STK .7 Crashing Frequently

[ruggers]

We have enjoyed all the Supertuxkarts, and the new version, .7, is a really big hit at our house! Thanks for all your hard work.
I need to ask for your help, however. We're having very frequent crashes on all three computers that we run the game on. The Windows 7 computer crashes the most, often right at the beginning of a track. Our Vista machine is next for crashes. This is the one we use most often because it has the better speed. By turning the music off and running as administrator the crashes are less often, however, at least once during an hour it crashes in the middle of a track. Almost always in the next to the last track on "All Tracks Grand Prix". However, it randomly crashes in other tracks as well. We are playing two players with gamepads. The other computer is running XP and also experiences random crashes.
I looked over the forums and didn't see others having problems. Have you had other reports of problems? We would be happy to run STK in debug mode if you could tell us how to do that. We'd really like to get the game to run more reliably on our computers as it's awfully frustrating when it quits in the middle.
Thank you for your help.

[hiker]

I need to ask for your help, however. We're having very frequent crashes on all three computers that we run the game on. The Windows 7 computer crashes the most, often right at the beginning of a track. Our Vista machine is next for crashes. This is the one we use most often because it has the better speed. By turning the music off and running as administrator the crashes are less often, however, at least once during an hour it crashes in the middle of a track. Almost always in the next to the last track on "All Tracks Grand Prix". However, it randomly crashes in other tracks as well. We are playing two players with gamepads. The other computer is running XP and also experiences random crashes.
I looked over the forums and didn't see others having problems. Have you had other reports of problems? We would be happy to run STK in debug mode if you could tell us how to do that. We'd really like to get the game to run more reliably on our computers as it's awfully frustrating when it quits in the middle.

We have actually heard of that problem, and we have found and fixed one issue which might explain the crashes you see. Unfortunately at this stage we are not entirely sure about our next release (we need an updated irrlicht version, or we have to integrate irrlicht in our build environment - the first one is unknown when it comes out, the second not really convenient).

Would you be able to build an executable yourself? If you could test our current svn version it would at least verify that the issue is indeed fixed. We also know of an issue about using multiple game pads, which can not be reproduced anymore with latest SVN, so we might have fixed something there, too. It's not really difficult to build stk yourself - you have to download and install "Visual Studio C++ Express" (which is available for free from microsoft), get the STK source files, and our dependency package, which includes everything else you need. Then you hit build, and should be able to test. If you could do that, this would help tremendously. Let me know if you need any help, I've already got a few unexperienced people ready to compile themselves, so I know it can be done easily enough.

Cheers,
Joerg