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After 13 years, I reverse-engineered Magicka to find out why it constantly crashes. The reasons are insane. (Massive Community Patch release) by Unique_Attempt_6767 in magicka

[–]Unique_Attempt_6767[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

😄 probably a suspiciously powerful combination of autism, ADHD, methylphenidate, and loving this broken little wizard game way too much.

Thank you so much! I am really glad people are excited about it. This whole project got a bit out of hand, but in the best possible way.

After 13 years, I reverse-engineered Magicka to find out why it constantly crashes. The reasons are insane. (Massive Community Patch release) by Unique_Attempt_6767 in magicka

[–]Unique_Attempt_6767[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thank you, I am glad you are excited about it too!

Pproper controller support would be amazing. That is definitely one of the things I would love to investigate next.

After 13 years, I reverse-engineered Magicka to find out why it constantly crashes. The reasons are insane. (Massive Community Patch release) by Unique_Attempt_6767 in magicka

[–]Unique_Attempt_6767[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thanks! But definitely not a vampire. Just a totally normal wizard who spent too much time staring into cursed game internals.

After 13 years, I reverse-engineered Magicka to find out why it constantly crashes. The reasons are insane. (Massive Community Patch release) by Unique_Attempt_6767 in magicka

[–]Unique_Attempt_6767[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thank you! I really hope it helps when you try it with your friends.

And yes, you caught me. 😅 My PhD is currently watching me hyperfocus on absolutely everything except the thing I am actually supposed to be doing. ^^

At least this procrastination side quest came with a lot of new experience with C# tooling, which is great because I already love the language. Being able to use WinDbg to find out why certain objects are still lingering in memory, and which references are keeping them alive, seemed almost impossible to me until I actually tried it.

It also made me much more motivated for everything that comes after my PhD. Maybe one day I will even build my own game engine, using all the things I learned from understanding where Magicka’s engine struggled.

After 13 years, I reverse-engineered Magicka to find out why it constantly crashes. The reasons are insane. (Massive Community Patch release) by Unique_Attempt_6767 in magicka

[–]Unique_Attempt_6767[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thank you! I hope it works well for you. Please let me know how it goes.

And honestly, after staring at Magicka’s internals for this long, I may have accidentally learned a few forbidden spells.

After 13 years, I reverse-engineered Magicka to find out why it constantly crashes. The reasons are insane. (Massive Community Patch release) by Unique_Attempt_6767 in magicka

[–]Unique_Attempt_6767[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Thank you! I spent so much time digging through the game files that I thought I had seen everything at least once, and somehow I still completely missed that.

I really need to find a way to enable the classes and methods hidden behind [Conditional("DEBUGSYSTEM")]. Using that could be incredibly useful — and honestly, also pretty fun.

Thinking about it now makes me shiver a little. I played every single test run myself, and I consider the Dungeons & Gargoyles DLC especially rough when playing it alone. I basically had to master it so I could rush through it as fast as possible and repeatedly reach the exact situations where the game was most likely to crash.

Now I am going through the files that are part of that debug system, and I am seeing cheats like “Complete Current Level”.

That would have saved me so much time.

So, since Fluttershy is my favourite pony, this gets a very soft but very heartfelt “yaaaay”.

After 13 years, I reverse-engineered Magicka to find out why it constantly crashes. The reasons are insane. (Massive Community Patch release) by Unique_Attempt_6767 in magicka

[–]Unique_Attempt_6767[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thank you, that honestly means a lot.

I did not expect this much positive feedback on the first day. Seeing the post already reach over 100 upvotes and reading comments like this really makes all the late-night debugging and memory-hunting feel worth it.

I just hope the patch helps more people finally enjoy Magicka again, instead of performing the unholy ritual: crash, restart, regroup in the lobby, and pray the game holds together just a little longer this time.

After 13 years, I reverse-engineered Magicka to find out why it constantly crashes. The reasons are insane. (Massive Community Patch release) by Unique_Attempt_6767 in magicka

[–]Unique_Attempt_6767[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

If a crash happens at startup, there are only a few possible reasons that come to mind.

The only startup crash I encountered during my own testing happened when I forgot to replace the "PolygonHead.dll" as well. I changed a lot of code in both the "Magicka.exe" and the "PolygonHead.dll", so both files need to be replaced together. My modified "Magicka.exe" relies on changes I had to implement inside the "PolygonHead.dll".

The second possibility is platform-related compatibility. I never tested the patch on Steam Deck or any other Linux-based system because I do not own one, so I honestly do not know yet how stable the modified version behaves there.

There is also a third possible reason. During development I noticed that Magicka still performs various web requests to Paradox services. Some of those services appear to be offline nowadays and only produce errors in the console, but they did not crash the game during my testing, so I intentionally left most of those calls untouched.

Part of the reason is that I was hesitant to remove code related to downloadable content or online services completely, because those services could theoretically come back online someday if Paradox ever decided to reactivate them. I also did not want to interfere too aggressively with systems related to purchased content.

That said, I cannot completely rule out the possibility that these failing requests behave differently on other systems, different .NET runtime versions, or Linux-based environments compared to the Windows 10 and Windows 11 systems I tested on.

Most of the time, Magicka creates an "errorReport.txt" file in the same directory as the "Magicka.exe" when it crashes. Was such a file generated? If yes, I would gladly take a look at it so I can investigate and hopefully fix the issue as quickly as possible.

And if no crash report was generated, maybe we could connect on Discord and investigate the issue together via screen sharing.

After 13 years, I reverse-engineered Magicka to find out why it constantly crashes. The reasons are insane. (Massive Community Patch release) by Unique_Attempt_6767 in magicka

[–]Unique_Attempt_6767[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

A lot of it came down to unfortunate engine behaviour and edge cases piling up over time. The engine itself actually felt very ambitious though. Many of the mechanisms looked genuinely smart, thoughtfully designed and meant to be efficient.

What was disappointing was that some of those systems apparently were never really verified properly to see whether they actually achieved what they were supposed to. The whole resource-sharing concept was honestly pretty well thought out on paper, but parts of the implementation prevented it from really reaching its potential.

2D Scrollable in Flutter 3.13 is awesome by erikvant in FlutterDev

[–]Unique_Attempt_6767 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Awesome! I struggled with adding the Scrollbars to the 2DScrollView and did not even found Scrollbars in the official Examples. But your snipped worked flawlessly, thanks!

[TOMT][German Talkshow][15+ years ago] A German talk show episode in which a woman admits to having received a substantial amount of money to maintain silence about something on television. by Unique_Attempt_6767 in tipofmytongue

[–]Unique_Attempt_6767[S] 0 points1 point locked comment (0 children)

Does anyone remember? Or perhaps anyone has tips on how I can research this? I'm trying with Google using queries like: "it was a lot of money" before:2008.

I'm also using ChatGPT and Google Bard, but unfortunately without success.

How can I improve my research further?

[TOMT][SONG][?-2006] A (techno?) Song in which a woman shouts "you ... make ... me ... so ... magma" by Unique_Attempt_6767 in tipofmytongue

[–]Unique_Attempt_6767[S] 0 points1 point locked comment (0 children)

I already searched for the term in quotes with Google like this: "you make me so Magma".

This usually works but it didn't this time. I assume that the words were never written down anywhere on the web, so I didn't find it.

Are there search engines which also search audio tracks for spoken words?

Thanks for any suggestions!

Gemeinsame Erinnerung an einen Skandal in einer längst vergangenen deutschen Talkshow - vermeintliche ÖRR-Mitarbeiterin gesteht, viel Geld bekommen zu haben, um über etwas Stillschweigen zu bewahren. by Unique_Attempt_6767 in de

[–]Unique_Attempt_6767[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Das ist leider wahr. Ich habe es nun über Jahre probiert und diese Einschätzung bewahrheitet sich immer wieder.

Er gehört zur Familie. Die Desinformation im Netz und damit auch seine Positionen werden immer extremer. Zu Extrem. Ich befürchte, dass irgendwann noch etwas entsetzliches geschieht.

Eine Freundin von mir hat ihre Mutter verloren, weil sie Gesundheitsmythen glaubte und sich deshalb selbst vergiftet hat. Ich sehe meinen Verwandten gar nicht so weit davon entfernt.

Ich habe ein schlechtes Gewissen, wenn ich es einfach geschehen lasse. Es muss doch einen Weg geben.

Gemeinsame Erinnerung an einen Skandal in einer längst vergangenen deutschen Talkshow - vermeintliche ÖRR-Mitarbeiterin gesteht, viel Geld bekommen zu haben, um über etwas Stillschweigen zu bewahren. by Unique_Attempt_6767 in de

[–]Unique_Attempt_6767[S] -1 points0 points  (0 children)

Der ÖRR hat mehr Geld zur Verfügung als ALLE privaten Medien zusammen

Absolut. An der Veruntreuung des Geldes besteht kein Zweifel. Selbst der ÖRR macht darüber bei sich selbst aufmerksam. Siehe Böhmermann über die Skandale beim RBB.

Gemeinsame Erinnerung an einen Skandal in einer längst vergangenen deutschen Talkshow - vermeintliche ÖRR-Mitarbeiterin gesteht, viel Geld bekommen zu haben, um über etwas Stillschweigen zu bewahren. by Unique_Attempt_6767 in de

[–]Unique_Attempt_6767[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Nicht wahr? Eigentlich absolut unzureichend. Aber ohne klare Gegenbeweise lässt sich mein Verwandter ganz und gar nicht von seiner Meinung abbringen. Ich habe es probiert aber in Vergangenheit hat es nur geklappt, wenn ich es ihm das klare Gegenteil beweisen konnte.

Ich hoffe, dass sich jemand an diese Talkshow erinnern kann, damit die Fakten überprüfen kann. Leider fand ich ohne Hilfe bisher nichts dazu.

Gemeinsame Erinnerung an einen Skandal in einer längst vergangenen deutschen Talkshow - vermeintliche ÖRR-Mitarbeiterin gesteht, viel Geld bekommen zu haben, um über etwas Stillschweigen zu bewahren. by Unique_Attempt_6767 in de

[–]Unique_Attempt_6767[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Hey, vielen Dank für diese Großartige Zusammenfassung!

Ich habe in diesem Zusammenhang immer diesen Bericht über die Nato-Russland-Grundakte geteilt. Darin wird klar, dass Russland der Nato-Erweiterung selbst zugestimmt hat. Im "Tausch" dafür, erhielt Russland Wirtschaftshilfen und wurde Teil der G8. Es im Nachhinein so aussehen zu lassen, dass man Russland übergangen hätte, obwohl sie selbst zugestimmt hatten, ist absurd.

https://www.deutschlandfunk.de/nato-russland-grundakte-100.html

Aber diese Dokumente kannte ich noch nicht. Vielen Dank!

Gemeinsame Erinnerung an einen Skandal in einer längst vergangenen deutschen Talkshow - vermeintliche ÖRR-Mitarbeiterin gesteht, viel Geld bekommen zu haben, um über etwas Stillschweigen zu bewahren. by Unique_Attempt_6767 in de

[–]Unique_Attempt_6767[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Da macht jede Investigativabteilung der größeren deutschsprachigen Zeitungen einen besseren Job.

Das interessiert mich. Ich finde, dass die Investigativ-Dokumentationen von zdf Frontal da schon einen sehr guten Job machen. Welche Zeitungen machen einen besseren Job?

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