Code a game comp - MIX-IT-UP - Aug 25th to Oct 20th 2019

[STEVIE G]

V2 is up ...

Fixes issues with:
'Start Wave' menu where clicking off buttons caused a MAV
Saving default controls (including being unable to use mouse and keys)
Default screen res of 1280x720 causing screen freezing on some machines.  This is now 1920x1080 if display allows.

https://stevieg.itch.io/gunstar?secret=qpSAuh6TnXfdOw94mJ0e6czB9k

[iWasAdam]

halfway through screen2 completely froze   

[STEVIE G]

halfway through screen2 completely froze   

As a fellow dev I'm sure you can appreciate that this isn't useful 
I'm assuming you mean Wave 2?
Can you recreate the problem?
Any errors or did you have to use task mgr to quit?
Is there anything specific you were doing? 

[iWasAdam]

lol, true
I was using keyboard (why not allow both to be used?)

ok. re-ran. now it freezes on 'wave 1'. What is interesting is pressing fire I can hear the fire sound as it seems to be working, so it looks like the freeze is the screen.
Yep, definitely the screen, as pressing escape the sounds change to the menu sounds.

Didn't need task manager as I was using a window and could quit by pressing 'X' close button

[STEVIE G]

lol, true
I was using keyboard (why not allow both to be used?)

ok. re-ran. now it freezes on 'wave 1'. What is interesting is pressing fire I can hear the fire sound as it seems to be working, so it looks like the freeze is the screen.
Yep, definitely the screen, as pressing escape the sounds change to the menu sounds.

Didn't need task manager as I was using a window and could quit by pressing 'X' close button

If you use the mouse default control you can also use keys or mouse buttons to shoot/thrust.

As soon as you started Wave 1?  Did you kill anything?
What graphics resolution were you running at?
Does it freeze on full screen?

[Derron]

As sound seems to be still playing - "fire sound", "menu sound". This means that the whole game is still running - as I doubt Blitz3D uses any threading to process the rendering.

It sounds as if something trashed the graphical output - which might be Windows 10 running on the Surface - or the IGP there has trouble with the DX commands.
So maybe some specific command or "chain of commands" is resulting in the issues, maybe an invalid numeric value is passed to let it stumble?

As VANarchy seems to be playable for IWasAdam (it is?) it won't be Blitz3D generically but some kind of command sequence (alpha 0, alpha -1, alpha 0, ...) borking up a state.
Maybe it borks up what the active drawbuffer is (Blitz3D used a double buffer system?)?

Maybe Stevie G could add a key which enforces some "cleanup" of states (set to a given buffer) or print out some information to the log - so eg during load you store the memory/int value of the buffers ... log them. And when the key is hit, you log the current values (together with other information). Of course you also could check the values during runtime and if stuff differs - auto log/open a notification window and inform Adam about it
Other stuff to check (on that keyhit):
- validity of image/textures/models/
- validity of the graphics context


bye
Ron

[iWasAdam]

confirmed with mouse+keyboard

yep had already killed things

not sure about the resolution - it was running in a windows possible 1000x900ish?

didn't try fullscreen as when it crashes you can't get out of it and machine need to be rebooted

[STEVIE G]

V3 up - fixes issue with mouse unable to move below menu Options and cursor being distorted in 1920x1080 res.  Also fixes issue with Turrets occasionally appearing in the wrong place. 

https://stevieg.itch.io/gunstar?secret=qpSAuh6TnXfdOw94mJ0e6czB9k

I'm afraid there's not much I can do about the freezing Adam, works fine here and works fine for many others who use Windows PC's.  I had this tested on lots of different builds by friends also.  My understanding is that you are using an emulator on a Mac so without being able to recreate myself it's difficult to know whether it's a problem with the game or it's on your side.  If I get more information I'll take another stab.

Cheers
Stevie

[Derron]

I understood he is using a Windows Surface tab ... with Windows 10.


bye
Ron

[STEVIE G]

I don't think he mentioned that at any point - unless I'm missing something?

I can try one last thing - the option to store all textures in Video Memory.  I'll get an update at some stage over the weekend.

[Steve Elliott]

On your Gunstar thread:

Adam:
Win 7 and Win 10 + surface are giving me memory errors

The surface is a MS product with win10 on it. 2gb ram (I think) and smallish screen.

[Derron]

@ Stevie G
Did you do anything different than in VANarchy? Some visual "trick" not done there? Of course I now assume that VANarchy worked fine on Adam's surface (maybe @IWasAdam could clarify this point now).

The game continues in the background - so it MUST be something with the graphics (isn't Blitz3D DX7 ??) - some borked graphics state or so.


bye
Ron

[STEVIE G]

@ Stevie G
Did you do anything different than in VANarchy? Some visual "trick" not done there? Of course I now assume that VANarchy worked fine on Adam's surface (maybe @IWasAdam could clarify this point now).

The game continues in the background - so it MUST be something with the graphics (isn't Blitz3D DX7 ??) - some borked graphics state or so.


bye
Ron

I don't think it's clear if he played Vanarchy.  Nothing different is going on though gfx wise - neither is gfx intensive and they both use the same texture / quad / object and particle systems. 

I'm no expert but isn't 2GB of ram pretty bad if shared.  The game uses approx 50mb of video ram. 

Sounds like an issue similar to this which is more hardware related ...
https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/all/older-games-freezing-up-screen-but-keep-playing-on/5b007ada-b733-47db-a2fa-11b2c61787bb

Happy to try things to get it to work for all but with limited info that's a challenge 

[iWasAdam]

latest version seem to be running fine now 

[STEVIE G]

latest version seem to be running fine now 

Excellent