Starcraft AI blog

Argh, crashes!

I ran a ton of test games, against both stronger and weaker opponents of all races on rotating maps, and saw no sign of any crashing bug. I eliminated nearly all crashes from Steamhammer by about April last year, and since then there have been only a handful of crashes total on SSCAIT. Every release has been reliable. But on SSCAIT, the new Steamhammer is crashing frequently, in up to 1/3 of games. If that happens in CIG, Steamhammer will finish in the bottom half if it is not disqualified altogether. I have contacted the CIG organizers to warn them of the possible disaster.

The symptoms indicate a severe bug which happens in many games and causes a crash or not depending on details of the environment. It’s likely a pointer or iterator thing. Crash records point to squad update routines for different squads. Those were all changed to assign or unassign detectors depending on the situation, so I know where to start looking.

Please stand by while I employ my fine-tooth comb. It’s too late for CIG, but the rest of the world can be saved. I’ll issue a new version when it’s fixed, and I hope it won’t be long.

I’m eager to get on with the real work, but crashes come first. Argh!

Update: I found bugs of the general kind I expected in the places I expected. As usual, the bugs were obvious once I read my own code carefully. Lesson: I was in too much hurry. Code review works even with only 1 coder. I’ll upload version 1.4.7 after reading through again and retesting.