Actually, wait a second there, cowboy (or cowgirl). Before you file a bug, let’s take a look see at those logs of yours. You can find it as a workspace/.metadata/.log log file or as an hs_err_pid log file somewhere (possibly where Eclipse is installed) if you’re using Sun’s JVM. It is quite possible that the bug you are about to file is a duplicate of an existing bug that is already in Eclipse’s Bugzilla database. There’s been a ton of duplicates filed recently and the same questions keeps coming up on IRC over and over again that it’s almost driving me crazy. So for the sake of my own sanity and your own personal time (so you don’t need to waste time asking for help if it’s already a known issue), let’s take a look at three of the common crashers that have risen up in the past couple of weeks and months.

Do you see something like…
org.eclipse.core.internal.dtree.DataTreeNode?
org.eclipse.jdt.internal.compiler.lookup.ParameterizedMethodBinding?

This one is really famous. In fact, this bug has been filed so many times I sometimes wonder if it’ll have more duplicates than what the 64-bit Windows SWT bug did. That one was rather unfortunate since it was fixed but resurfaced later…but I digress. Anyway, common symptoms for this crasher include “Eclipse crashes when I save…”, “Eclipse crashes when I open a project…”, “Eclipse crashes when I…”. I mean, these are such common operations that you just have to go think “Oh wow, either my setup got hosed or Eclipse is a little too flaky for my liking here!”.

To resolve this issue, I suggest you take a look at bug 214092 (a number that I have now committed to memory for bug triaging and IRC support purposes). This is actually not an Eclipse problem. There is a VM bug in Sun’s Java 6 VM that is causing this crasher. I’ve been told by Ismael that this has been fixed in the Java 7 builds so that’s a good start. There’s also another bug that’s for backporting the fix to Java 6 so we should see that soon enough.

If you don’t see the above, are you seeing something like…
org.eclipse.swt.SWTError: XPCOM error -2147467262?

This one has grown in Bugzilla activity recently due to the advent of Firefox 3. You can take a look at bug 213194 for more information. I’ve heard some users comment that Eclipse is still crashing on the final Firefox 3 release. This contrasts with the original problem that was caused by users using a Firefox 3 beta build that was older than what SWT was expecting. In any case, if removing Firefox 3 doesn’t help (someone on IRC just removed XULRunner 1.9 and it helped in that case), I suggest commenting on the bug with as much information about your system as possible.

If you’re not seeing either of the two above, perhaps you’re seeing something like…
Java_org_eclipse_swt_internal_mozilla_XPCOM_NS_1NewLocalFile?

This one is rather new compared to the other two and I haven’t really seen this one brought up too often on IRC myself. This problem is captured in bug 236724 with a workaround suggested by a user (yay for community involvement!). The workaround has supposedly worked for another person I was talking to on IRC, so hey, it might work for you too!

For those of you that aren’t having any problems with Eclipse, I hope this post was still educational to you and hope that you can spread this information to your peers and coworkers so that they can resolve such problems if it arises for them.

For those of you that are hitting one of the bugs I described here, I hope you can find a solution or workaround in the bug reports I mentioned.

Lastly, for those of you that are having problems with Eclipse that don’t seem to match any of the ones I’ve described above, I’m sorry I wasn’t able to be of any help. :( Please feel free to file a bug and/or ask about it on the newsgroup or on IRC.

Update:
Do you see something like…
gtk_enumerate_printers?

I forgot to mention this one. Some users have reported that Eclipse seems to hang indefinitely (or for a very long time, like over a minute) whenever you try to open a file in the editor. This is a slightly uncommon problem that hits users on Linux systems using gtk+ 2.10 and up. This is a bug caused by gtk+ wherein the aforementioned function hangs the UI thread. Originally, the bug was fixed in one of the maintenance releases of gtk+ 2.10 but it has somehow resurfaced again in the 2.12 line. The solution is to start Eclipse with the following method:

eclipse -vmargs -Dorg.eclipse.swt.internal.gtk.disablePrinting

If that does help, please add your system’s information to bug 215234 so that the SWT team can collect all of this information and try to fix it. I know this isn’t a crasher but it is pretty much annoying enough to be a crasher since once it hangs you pretty much have to kill Eclipse and restart it or wait for the function to return (who knows when that’s going to happen?).

Just because your game has awesome CGs doesn’t mean you can just skimp out on the soundtrack’s cover art.

What did you guys do to Rimi? ;_;

What have I done to deserve this?

Real (wo)men fish like this.

I finally completed 12RIVEN -the Ψcliminal of integral- on Sunday but didn’t really have time to blog about it, so here it is now. I went through all eight routes and they’re really pretty easy to get if you just skip the dialogue that you’ve already read, so feel free to go through all of the endings. This one took me under thirty hours to complete. I’d say it’s been a very enjoyable experience.

See below for a review of 12RIVEN -the Ψcliminal of integral-.

Gameplay:
There isn’t a lot to talk about here since it’s just a visual novel but at least the interface is a lot better than Ever17’s. I guess that should kind of just go without saying since it’s been about five years since Ever17’s original release for the PC. One thing that irked me was how the characters’ mouths didn’t seem to move along with the text. That’s probably some kind of setup issue since I’m pretty sure they would’ve noticed this while testing the game.

CG:
After having played games like Planetarian and CHAOS;HEAD, one would probably get into the habit of expecting high quality CGs out of any other visual novel. 12RIVEN does a pretty good job here as a whole but there are some pictures that are just plain awful. I guess after having played Ever17, I probably shouldn’t have been expecting too much from KID. The backgrounds are not bad but they’re also not all that special. I think they did a good job with the CG character models though.

Music:
I think Takeshi Abo’s did a pretty good job with 12RIVEN’s soundtrack. The tracks are definitely a lot more memorable than Ever17’s, I mean, those tracks were just way too monotonous for comfort. I don’t think any of 12RIVEN’s tracks were as good as Ever17’s “Karma”, but there were a lot of good ones like “Integral”, “Paril”, “Repressor”, “Voyager”, “Eclipse”, “Ocean blue”, and “Beyond the mebius”. 12RIVEN’s theme songs were also excellent. Both tracks are done by KAORI (who performed the opening for Ever17, let’s just not talk about Ever17’s ending theme here). I tend to like ballads better so it’s no surprise that I absolutely fell in love with “プロセス”, but “third bridge” is also quite good.

Story:
The thing everybody wants to know about a visual novel is obviously going to be how awesome its story is. It is, after all, just a novel at the end of the day. And with it coming from KID and all, you’re naturally going to compare it with its other games such as Ever17. I don’t have anything else to compare 12RIVEN with since I haven’t played any of their other games personally. Anyway, while I didn’t understand everything in 12RIVEN, I do feel that it has a more intricate plot than Ever17. Almost everything that happens in 12RIVEN has a purpose in the story. Events don’t just happen for the sake of killing time (the bit about the sandwiches in Ever17 may come to mind here). In this regard, I feel that 12RIVEN’s pacing is a lot better than Ever17’s. You do switch around quite a bit in 12RIVEN (between Renmaru and Narumi) and it may bother you. It certainly did for me in the beginning but I got over it.

I’m not sure if there’s one particular twist in 12RIVEN that I can “quantify” as being as big as the one in Ever17 but it’s definitely got a hell of a lot more twists than Ever17 in my opinion. The ∫ route is just absolutely insane. The last couple of hours is so heavily packed with twists it’s ridiculous. The way they tie everything together is just absolutely mind-boggling. I once read a comment noting that the author was probably going out of his mind. At the time, I hadn’t even started the game so I didn’t know what the comment was getting at, but now I do.

Anyway, to prevent anybody from “wasting their time” on bad ends like me, I’ve listed all eight of the routes below for your reference.

Renmaru’s routes:
divagate - bad
divide - bad

Narumi’s routes:
divarication - bad
divinity - bad
indefinite integrals - good

∫ routes:
diverging - bad
diversity - bad
integral - good

I completed them in following order: divide, divagate, divarication, indefinite integrals, divinity, diversity, diverging, integral

The ∫ route opened after I completed “indefinite integrals”. Since that’s the “good” end for Narumi, I presume you don’t actually need to complete “divarication”. For Renmaru’s side, since I did both of them, I can’t tell whether you only need to do one or both.

I noticed that they added some seiyu comments to Knights of Ratatosk’s website today so I quickly tuned in to what Rie Kugimiya had to say about her role as Marta Lualdi in this upcoming epic. Here are some of the things I picked up with my limited knowledge of Japanese.

• she hasn’t been a seiyu that’s voiced much games in the past
• but she always wanted to play a role in a famous game series like Tales, or possibly interpreted as she always wanted to have a role in Tales, not sure which is it
• thrilled to be given the role of Marta Lualdi
• she doesn’t own a Wii
• KoR is very large and has a vast amount of content (amongst other things), she would definitely like to play it…when she buys a Wii someday
• これからも作品ともども応援してください (”Please support my/Tales‘ works in the future”, not sure which she’s referring to here, but if you meant yourself, have no fear Kugimiya, I’ll always support you)

Damn Namco, buy/give her a Wii already!

Everyone’s favourite gaming magazine, Famitsu, has revealed a new Persona 4 character this week.

Is that voice actress who I think it is? Why yes, I do believe it’s Rie Kugimiya!

Atlus has left me no choice but to buy this game, curse you!

I don’t remember it being this hot last summer, holy mackerel.

Then again, I spent most of my days in an air conditioned office hacking on code last summer, so that’s probably why.

If anyone’s playing or planning to play 12RIVEN -the Ψcliminal of integral-, please note that “divide” is a bad end. The walkthrough I followed never explicitly stated which routes were good and which routes were bad so I thought, hey, I’d just let fate do its thing, right?

Damn it.

I guess I’m going to have to reload from a prior save point and go through it again. I believe the game can skip dialogue sequences that I’ve already read through so that ought to make things less painful for me.

Update: Good lord, I just finished the “divagate” route and its even worse than “divide”. Are all of Narumi’s routes going to be bad ends too?

The CD single for the insert song, “罪過に契約の血を”, and third ending song, “グラジオール”, for CHAOS;HEAD will be released on the 25th of this month. I laid down an order for the single about a week ago myself. Now it seems that CDJapan has updated their product page for the single with the CD cover today so I have attached it below for your viewing pleasure.

I’m a few days behind but it seems that they’ve announced that Memories Off 6 ~T-wave~ will be released on August 14th on their website’s news section.

I have no idea when the PC version’s going to be out so it might be a while before I get a chance to play through this one. They haven’t officially announced that they’re working on a PC port to be honest but since there’s really no reason for them not to make a port, I’m not too worried.

They’ve enlisted the voices of quite a few well known seiyus like Aya Hirano, Yuko Goto, and Rie Tanaka so the conversations should at least be fun to listen to even if the plot is not too strong. I can’t say I’m a big fan of Hirano’s voice though.