TIR and Battle of Britain II

[nealg]

Hi -- been a while. Posting here, but it doesn't really belong here other than I have a TIR 2 -- serial #15370. However, this issue is affecting some TIR 3 and TIR 4 users with this sim also.

Without going into a lot of background, the sim has a crash problem for many that has become known as the English Text crash -- so-called because the BoB.exe has a internal name of battle of britain english text.exe, and Windows XP generates this as the 'offending' cause of the crash.

What has been discovered, for myself and another user who tested it first, is that XP SP2 has a feature included called 'software Data Execution Prevention' ; what it does, as simply as I can put it, is lock certain memory registers from executing code. Allegedly, this helps prevent the execution of malicious code. It's more involved, but, trying to keep this short.

It has been suspected that TIR was contributing to these crashes, so as a test, we configured the XP SP2 DEP feature to 'ignore' our bob2 and TrackIR executables. Interestingly, this has proven to be highly successful -- I went from one ET crash every 15-20 minutes, to none at all -- until yesterday.

I might also note here : prior to trying this DEP thing, I had reduced my ET crashes to almost zero by flying the sim WITHOUT TIR enabled. This, and what occurred yesterday, is why I am posting this today.

There is a line in the BoB2 config text file ( BDG.txt ) that allows you to disable TIR in external view; I prefer this, as in BoB2:WOV the external TIR is reversed ( that is, up is down, left is right, etc. ). So, I tried it out yesterday to see how it works.

And got the ET crashes repeatedly. I reset the line in the text file to re-enable TIR for external, and am back to being stable once more.

Upshot of it is, there does seem to be a problem with TIR ( be it 2, 3, or 4 ) and the sim. We users do not know if it is TIR ( all of us are using it in other sims fine ) or somehow in the way BoB2:WOV implements it. The user with TIR 4 was using a TIR 1 when he first started flying BoB2:WOV, and he had none of the problems -- it wasn't until he obtained his TIR 4 that the ET errors began. With my TIR2, they have been there since release.

There are many more posts on this at the Shockwave Tech forums for BoB2, but it was felt that Naturalpoint might want to be aware of it also...in the hope that maybe this was something you might have a answer for. It isn't that we suspect the crash to be totally TIR caused, but it does somehow seem to be involved. By excluding it from XP SP2's DEP routine, two of us have had the crashes almost stop completely, and others have had varying degrees of success. What makes this hard is that the error crash message is a pretty generic Windows message, giving no real clue as to what exactly causes it -- and, unless the code specifically implements the DEP routines, DEP will never be mentioned as a cause -- rather, the old standby 'Exception Access Violation' is given.

Ok...whew...sorry about the length. So....any clues? Ring any bells? Any suggestions?

Now, now -- EXCEPT that!

[Birch]

As long as the TrackIR application itself is not crashing, then it sounds like it may be a problem in how TrackIR support was implemented in BoB. This seems likely since the crashing has not been reported in other TrackIR Enhanced titles, has the developer of the title provided any kind of response on the issue?