Hey guys, I’ve been playing around with Inform 7 for years and love it dearly, but have never visited the forums or newsgroups much, so I apologize in advance if I’m doing things a bit wrong here.
I haven’t been able to consistently compile projects for a few versions of Inform 7 now. I’m not sure why; the compiler returns error number 10, but does not offer an explanation for that error code. The chance of it failing increases with the complexity of the project; a project with a few rules and a dozen rooms will fail better than half the time, a project with only a title will fail occasionally as well. Once it has failed, it will continue to fail, no matter what I attempt to compile (even if the project is blank), until I restart the program.
I have read the development log a few times, and I started having the problem with version 6E59. Strangely, uninstalling it and going back to an earlier version doesn’t seem to fix the problem. I have no idea why. I thought maybe one of the extensions was corrupt originally, so I removed all of them I could find, but had no luck. Newest version doesn’t seem to work any better than the old ones.
This has been going on for a long time, with me usually trying it after a few weeks for a few hours and getting frustrated and leaving it alone for another few weeks. I decided to give breaking the cycle a shot. Does any have any idea what to do or what to look at to fix it myself? I’m computer literate enough I might be able to figure it out with a hint in the right direction, like what the error code means or suggest a way to see what the compiler is failing to do specifically.
I admit my computer is slightly unstable; there’s a driver or something buried in there somewhere that crashes it rather reliably under certain rare conditions, in case error code 10 secretly means “I kept the program from exploding your computer”, don’t hesitate to tell me.
Some information:
currently have 6G60 installed
operating system is Windows Vista Home Premium 64-bit
My laptop would start throwing code 10s quite often when it got too warm. Inform seems more sensitive to faulty hardware than a lot of other programs. (As a compiler should be.)
Since you get them even on brand new projects, I’m inclined to blame your hardware.
Weird – I got a slew of these yesterday, too. I was working with code I hadn’t touched in six months, so I had no idea what the most recent thing I’d written in it was; I started commenting out chunks until I had the code down to A foo is a kind of thing. The plural of foo is foos. The description of a foo is usually "It's too foggy to make out clearly."
Over There is a room. Some foos in Over There are defined by the Table of Existent Foos. The description of a foo is usually "[Description]".
When play begins: now the player carries your quest.
[with the Table of Existent Foos not commented out] and it was still giving me “Code 10.” I ended up downloading the latest version (6G60, when I’d had 6E59) and that got me back to seeing normal, fixable compiler errors.
Thank you for the suggestion for the possible overflow errors, that doesn’t seem to be the solution though.
I suspect it may be faulty hardware as well, but I haven’t been able to narrow it down to anything specific. Most programs run fine, it’s just a few that have problems, and they don’t seem to have any relation to each other. I can run things like Mass Effect 2, GIMP, and Microsoft Word and have no issues at all.
Anyone have any idea how I could narrow it down? I appreciate your thoughts!
My first question would be what is the list of things that do cause problems? That is the place to start… and then try to figure out what they have in common.
Eh, this sounds like a question for Hardware People, not IF people. Surely there’s some diagnostic programs you can run to test the integrity of the computer’s memory, hard drive, CPU operations, while under stress. I don’t know what or where such programs are, though.
You can use Windows Memory Diagnostic to create a bootable CD that will test the RAM in your PC. Let it do 2-3 passes; it should not fail any tests.
Prime95 has a torture test mode that will stress your CPU. It should be able to run at least a few hours before it encounters an error.
If those check out OK, it could be a faulty hard disk. Laptops usually have a hard disk scan tool in the BIOS; non-generic desktops may as well. Otherwise the disk manufacturer will have a downloadable tool.
Offhand I’d guess it’s one of those three, more or less in that order of likelihood. If you have errors or BSOD messages, that could help narrow it down. Same if you know how to reliably trigger a crash.
