EQ2 Browser Crash Issue - Info requestFollow

I've never had this happen, so I'll be no help. Also, posting this was of no help either. But I gotta +1 some way!

Also, if you do have this happen and get an EQ2 crash log because of it, that might have vital info that could help.

I've never been able to reproduce this issue but I've heard from smatterings of people who have. Detailed information is what we need.. if you have a crashlog (can email this to calthine@allakhazam.com and cyliena@allakhazam.com), or see a certain ad/ad type before the crash, if it's on a certain type of page on our site, etc... anything can be useful!

Edited, Feb 27th 2012 2:21pm by Cyliena

Wonder if it has something to do with the custom UI's. I don't use one and it never happens to me.

Can you make it happen without a custom UI?

We do not use an ad service - can you pinpoint specific ads causing it?

Little extra info I didn't include yet.

Those with the issue are using the full install, not streaming. That doesn't mean the problem doesn't exist with the streaming client, just means we haven't tried it that way. It shouldn't make a difference but figured the more info the better when tracking down something elusive like this.

These are the steps to reproduce this from scratch:

1. Do a full install of Everquest 2 on a Windows 7 machine.
2. Install the DrumsUI or Profit-Reborn custom UI
3. Log into EQ2
4. Open the Quest journal
5. Click the icon to load that quest on Zam (make sure you're not logged into Zam in the in-game browser window and if you are, log out)
6. Wait for the page to load, move your cursor around on the browser window, give it about 30 seconds, then close the browser window
7. Repeat steps 5 and 6 a few times

I have some guildmates that could do those steps while running Windows XP with no problems. But for those of us running Windows 7, the four of us that tried could make this freeze the game client consistently within a minute of trying using Fetish Nightfall, DrumsUI or Profit-Reborn. Fetish Nightfall is a bit harder to install these days which is why I didn't suggest trying that in the steps above.

Can someone at Zam can try this and let me know if it freezes the game or not? As I said, we've got four people able to reproduce this behavior within a minute so hopefully these are the repro steps you guys need to track down what's going on. If not, let me know and we'll keep searching. :)

Thanks!

Which version of Windows 7 and 32-/64-bit?
Does it happen vanilla without any UI Mods?

Happens with Windows 7 Professional 64 bit and Windows 7 Ultimate 64 bit. I'll have to ask tonight to see if there are any other variations of Windows 7 involved.

Not sure if it happens without UI mods. UI mods are the main reason we load up Zam the way we do. All we have to do is click a single button and there's the quest data or the item data with no typing involved. With the vanilla UI we would have to type the info manually to get there each time we want to look something up.

I'll try to test it with the vanilla UI tonight though to see how that effects it.

Edited, Feb 28th 2012 12:59pm by Dethdlr

That "might" cause the problems we're seeing. The testing we've been doing has been with quests, not items or NPCs. I should be able to see tonight though.

So this only happens if you click the custom UI quest links to open the browser, but not if you use /browser and navigate through the site itself? I use the default quest journal so I can't test that out myself, but using /browser has never crashed me. (I'm also using Win XP 64-bit so that may be a difference as well, as you noted)

Edited, Feb 28th 2012 6:47pm by Cyliena

Where I'm finding an anomaly is I had one occurrence where I could not get it to lock up no matter what I did, including go to quest pages, until I had closed the browser and was camping. The browser wasn't even open.

I wish we could find error logs on this.

Repro'd one try of four on "Finding the Dain" on the default UI, logged out. I tried to click a COPY button. Interesting, the page had loaded completely, but then seemed to reload.

No crash on Cyliena's test pages 4 tries.

Now I'm logged into my account, been all over the site with no issues. edit: and posted this from in-game.

The one time I locked up I had Firefox open in the background, so I'll ask: Does anyone have any other browsers open when this happens?

Edited, Feb 28th 2012 8:47pm by Calthine

The only thing I can add as someone that's never froze or locked up is: I don't use a custom UI, I don't use any macros to open the browser to certain pages and I have ads showing on Zam when I use it. I just type /browser and then search for what I'm looking for. Also, I always start out with either the name of the quest or the particular World Event, where I'm trying to make sure I have all the quests done. The only time I might look up an NPC is after I've searched the quest. I'm also using Windows 7 64-bit. Oh, and the ingame browser's homepage is set to eq2.zam.com, if that matters.

Tried those test links with the default UI. I always play full screen btw, don't think I mentioned that before. Nothing running in the background, ACT, other browsers, etc. for any of the tests I've done.

I went to and back from test links 1 and 3 over 10 times and couldn't get it to freeze. Link 2, I got it to freeze after about 4 or 5 tries the first time. Restarted and tried it again and it probably took me 8 or 9 tries to get it to lock up. Not really much in the way of conclusive evidence there unfortunately.

For me, it seems to still freeze a lot more frequently at the quest write ups than anything else that I've tried. I'm done testing for the night but not for good. Will do some more tests tomorrow or the next day.

Thanks for sticking in there with me and trying to track this down. :)

Edited, Feb 29th 2012 12:34am by Dethdlr

I'm starting to think it's not ZAM but a graphics overload on that poor 20 year old browser. Please try it on sites besides ZAM.

I've tried it and never been able to get it to freeze the game with EQ2I, LootDB, EQ2LL, or Xanadu, all sites which lend themselves well to looking up information from within the game with the in-game browser. And granted, all a LOT less complex than Zam.

I don't doubt that Massively or other sites can cause the same issue. I wouldn't be surprised if loading YouTube, Netflix or Hulu with the in-game browser would cause this issue as well. But none of those are sites with valuable information about in-game items or quest write ups that lend themselves well to looking things up with the in-game browser like Zam does. Zam has some really nice information that is great to have available with the in-game browser.

Calthine was able to repro this issue with Drums and the default UI, something that was stated at the beginning of this thread that nobody at Zam had been able to do before. Are we working towards finding out what specifically is causing this and then tweaking the pages at Zam to solve it? Or are we working towards determining that the in-game browser is incapable of loading pages like quest writeups at Zam? Hopefully it's the first one. :) If so, I'll keep plugging along. I've got some ideas to track it down but it may take me a while. The in-game browser can load a page off the hard drive as well. I can grab one of the pages that lock me up, save it locally, and then start pulling parts of it out until it doesn't happen anymore. Then I can add things back in until it starts happening again. This should let me narrow it down to a pretty small html file that regularly causes the problem. I should then also be able to put together a very similar html file that never causes the problem. But as I said, it will take a while and a lot of work.



Thanks for the heads up about my signature. I tried my sig from EQ2Interface that uses bbcode and it didn't work. :( Then I tried straight html and it didn't work either. :( Finally I just typed the addresses and put them in parenthesis and apparently that didn't work either. Doh! There's no information on the page to tell me what I can and can't use in the signatures so I'm kinda flying blind. :( I finally just put the links by themselves and that seems to work.

Thanks!

Ever since there has been more than one web browser, web developers have had to choose which browsers they are going to support, and which ones they're not. What works in one browser may not work in another. In fact, what works in one browser may completely crash another. This is a simple fact of web development. Once you have chosen the browsers you are going to support, you have to tweak your site so that it works properly in those browsers. As a web developer, you don't have any control over how those web browsers work and what bugs they have, and believe me, most of them have bugs. You have to tweak your site to work around the bugs in the browsers you've chosen to support. When a new version of Internet Explorer comes out for example, your site may no longer work properly in the new version. When that happens, you have to either tweak your site to work with it or simply say that you don't support that version of Internet Explorer. Most people tweak their site. Saying that it doesn't work with the new version of Internet Explorer so blame Microsoft and call Steve Ballmer doesn't help.

The same thing applies to the in-game browser. It has bugs. It has limitations. In order for it to function properly with a given site, that site may need to be tweaked to support the in-game browser. What needs tweaked isn't something that is documented. It is derived by web developers doing trial and error until they figure out what they need to do to support a given browser. Same thing with the in-game browser. The in-game browser is what it is. It's a limited browser that can handle a limited amount of capabilities.

As a web developer, you have two choices when dealing with a limited browser such as the in-game browser:

1. Support the in-game browser. This means you have to do the work to tweak the site so that it functions properly with the in-game browser. This is usually a pain.

2. Don't support the browser. This means you do what you can to get it to work but if things go wrong, you don't officially support it anyway.

There are many, many sites out there that don't support the in-game browser. Pointing at them and saying your site is fine because those other sites don't work either doesn't help anything. Those other sites don't support the in-game browser.

If Zam's position is that because of the limitations of the in-game browser, you don't officially support it's use, that's a perfectly acceptable position. Nobody can fault you for it if that's your decision. Getting an advanced site like Zam to function properly in something as limited as the in-game browser is a sizable challenge. If the benefit isn't worth the work involved in officially supporting it, then that makes sense, don't officially support it.

If that's the case, just let me know. But that's not what has been stated so far. What has been stated so far has been that this has been happening for two years and nobody can give repro steps. So I gave you repro steps with a custom UI. You then said you need repro steps with the default UI. So I gave you repro steps with the default UI. You then said that since it happens with other sites as well, it's not Zam's fault. I think we can all agree that it's not Zam's fault. The in-game browser has major limitations. We all get that. It's the fault of the in-game browser. But none of *us* can't fix the in game browser. The only thing we have control over is our own code. Some of the other EQ2 sites have decided to code their pages in such a way that they work with the limitations of the in-game browser. So far, Zam hasn't. That's a perfectly understandable position.

So is that correct? Zam doesn't officially support the in-game browser due to it's sizable limitations and bugs?

Thanks

It's potentially Flash.

We discovered that from me getting the problem on dictionary.reference.com and getting an actual error log. More samples would be better: while it appeared to be the same issue, it was the first time on any trial I got a windows error message and therefore might not be it.

Although it's looking good :)



Edited, Mar 1st 2012 11:46am by Calthine

lol. Heck, this IS a better browser. You should have seen what they had for a browser before this one. You talk about limitations. It didn't even support all the normal html tags. Took me forever to put together pages that worked in that mess they called a browser. This is leaps and bounds above the old one. :)

But yes, it could be much better. But at least it works. Most of the time. With some pages. :)