Lacewing - Fatal Crashes

The Flash version of Lacewing is a bit of a mess. It has a number of issues that cause a Flash swf to completely lock up, which is pretty disastrous. I don't even think the errors are that hard to fix, just involving a check for a null value every now and then.

The following errors are the ones that pop up when I'm running in the debug version of Flash, and only when I've got somewhere around 18 or so connections.

This is the most common one:

TypeError: Error #1009: Cannot access a property or method of a null object reference. 
    at lacewing::Client/handleMessage()
    at lacewing::Client/process()
    at lacewing::Client/onSocketReceive()

Occasionally I also get these:

Error: Error #2030: End of file was encountered.
    at flash.utils::ByteArray/readBytes()
    at lacewing::Client/readBinary()
    at lacewing::Client/handleMessage()
    at lacewing::Client/process()
    at lacewing::Client/process()
    at lacewing::Client/process()
    at lacewing::Client/process()
    at lacewing::Client/onSocketReceive()

TypeError: Error #1009: Cannot access a property or method of a null object reference.
    at lacewing::Client/getPeer()
    at lacewing::Client/handleMessage()
    at lacewing::Client/process()
    at lacewing::Client/process()
    at lacewing::Client/process()
    at lacewing::Client/process()
    at lacewing::Client/onSocketReceive()

I'm not sure what kind of ritual one must perform to get a fix for Lacewing, but Mathias and Looki (who aren't even the authors!) have patched the flipping thing before, so I'm posting this here with the hope that my last few months of work haven't been completely wasted.

I'm using that version with an extra fix or three from Looki. Please login to see this link.

Oooh, but I'm now realising that it's a very similar problem to the one Mathias was fixing last time, with numbers being read as much, much higher than they should be. As soon as the number of connections goes past 16, everything crashes, because 2^17 > 65535, the capacity for a short. That would explain the various stack overflows, null values when it comes to player ids, etc.

The issues seem to be with server-sent player left channel and player joined channel messages. So one way to get around the catastrophic crashing errors is to just not use channels in your app. For people who code their own servers with pyLacewing or something else, like me, this isn't a massive problem, since we can use the server to relay a clients messages to other clients ourselves.

Just to help out other Lacewing-Flash developers, I'll spell out the two choices you have: 1) Use channels, but you can only have a maximum of 16 players in a channel. Any one joining or leaving after that will cause every other player's app (or sometimes even browser tab) to crash. 2) Don't use channels, but you'll have to write your own server to relay messages.