Eight byte-identical field stacks from night 6, all one player, all in an
Owens: ParticleEngine::Destroy +0x11, access=0 target=0x0, from the plain
per-frame render path. Nothing in the stack touches weapons or the Owens.
Conn Man's Surface Pro 9 (Iris Xe, 128 MB shared) is simply the only GPU in
the fleet that ever actually LOSES the D3D9 device -- his two-trigger
missile+laser bursts are what provoke the timeout, not what crashes.
What crashed is our device-loss handling, which was wrong three ways at once,
in two inline copies (the scene Present and the wait-screen Present):
1. On D3DERR_DEVICELOST it called Reset() IMMEDIATELY. Reset on a
still-lost device ALWAYS fails, and V() only logs. There was no
TestCooperativeLevel gate at all.
2. It then ran ParticleEngine::Initialize against the lost device. The
creates fail there and NULL their out-params -- proven, not assumed:
the bench repro faults at target=0x0, not at a dangling address.
3. The next lost frame called ParticleEngine::Destroy again, which
Release()d those NULLs blind. Read of vtable at 0x0. Dead.
So: lost frame 1 tears down and leaves NULLs, lost frame 2 crashes. Two
frames, every time, deterministic -- which is exactly why all 8 field stacks
are byte-identical.
Reproduced before fixing. BT_DEVICELOST_TEST=<frame>,crashrepro runs the
field sequence on the bench; on the unfixed build it died at Destroy +0x11,
access=0 target=0x0, and symbolized to the same four frames as the field
logs. Same shape, same offsets-modulo-hook. That run also proved the
out-param-nulling assumption the whole diagnosis rested on.
The fix -- one shared DPLRenderer::BTResetLostDevice() replacing both inline
copies:
- Destroy() is idempotent and null-safe, and nulls after release.
- Reset() is gated on TestCooperativeLevel() != D3DERR_DEVICELOST; while
the driver still says lost, skip the frame and retry.
- The Reset HRESULT is checked; on failure, log and retry next frame
instead of driving on.
- On success, re-create via the new CreateDeviceObjects(), NOT
Initialize(): Initialize memsets the installed-effects table, so every
reset that DID succeed silently killed all particle effects for the rest
of the mission. The quieter sibling bug, fixed by the same split.
- Initialize checks its HRESULTs and defends MAXPARTICLES<=0; the draw
paths guard the NULL buffer, and ExecuteParticles keeps draining
particles while the engine is dormant so they cannot pile up.
Verified: the crashrepro shape now logs SURVIVED and play continues; three
forced full loss/reset cycles each log "[render] device reset OK"; a plain
run is assert-free.
Found while verifying, worth its own line: VIDEO\particles.png has NEVER
existed -- not in the tree, not in BTL4.RES, not anywhere in git history.
The texture load has failed on every machine since the engine was written,
and every billboard particle ever rendered was untextured quads via
SetTexture(0, NULL). RenderParticles deliberately does NOT gate on the
texture -- that would disable all particles everywhere; untextured IS the
shipped look. Filed separately; a real particle sheet is a content task.
The field verification that counts is Conn Man flying his exact crash
loadout on this build: instead of a dead process he should see at worst a
brief hitch and "[render] device reset OK" in his log. #35 stays open until
that happens.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
