Bug catching and OS oddness

Just had a little bit of bug hunting oddness -

I released Tank Universal after having it tested on W2000 and WinXP and users reporting it stable.

But Vista users were reporting a recurring crash at a particular point. Didn't have Vista available to me when testing, but managed to get some time on a Vista box today.

Turns out it was a pointer that wasn't being zeroed after a level change (I thought I'd got them all!). This pointer was being passed to a PhysX function (pxBodySetFlagRayCast) that sets a mesh (in this case non-existant) to being pickable by the PhysX engine. So by just making sure the pointer was properly cleared between level changes, problem solved!

But it was odd how this doesn't cause a crash on either W2000 or XP, but does on Vista. Guess that highlights the importance of good programming habits!

Since you mention it yourself... TU also crashes on my Vista installation. It loads and shows me the main menu, but when I choose to start a new game, it goes bye-bye with a Blitz3D error message. I haven't run Windows at home in a couple of days, and I don't remember what it was. If it's important, I can run it again on the weekend and post the exact error message here; but don't expect a result before Saturday or Sunday.

Vista is just more picky and has raised the old DEP security stuff to a level of insanity (especially with enabled UAC and/or on regular user accounts) without adding the least bit to OS stability, just to OS incompatibility unhappily.

Winni

You're talking about the demo or full version of TU?

Hopefully I've sorted the Vista crash and will be releasing a fix shortly.

Vista is a bit more finicky about everything :s