34 thoughts on “Update Notes: Tuesday, March 6, 2012

  1. @Llenwyn: You can thank/blame the browser fix on me and my guildmates. We spent a few days last week tracking down what was causing the crash with Zam, provided them repro steps, and eventually provided them steps on how to fix it from the client side (Flash was the cause btw). They passed the info along to Zoltaroth. I’ll see once I get home tonight whether or not they implemented my exact *fix* or if they implemented it some other way.

    Why my guildmates and I had to step in and figure out a bug that had been in place for several years, I have no idea. lol

  2. There has been a fix/workaround for ages which involved disabling flash by adding a few lines in the .ini. I always marvelled that they never patched that workaround to keep the game from crashing when people openend Zam in the browser.
    I am curious to see if they actually fixed it this time, making flashsites work in the ingame browser.

  3. @Dethdlr we all knew that is was flash but the fact that this would occur only when you had something else but IE installed surprises… Grats on finding that
    Next: puffy cloud instead of feather :p

  4. @Llenwyn: Yup. My fix was to create a file called user.js in the mozilla folder and put this one line inside it:

    pref(“plugin.scan.plid.all”, false);

    Disables Flash, Realplayer, and a few others but not everything. I’ll be interested to see how they went about fixing it.

  5. It’s great that we have players within the community who actually know what they are doing – in so much that they embarrass Sony because they actually know how to fix things that either the people who work for the EQ2 Dev team are too incompetent to fix…or just too lazy.

  6. I patched my browser using a similar fix to the one you just described Dethdlr. I got it off the official forums at least 6 months ago. As I am on my phone I can’t find the source for it atm.
    I just think it is very typical for SOE to leave a bug like this unfixed for so long, even though a fix/workaround has been created by their own customers. It must have been around for at least a year…

  7. Actually, Taka, it seems to me more like SOE is willing to fix the bugs as long as someone else does all the work . . .

    I hope they’re paying you for this, Dethdlr, or at least compensating you. Yeah, yeah, you’re helping to fix a game you like which makes it better for you, your friends and everyone . . .blah blah, I get it and thank you for it, but I’m paying THEM to fix this . . .

    Here’s waiting and hoping for the day Dethdlr and Feldon start up their own EQ2 server. I’ll give them all my money, then I’ll be able to play on a server where I know sh…tuff will get done.

  8. I’m hoping they actually fixed it and not just patch the workaround many of us have been using since this starting happening. But I am sure they will just use the workaround which really isn’t a workaround just setting an option.

  9. Hmm..not sure they quite fixed it…I deleted Dethdlr’s fix. Ran the patcher (Look like it updates xpti.dat file under mozilla/compenents), andi was still able to crash the game using the custom UI Zam button.

    I will just leave your fix in for now.

  10. Originally posted by Deadcrickets:

    @Dethdlr Actually you can thank me for the fix. I worked with a TSR MONTHS ago on this and pointed out the cause behind it.

    And yet it was not fixed until today, 48 hours after it had been independently reported to SOE by Dethdlr.

    I’m not trying to start an argument, but with SOE, bugs get reported all the time with the exact steps needed to reproduce, and even fix. Sometimes it comes down to who sees it, when, and whether they have enough free time to fix it.

  11. @Feldon Not to interrupt the cliche but if you read the thread the exact fix was posted in it after I posted the root cause. You have to remember this is a LOW PRIORITY fix according to Rothgar. They already knew about it and said it would be fixed. Months later, it’s fixed. End of story.

  12. @Deadcrickets: Sorry, but you’re wrong. I don’t doubt at all that you came up with a fix or that you talked to Rothgar or TSRs or anybody else. But then it got put on the shelf and forgotten about. That’s not what got it fixed.

    What got it fixed was me working with Zam, coming up with repro steps, and then coming up with a workaround (which it sounds like they didn’t use so it’s still broke anyway). The Zam folks, instead of detecting the in-game browser and turning off flash on their site as I suggested, decided to instead work directly with Zoltaroth to put the fix in place in the in-game browser.

    If you want to see why it got fixed (IF it’s fixed) now instead of June of last year, go read this thread on Zam: http://www.zam.com/forum.html?forum=19&mid=1330361606185652588

  13. Its great that the ingame browser is fixed now (every so often I’d forget to connect to Zam on it), but as the above shows even detailed technical bug reports sent in do not result in a fix (Cheers everyone who did send in such reports though 🙂 ).

    Although being optimistic perhaps with the new producer and change of devs perhaps they will get fixed now, I’ll certainly be happy to put in time reporting everything I see error’d in the game if I think it’ll actually get fixed.

  14. @Dethdlr That’s nice, and yet the fix that Zam came up with is exactly what we came up with months ago and they said they would implement. You seem to not understand how the browser is a LOW PRIORITY compared to a high priority item that requires a fix like the memory pointer corruption I got in.

  15. @Deadcrickets: You seem to not understand that eight days ago, this was Zam’s viewpoint of the problem:

    I’m trying to get this looked at again, but I need information. None of us can reproduce it, and we can’t troubleshoot what we can’t reproduce.

    What are you doing when it crashes? Are you using any custom UI? What link are you trying to click through to?

    They couldn’t reproduce it and didn’t know what was causing it. This was eight days ago. Whatever you did last June was apparently forgotten.

    Prior to you posting the link in comments here, I had never read the post you linked. So Zam forgot about it and I never heard of it. How that’s taking credit for your work is beyond me. But if it makes you feel better, go ahead and believe that. I know the behind the scenes details of what happened during THIS round of troubleshooting the problem and I know that the Zam devs talked directly to Zoltaroth to get this implemented as a direct result of THIS round of troubleshooting. But if you want to believe that what you did last June just coincidentally made it to the top of that low priority list at exactly the same time, have at it. 🙂

  16. Their fix seems to have fixed Zam at least for me. I looked into what changed and as Mortager mentioned, the xpti.dat file under mozilla/components was changed but I’m not sure that had anything to do with the fix. But they also made a single change to the all.js file in the mozilla/greprefs folder.

    They changed this line:

    pref(“plugin.scan.plid.all”, true);

    to this line:

    pref(“plugin.scan.plid.all”, false);

    Looks VERY familiar. 🙂

  17. @Dethdlr
    March 6, 2012 @ 8:01 pm

    Are they kidding us ? They could not reproduce this problem ?
    Was it really so difficult to go to any website that has some embedded flash and have the browser crash on them.
    Are they going to say they have only IE installed on their dev pc ?

  18. lol you guys are funny. Many people have reported this fix, like many others we’ve reported them directly to a dev. If Deth or whoever finally got them to push it through then who cares as long as they get it fixed.

  19. @Uberfuzzy

    I believe they’ve done that since the outset if you were to hover over your apprentice with your cursor. If they added it after the initial AoD launch it was very shortly thereafter.

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