Engine Error
 

I get the attached message from the engine ever now and again. Anyone seen this one?

It seem self explanatory, but I always have a matching EndMessage....and the methods where I use begin and end are locked by a critical section!

Any ideas?

No one is going to have any ideas unless you post some code.

WHAT?

There isn't any associated code....the ENGINE crashes...and it throws that dialog (Did you even look at the attachment?). Presumably if someone has seen that message dialog before they might know what causes it (no code required).

Anyway.

D.

This means in one of the plugins on your server, someone is calling IVEngineServer::UserMessageBegin, and not calling the corresponding UserMessageEnd function.

Try removing plugins one by one until you can find the culprit.
Hope this helps.

Found the problem. It was my plugin. I wasn't thinking it through properly. There were times I was calling beginMessage from another thread which conflicted with a call from the engine itself. Perhaps Valve should just put a locks on their message queue considering its so important that it can bring down the whole engine, or course you'd just get deadlocks if someone didn't called endmessage. ANYWAY, I suppose you don't take that into consideration when you are writing a single threaded application.

It was easy enough to just queue my own messages and then fire them out during a gameframe. Doesn't seem to be a performance hit.

Thanks for input guys.

D.

I would avoid calling any Valve functions from a spawned thread as I highly doubt Valve's code is thread safe.

Mani