Server crashes

The Tetattds server has crashed several times since we released 2.0 (and actually many times before that too) . I found and fixed a potential problem, so I hope the server is more stable now.

For those interested in the technicalities, it happened when the client closed the connection at the same time as the server sent out a packet. The server would then close it’s end of the connection, but after a while it determines that there was a timeout, since the client never replied to the packet sent out earlier. At this point the data for that player was already deleted, and it crashed as a consequence.

19 Responses to “Server crashes”

  1. Bran Says:

    Hi guys. Fantastic game. Great work. I think I may have found some bugs. Not sure what happened, but it only happens on a specific Nintendo DS system. I have two. I try the same game on the other DS and it works fine. Endless and VS Self modes seem to work just fine. It’s just Highscores and Wifi Play that are screwed up. And it’s only on this specific DS. I can’t find anything wrong with the DS. Already tried erasing the game off the slot1 card and reinstalling a fresh copy. Seems like the DS saves all the screwed up scores somehow even after I’ve deleted the .sav file and started fresh. Any ideas? Thanks! :)

    Here’s what happens:

    All my highscores seem to be screwed up like in the million digit range. Also when I try to play “Wifi Play”, I get this screen everytime:

    r00: 0×00000000
    r01: 0×000000c9
    r02: 0×00000020
    r03: 0×0000007e
    r04: 0×020d6689
    r05: 0×00000000
    r06: 0×020ad240
    r07: 0×0209b944
    r08: 0×020ee740
    r09: 0×00000000
    r10: 0×00000000
    r11: 0×00000000
    r12: 0×020d6738
    r13: 0×0b003c58
    r14: 0×0202335b
    r15: 0×02023364

  2. Sten Larsson Says:

    I’ve never seen this problem on any of the four DS we have between us in the project. If the highscores are messed up, something probably went wrong when loading the highscores.

    Looking at the printed numbers it seems like it crashes when about to draw a string in the GUI. This is a long shot, but perhaps there is something special with the name you have on that DS?

  3. Bran Says:

    Hmm…the name on my ds is Bran same as the other one. I’m going to reset the DS to its factory default settings and try it again. I’ll let you know what I find out. Thanks for the quick reply, Sten. Did I mention I love your game? :)

  4. Bran Says:

    Okay, I reset to factory default and now it works fine. New game, all scores reset to zero. Strange, huh? I can’t figure it out.

  5. Sten Larsson Says:

    Yeah, I still don’t know what caused it, but it’s good that you got it working.

  6. Aaron Says:

    ooo I love Tetris Attack but I don’t have a DS… any chance this will be ported to Windows / Linux / Mac

  7. Sten Larsson Says:

    Yes, we are working on that for debugging purposes. It will probably be a straight port though.

  8. Shanman Says:

    Hello guy’s…

    I love the game. It is extremely addictive. I have noticed that your server has been down for a few days now (todays date is Thursday May 17,2007).

    I was also looking to see if there was a list of people serving the game that I can try to get onto when your server is down.

    Thanks, and feel free to email me.

    Regards, Shan

  9. Sten Larsson Says:

    Well if the server goes down again you can contact me on gtalk. My email begins with sten.larsson (gmail).

  10. razorgator Says:

    Any chance you’ll create an A.I. to play against? One screen with the A.I. playing and the other for yourself?

  11. Noah Says:

    I just came accross this blog today. Can’t believe you guys managed to program tetris attack for ds! I bought my DS not too long ago. I am very new to this, I want to play tetattds on my ds. Can anyone please give me the how-to for this? What do I need to transfer the code over to my DS and how will I do this so I can play?

  12. Sten Larsson Says:

    razorgator: Yes we have plans for that, but development is going very slowly so don’t expect it anytime soon.

    Noah:
    You will need a flash cart. There are lots to choose from and I don’t know what’s best at the moment. “M3 Simply” and “R4DS” (I think the are the same) are probably among the best.

  13. missingno. Says:

    If you’re having trouble with building a decent AI, maybe you could just have a placeholder AI that simply swaps random pairs really rapidly in the hopes that you’ll get a few successful matches per second. Obviously that would get replaced with an actual algorithm once you code a real AI, but it’d be nice to have some form of CPU opponent in the meantime.

  14. Lockmare Says:

    This is definitely the most played game on my DS right now. I’m been playing on a white DS Lite with a R4 card. Recently the game crashed while playing vs self. The music was repeating a small snippet, and a hex dump showed up on the top screen:

    (rows were labeled r00-r15)

    r00: 0×00000000
    r01: 0×020dd2b0
    r02: 0×00000110
    r03: 0×00000324
    r04: 0×020ddff0
    r05: 0×00000000
    r06: 0×0210d418
    r07: 0×00000000
    r08: 0×00000000
    r09: 0×020dd6f0
    r10: 0×00000000
    r11: 0×020dd2b0
    r12: 0×00000116
    r13: 0×0b003c40
    r14: 0×02004941
    r15: 0×0200494c

    Thought the debugging info might be useful. Took a digital camera picture of it, but I couldn’t find an email on your site to send it to. I want to stress I play this a *lot*, and this is the only crash I’ve ever seen. Hopefully this dump helps.

    Thanks for a great game, and for publishing the source. It helped quite a bit while tinkering with my own DS coding projects.

  15. theONE Says:

    When will yall host another server?

  16. Sten Larsson Says:

    We don’t have access to any server machine at the moment. Hopefully we can start another later.

  17. Lou Says:

    server is dead

  18. Sten Larsson Says:

    Yes it’s been that way for a long time… We can try to set up a new server during the weekend. I’ll post a new entry when it is up.

  19. Greg Says:

    All of the hardwork on this project is much appreciated. I absolutely love this game! Incredibly addicting as mentioned earlier and a very polished look with great sound. Thank yoU!

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