Scooter: Where exactly does it crash?
When loading up the UI already? On running a particular mod?

Quote (Thilo @ April 30 2006, 4:21 pm)

The new error about "failed to load ...dll" is not serious and only means it tries to load a dynamically linked library first. If that fails, it then tries to load the qvm files.

Like I said before it probably was nothing.
[edit]May 1,2006 12:49am I was playing a create a match of BORG ATTACK with the mod, at the end of the game just as I score the last frag it announces and starts a new game.[/edit]

Ok Crashguth...
I fixed your first bug where it complained about too few levelitems, it happens when a map has more than 256 level items, which was the current maximum. I increased it to 1024
The second bug where Net_CompareAdr complains is a general bug in ioquake3, too. I fixed that bug, too.

ok thilo...i downloaded the file again and it is still doing the same thing ......i tried command line server and I tried loading alamo and set it to dedicated internet server in the GUI...both error's are still there what are we doing differant??

Check the date of the uploaded files. The bugs have been fixed in my codebase, I haven't prepared new builds yet, though. I will probably release beta3 end of this week or sometime next week. I'll announce the release again, here. I also hope beta3 to be the last release before the big final release, that I'll also advertise on bigger gaming sites.

Scooter: I'd need someone to use the debugger to find out exactly where it does crash.
It'd be interesting, whether plain vanilla ioquake3 crashes on WinXP, too.
I take the original EF doesn't crash?
I also need to know whether your Data execution prevention is hardware or software based.

I checked the Data Execution Prevention exceptions list and stvoyhm.exe is in there, so most likely the crashing issue is with that too.

Data Execution Prevention is a combination of hardware and software. It is built-in to AMD 64-bit processors and software support for it was part of Service Pack 2 for Windows XP. It force shuts down programs that try to access restricted portions of memory unless you put them on the exceptions list. This prevents various malware from compromising the system using this method to overflow the buffers.

The quake3 engine allocates memory for the virtual machine and then sets the instruction pointer into the new memory. Since malloc() allocates memory on the heap and that means the memory is flagged as "read/write" only but not executable it will not work, of course.
There are different ways to allocate memory where you tell the OS that certain memory is executable. For instance, under POSIX-compliant OS like Linux, BSD etc you have the mmap/mprotect call where you can set the PROT_EXEC flag for certain memory. That should fix the bug with data execution prevention under Linux.
There is a call in the Windows API that can do the same stuff but it hasn't been added to the codebase, yet. Unfortunately, my 64bit windows beta edition has expired for over a year and I need to get a proper one I guess.. luckily, I as student at my uni get it for free
As soon as I get it I'll try to fix the issue, both in ioquake3 and in EliteForce.

I'd still like you to try removing the normal stvoyHM.exe from the list and see what it does.
Another thing you could do is not use the compiled VM but let it interpret these VMs. The engine does have an interpreter too, and you can activate it by setting the cvars vm_ui, vm_game and vm_cgame all to the value of '1'.
The interpreter is considerably slower though, at 70 fps you will lose about 10-20 fps with the interpreter.

Quote (Thilo @ May 04 2006, 7:33 am)

I'd still like you to try removing the normal stvoyHM.exe from the list and see what it does.

I tried that, I got a error message llRC about a .dll. It seems that iostvoy.exe needs normal stvoyHM.exe to function.

No, it shouldn't need any DLLs or stvoyHM.exe to function.

Heads up people, I put out beta3! I hope this will be the last one before I do a final release.

Project page:
http://thilo.kickchat.com/efport-progress/

Notable bugs fixed:
- Lighting looks even closer to the original now.
- Engine now works when Data Execution Prevention is enabled on Windows. (The original engine would crash, too)
- A few fixes in the QVMs.
- Autodownload issues that allow downloading of *any* files from the server. See:
 http://www.securityfocus.com/archive/1/archive/1/433349/100/0/threaded

Get it here:

Windows 32 bit:
http://thilo.kickchat.com/efport-....ta3.exe

Linux 32 bit:
http://thilo.kickchat.com/efport-....a3.i386

Linux 64 bit:
http://thilo.kickchat.com/efport-.....x86_64

New VMs, everyone should download it, server admins and players:
http://thilo.kickchat.com/efport-progress/bin/vm/pak9.pk3

Dedicated servers for the Linux platform can be found here:
http://thilo.kickchat.com/efport-progress/bin/

For modders, I have updated the description on how to integrate my fixes to the VMs into their mods as well as the building instructions.

Have fun, and as always, please report all bugs you find.