This is a borderline shitpost, but I have a job where my mind wanders sometimes, and I come up with lots of weird stuff. Last week, I was taken with the absurd idea of making a satirical song about FAF to the tune of 'My Favorite Things' from Sound of music. Don't ask why.

For better or worse, here is the result.

"ASFs spew from a surfaced Atlantis
Three engies lost to a single rushed Mantis
Point defence rapidly blasting their beams
These are a few of my favorite things!

2 minute bombers, and engineers juking
SMD snipes and the subsequent nuking
Seeing your enemies power-stalling
These are a few of my favorite things!

Fatboys out-ranging Galactic Colossus
Monkeylords stealthing and bloody Ahwassas
Allies and all their "assist me plz" pings
These are a few of my favorite things!

When the com snipes and CTRL-Ks
have me feeling sad
I simply remember my favorite things
And then I don't feel so bad!

Rapid-fire arty and tactical missiles
mass fabs exploding, reactors so fissile
Mazers and cloaking and teleporting
These are a few of my favorite things!

Soulrippers belching out plumes of pollution
Salvations finding their firing solutions
Flak tearing bombers apart by the wings
These are a few of my favorite things!

Walking destroyers and cruise missiles soaring
"Commander under attack" AI warnings
Cheap ghetto gunships full of mech marines
These are a few of my favorite things!

When the com snipes and CTRL-Ks
have me feeling sad
I simply remember my favorite things
And then I don't feeeeeeel... sooooo bad!

@spikeynoob excellent news!~ We'll test the crap out of it and let you know if we find anything.

Thank you

I, for one appreciate the effort, folx.

"Learn Lua and be the change" is something you've almost tempted this zero-experience old-guy to try, but now is not the time in my life where I have the time, so thank you to those of you that do. Best I can do at this point is try to isolate things we find in our games and bring them up to smarter people.

Never underestimate the value of the participation marks.

And yes, it's on Assassination. lol.

But we've played several Phantom games now and every time a player dies, their stuff stays around. They are reported as dead, they count as an innocent or phantom death toward game victory, they cannot issue any orders -- but anything their base was doing continues to happen; factories still produce units, waypoints are followed, etc.

We usually play modded, but I can reproduce in vanilla with all mods off. Started a couple of weeks ago. Easily reproducable even with AI -- just build a few things and then ctrl-k your ACU. Your buildings will all remain. You will be able to select, but not issue any new orders.

If you want a replay, we did https://replay.faforever.com/18038205 last week. Takes 58 minutes for first death tho (dark green).

Let me know if you have any questions.

Can't wait to try it. Thanks for your time folx!

Crashes at the 40-minute mark and people with potato computers. What else?

New 'Mod' version of Phantom-X worked great for a week or two, but now after the latest Dev patch, it's doing the same thing as the previous version and then some:

When ACU dies, player counts as dead, but units and buildings remain.
NEW sometimes players don't count as dead and can continue to play! (Game will never count as over).

https://replay.faforever.com/19423345

@uveso OH I guarantee you you did. I blasted the hell out of our resident Aeon player who didn't expect it to be working. That'll teach them to read the forums. Lol.

As a fun note, this getting fixed just in time to coincide with the TMD changes is interesting, because we always thought the Purifier was a little bit too hard to stop if you stacked multiples up and fired them together, but the TMD buff has made it a little more reasonable to stop multiple purifiers, so win/win.

#SimCity Challenge.

FWIW, our playgroup digs this change. It's SO good being able to maneuver a couple of Atlantises while they continue to work on building planes. Big thumbs up to whomever we can credit with the idea.

Nice! Before the recent bug, we found it was causing desyncs too, but it didn't sound like an active project, so thanks for looking into it.

Some of the effects were pretty intense, but this mod is worth it alone for the oil slicks after a huge naval battle.

@jip Will definitely test it out. Thanks as always to you and @Uveso for getting on this stuff!

Here is the log from the Survival Map + BlackOps that crashed. The crash happened about ~30+ minutes into the game, at around 21:30 timestamp I think. That's when there's a bunch of info in the ICE log.

71dcd911-09ce-4fe8-9885-4aa8ee0f0801-game_20611540.log
0b06e82a-a16a-4e20-a9a9-8d1bb2308fe6-advanced-ice-adapter.log

(these are the logs you want, right @Jip? I am assuming advanced ICE log is part of having the debug mode turned on)

Note a post currently below this one saying they had the same crash/freeze in a campaign map with BlackOps on.

So an update on what we've found:

This is definitely BlackOps related, but it started recently, and I don't believe BlackOps has been updated in a while so maybe it's something in the main game has changed that broke BlackOps?

Phantom-X is not the only mod that locks us in this loop. We recently played a survival map (Survival 5thdimension 16 player v5) and experienced the same freeze.

Both cases, the freeze only happens with BlackOps on. If we play Phantom-X or the Survival map in Vanilla, no freeze.

Both cases, the freeze happens when people are well into T3/experimental production, though we haven't been able to identify any one unit or action that may have been the reason for the freeze.

Something is currently happening with alternate game modes when BlackOps is on.

The symptom is that the game 'freezes' but you can click on everything. The game just stops playing.

Our group has also had this happen in Phantom-X and Survival map games. Turning BlackOps off lets us play botht hose modes.

@battleshiponi

If Uveso updates the mod to fix some of these errors, there will be a new version in the mod vault. You may need to manually uninstall the old version and reinstall it from the vault (2 clicks :D) but there should be no need to go to github.

Ugh.. @Jip I know there's some weird connect stuff going on, but this happened again a third time tonight in another PhantomX game, so I'm starting to think it's Phantom related.

This time it was a different player (Vaemas) showing up first on the ICE log, even though it was mostly the same crew.

2023-07-28 20:41:04.893 INFO  Sent turn refresh request. (c.f.i.ice.PeerTurnRefreshModule:72)
2023-07-28 20:41:18.754 INFO  Sent turn refresh request. (c.f.i.ice.PeerTurnRefreshModule:72)
2023-07-28 20:42:11.007 INFO  Sent turn refresh request. (c.f.i.ice.PeerTurnRefreshModule:72)
2023-07-28 20:42:32.773 INFO  Sent turn refresh request. (c.f.i.ice.PeerTurnRefreshModule:72)
2023-07-28 20:43:04.894 INFO  Sent turn refresh request. (c.f.i.ice.PeerTurnRefreshModule:72)
2023-07-28 20:43:18.754 INFO  Sent turn refresh request. (c.f.i.ice.PeerTurnRefreshModule:72)
2023-07-28 20:44:11.007 INFO  Sent turn refresh request. (c.f.i.ice.PeerTurnRefreshModule:72)
2023-07-28 20:44:32.774 INFO  Sent turn refresh request. (c.f.i.ice.PeerTurnRefreshModule:72)
2023-07-28 20:45:04.894 INFO  Sent turn refresh request. (c.f.i.ice.PeerTurnRefreshModule:72)
2023-07-28 20:45:18.758 INFO  Sent turn refresh request. (c.f.i.ice.PeerTurnRefreshModule:72)
2023-07-28 20:45:45.870 WARN  Didn't receive any answer to echo requests for the past 10 seconds from Vaemas, aborting connection (c.f.i.i.PeerConnectivityCheckerModule:102)
2023-07-28 20:45:45.871 WARN  Sleeping refreshThread was interrupted (c.f.i.ice.PeerTurnRefreshModule:80)
2023-07-28 20:45:45.871 WARN  ICE Vaemas(349568): ICE connection has been lost for peer (c.f.iceadapter.ice.PeerIceModule:336)
2023-07-28 20:45:45.871 WARN  ICE Vaemas(349568): Received invalid packet, first byte: 0x0, length: 65536 (c.f.iceadapter.ice.PeerIceModule:432)
2023-07-28 20:45:45.871 INFO  Sending Notification:{"method":"onConnected","params":[13857,349568,false],"jsonrpc":"2.0"} (com.nbarraille.jjsonrpc.JJsonPeer:529)
2023-07-28 20:45:45.871 WARN  ICE Vaemas(349568): Received invalid packet, first byte: 0x0, length: 65536 (c.f.iceadapter.ice.PeerIceModule:432)
2023-07-28 20:45:45.871 WARN  ICE Vaemas(349568): Received invalid packet, first byte: 0x0, length: 65536 (c.f.iceadapter.ice.PeerIceModule:432)
2023-07-28 20:45:45.871 WARN  ICE Vaemas(349568): Received invalid packet, first byte: 0x0, length: 65536 (c.f.iceadapter.ice.PeerIceModule:432)
2023-07-28 20:45:45.871 INFO  Sending Notification:{"method":"onIceConnectionStateChanged","params":[13857,349568,"disconnected"],"jsonrpc":"2.0"} (com.nbarraille.jjsonrpc.JJsonPeer:529)
2023-07-28 20:45:45.871 WARN  ICE Vaemas(349568): Received invalid packet, first byte: 0x0, length: 65536 (c.f.iceadapter.ice.PeerIceModule:432)
2023-07-28 20:45:45.871 WARN  ICE Vaemas(349568): Received invalid packet, first byte: 0x0, length: 65536 (c.f.iceadapter.ice.PeerIceModule:432)
2023-07-28 20:45:45.871 WARN  ICE Vaemas(349568): Received invalid packet, first byte: 0x0, length: 65536 (c.f.iceadapter.ice.PeerIceModule:432)
2023-07-28 20:45:45.872 WARN  ICE Vaemas(349568): Received invalid packet, first byte: 0x0, length: 65536 (c.f.iceadapter.ice.PeerIceModule:432)
2023-07-28 20:45:45.872 WARN  ICE Vaemas(349568): Received invalid packet, first byte: 0x0, length: 65536 (c.f.iceadapter.ice.PeerIceModule:432)
2023-07-28 20:45:45.872 WARN  ICE Vaemas(349568): Received invalid packet, first byte: 0x0, length: 65536 (c.f.iceadapter.ice.PeerIceModule:432)
2023-07-28 20:45:45.872 WARN  ICE Vaemas(349568): Received invalid packet, first byte: 0x0, length: 65536 (c.f.iceadapter.ice.PeerIceModule:432)

That's a snip from the log where it died (again, near the 40 minute mark, but this is also shortly after the Phantom X reveal timer we have)

I'll attach the full logs too, but any suggestions you have, I'm listening. Next week, we'll try a Phantom X game without BlackOps, but right now it seems we can play other games with BlackOps, it's only our phantom X games that are crashing like this. We're big BlackOps fans, so obviously we hate to have to turn it off, but let me know if there's anything we can try to test for you.

ice-adapter.log
game_20472476.log

@uveso

Hello friends.

I'm not sure what happened, but all of a sudden, you can't build hydro generators with BlackOps Unleashed turned on.

To recreate, just play a game with BlackOps unleashed on, and spit that first engie out. Hydro cannot be built with hotkeys, and isn't visible on the build UI.