A problem with MP

[MoJo JoJo]

If enough different NPCs are spawned in MP the game will crash. Some maps take a little less than others to cause a crash depending on the map size and number of entities already in the map. I've been aware of this problem for awhile now and it happens even on the latest code. This sounds like it's related to a skin/model parsing problem (that's just my guess anyway).

 

Is there any speculation on what might be causing this?

[ensiform]

I believe @@Caelum has brought this up before because some customers are having it too. Afaik it's like 16 then it happens.

 

Contrary to popular belief, the game wasn't really designed for people to stuff hundreds of packs of NPCs etc and try to load as many as possible lol. But fixing it so more work I don't foresee being something easily changeable at this point when it's not really being worked on.

[Circa]

Definitely more than 16. But it might depend on the size of the NPC models or the poly count and all that stuff. There's a map we use for trials on my server that always crashes at a certain point unless you kill all the NPCs in this one room that spawns like 30. That's in addition to a few more spawned previously in the map that weren't killed.

[MoJo JoJo]

I believe @@Caelum has brought this up before because some customers are having it too. Afaik it's like 16 then it happens.

 

Contrary to popular belief, the game wasn't really designed for people to stuff hundreds of packs of NPCs etc and try to load as many as possible lol. But fixing it so more work I don't foresee being something easily changeable at this point when it's not really being worked on.

Weird how I never noticed it in the Base JKA, but I do more of the NPC spawn stuff in SP anyway so yeah, not really much of a problem.

[MoJo JoJo]

What happens is all clients on a server, or connecting to a server where more than 16 different types of npc's have been spawned without a map change will crash. Both OpenJK and vanilla clients are affected.

 

With the right server-side settings, client-side settings, and hardware, it's actually perfectly possible to have 100+ NPCs ingame simultaneously, but in real world usage, the 16 different NPC types will get people every time.

 

Here's a bug report I made last year describing the exact issue: https://github.com/JACoders/OpenJK/issues/817

Just read the bug report. Apparently the original JKA did have this problem after all, and I had never came across this until now.