar thread on the French side
http://www.ryzom-game.info/forum_thread_610_0.html&setmedia=0

There are even instances cached from the open beta forums. I'm going to go with the idea that this is a well-known and well documented issue dating back to at least September through multiple systems in multiple patches.

So, official Ryzom technical answer please. What causes it?

How do I fix it?

Thanks for your patience. (emailing a copy of the last portion of the letter and the tech questions to the ryzom tech support email as well)

Tin.

-relog
-run ryzom_recover
-reboot
-reinstall
-Hmmm... have you emailed technical-NA@ryzom .com?

one way ticket for me

well if ppl bothered to read the forums that exist we wouldn't have lots of topics about the same thing over and over


thing is ppl don't bother reading nor searching and then blame their laziness on their ignorance

Well the poster, naturally and obviously, makes a viable point. Ever since they started calling the old Complaints department "Customer Service" companies have been looking for ways to ... well ... basically have customers do the work for themselves rather than actually have employees directly solve the complaints or "resolve the issues" for the customer.

That's not a knock directly on Nevrax here, that's a knock on the whole last 30 plus years of the profession of Customer Service. Basically, the forum is a place where you can make aware your problems, perhaps get help from other players with the same issue or technically savvy individuals who might be able to help you (for free -- that's the point) and likewise allows the company to ... tah-dah ... seem responsive and collect data via "metrics", which is basically statistical attempts to see what issues need priority and what tends to accompany what problem (is it only Win98 pcs vs XP, yadda yadda).

Now, that's just context okay. Now I want to address your actual post.

Truth is that there are stickies on some of the major problems to the game. In addition, you are told to directly contact via email Nevrax's tech support if you have a serious problem. So you are just twiddling your thumbs here in the interim. That's another purpose of this forum, to give you something to do and perhaps try while you are waiting for a potential solution to your problem.

In addition, some of what you said is ... well ... unscientific as all heck, to be kind. An "access violation" is probably no different than a "page fault" . In other words, the software has gone outside it's allowed boundaries in memory and is now writing or acting upon data it is not supposed to be fooling around with. It doesn't matter if it's active, passive, writing, reading, or scratch pad, it's violating it's allocated rights according to the Operating System.

This can be the fault of Windows, of the game, of another program somehow misinterpreting what it should be doing while idle, a whole lot of things, but probably it's Ryzom acting up.

But to be fair, what you have described is a symptom of a problem, it is not a specific disease. By that I mean, there are many types of access violations, many causes to it, and it easily could be that 11 different causes to the various access violations exist, even if all of them were just caused by Ryzom and no other running software.

This is exactly why it is dumbfounding how Windows ever became the most successful operating system in computing. By every logic you can imagine, the best operating system for the customer on Intel compatible cpu PCs was clearly IBM's OS/2.

At one time, IBM's OS/2 could ... get this ... run all Windows programs, all DOS programs, and all OS/2 programs. But the key benefit was that OS/2 was much stricter in segregating one program from another. In Windows, page faults and access violations usually crashed other running programs. In OS/2 that was virtually impossible.

(ASIDE : For a while IBM's OS/2 even cost less, certainly less than a box of MS Windows and a box of MS-DOS combined)

See, Windows error messages will tell you that an access violation has occurred ... yet stupifyingly ... it doesn't prevent them. Did you ever consider how much then to blame is an operating system with such a lax system of restricting one program from interfering with another? OS/2 was much tougher. If one program did something awry, it was stopped. That offending program might be shut down and some of its progress unrecoverable, but the other software processes running were safe from the rogue software's potential abuse.

Now granted I said virtually safe because nothing is absolute and I'm sure there has to be a horror story somewhere about OS/2 . But since it was designed back in the days of Mainframes and IBM had experience with Operating Systems that ran on those, it was paramount back then to safeguard one users program (consider the batch processes of those days) from another. If a PH.D from university was running an experimental simulation for 5 hours of paid Mainframe time, he wanted to be sure it was safe from being overrun by the work of Acme Corporation's end of year accounting that was running simultaneously on the powerful mainframe. Simultaneously , in the sense, that the mainframe was sharing its CPU time , which was more than either program needed, on a time-share (ticks per second) basis to both tasks or jobs or processes or batches (as was the vernacular then). You couldn't afford having the two programs bump into each other and over-write each other's execution stack of instructions OR the scratch pad memory , or buh-bye the payment for the job on that mainframe and goodbye reputation and business.

Unix also had similar roots in the mainframe arena.

Windows really grew out of (MS-)DOS. DOS was meant to run exclusively as one program on one computer, there were exceptions to this, but it wasn't designed to strictly compartmentalize one software process completely and safely from the potentials offenses of another. That's changed to some degree with each Windows upgrade, but still it's pretty pitiful.

(ASIDE : Digital Research actually constructed DOS first and it was based on CP/M. Luckily for Bill Gates, he undercut Digital Research with some savvy pricing and also a nice right to always market DOS and so got the contract for the IBM PC. You could run a sort of "DOS" on Atari computers too, it was also called DOS for Disk Operating System also and was based on CP/M)

So these access violations may seem very similar, but the commonality of the name of the TYPE of offense, is not the same as saying they are all the same problem, even if Ryzom is causing the error.

It's like saying ... hey look at all those Runny Noses, guess everyone of those Runny Noses should be posted in one thread and the cure for all given there in one thread.

Problem is Runny Noses are a SYMPTOM, and not a disease. So one Runny Nose is due to the Flu, another to the common cold, another to a bad pneumonia caused by weak immunity to a certain other virus because the victim also has AIDs , and so on and so on.

Is the cure for each the same? Nope, but they are all Runny Noses. Same with the access violation here, possibly, maybe.

So you get points off for that contention.

Other than that, yep forums are a bit of a pain in the butt. You'll find that Saga of Ryzom board GMs are a bit better than some MMORPGs and are less effective than others.

You can get some help in-game using the tech support there. You can get mor help by email. There are stickies to many issues, but unfortunately they are a bit scattered about on various boards and even within threads.

I agree that there is no real excuse for this, but it is less bad than say for 2/3rd's of the other companies running MMORPGs.

I hope you have some success in getting help and I don't mean to bust your chops, I've busted the chops of Nevrax in this as well as Microsoft, I guess I'm an equal opportunity insulter to some extent.

It's frustrating, most of computing is when it goes awry. In the meantime, I wish you the best in this upcoming Holiday Season and hope you will soon be enjoying a better computing and game-playing experience.

(Meanwhile wasn't it cool hearing about how it used to be with the old Mainframes and IBM's OS/2. Doh!)

thing is most ppl don't do anything to try and prevent some of these violations. namely updating drivers, running virus scans and removing spyware and adware removers

thing is i do computer repair for a living, i would not have a job if ppl took an ounce of prevention when it comes to their computer.

the blame can also be place on windows and their horrible programming. also the laziness of ppl in general to use the search functions is to blame as well