Mysterious crash - does it happen to you?
BlitzMax Forums/BlitzMax Programming/Mysterious crash - does it happen to you?
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| I have a friend who is having a weird problem with the latest build of my Magic Number game ( http://www.acemagicnumber.com/bin/MagicNumber.zip ). He says that when he clicks the help button on the in-game menu, the game freezes up. No matter what I try, I can't replicate the problem. I'd appreciate it if some of the people here would download the game and try clicking on the help button from the in-game menu (hit escape in game to bring up the menu). Try a variety of options (driver, full screen/windowed, etc) and let me know what happens, please. The game generates a debug.txt file as it runs. If you get a crash, please post the contents of debug.txt and your system specs. Thanks, SpaceAce |
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| I get a black screen for a few seconds, then a white screen with nothing on it. No options visible. laptop - Toshiba Satellite 1800-814, PIII-1.1GHz, 256mb RAM, 16mb graphics, WinXP Home + SP2, DX9.0c. Log: ===================================== ======== New session started ======== ===================================== Clicked Help Fade Initialized Destination set Kills off Return screen set Help Screen Loaded |
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| Darn, thanks Gfk. Did this happen at application startup or when you tried to click help in-game? I accidentally included a debug file with the zip (now removed), so I am not sure if you clicked "Help" or if what you posted came from the file I included in the zip. SpaceAce |
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| No I deleted debug.txt before I started. I figured it shouldn't be there. ;) |
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| Good thinking :) So, the help screen loaded but all you got was a white screen. Bizarre. The help screen is one giant image, 800x2336. Do you think that could be wreaking havoc with some graphics cards? My buddy has a modern system with a powerful card and I have another friend with a less modern system who has no problem, but I guess it's possible... SpaceAce |
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| 2336 is definitely not acceptable. That means it is extended to 4096 which is only supported by the latest 2 generations of cards. Beside that it is really unperformant and a massive waste of VRAM and RAM in this case as well as over 800x1700 pixels are just black and unused. (your "image" will end with 20 MB VRAM where a large part is wasted, because BM will extend the image to 1024x4096 to follow texture standards) You better tile that as it is common in 2D (ir strip it into vertical slices that you handle similar to an image strip => animimage) |
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| The help screen is one giant image, 800x2336. WTF?! Do you think that could be wreaking havoc with some graphics cards? You can pretty much bank on it. |
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| Well, it didn't occur to me until I made that post because the image wasn't always that big. When I decided to wrap the game in the Grey Alien Game Framework, I massively increased the screen size to support both full-screen and windowed mode, so I simply made the help screen canvas larger and filled it in with a solid color to fit the new screen size. I will change the graphics when I get back and hopefully you guys can give it another test for me. Thanks, SpaceAce |
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| There are chunkedImage sources. I would highly suggest using such a thing. Then you can put your image in, load it as chunked image and it should work as intend. (I wrote one for Kamaya, its actually not that hard to do. Just some serious TPixmap.Paste fun on loading of the chunked image and a temporal RAM overhead) |
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| The help screen is one giant image, 800x2336. Do you think that could be wreaking havoc with some graphics cards? ;) |
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| The help screen is one giant image, 800x2336. Do you think that could be wreaking havoc with some graphics cards? Even worse, consider this -- since the images get stored internally in power-of-two format, it actually uses up 1024x4096 (!!!!) in video ram. Definitely beyond the maximum size on many (most?) video cards... for maximum compatibility, I'd chop it up in 512x512 chunks if I were you. |
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| OK, the whole image size thing was a silly oversight on my part when I changed the game screen size. Please download the latest build and let me know if it fixed the problem for you. Thanks! SpaceAce |
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| just to let you know, i can't download your zip file here so that i can't try to help you. |
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| I had to laugh when I saw the "one giant image" post :-) For my games I decided that 1024x1024 was the max size I would use. I discussed using 512x512 for greater support but then I'd have to split 800x600 screens into 4 parts which seem lame to me. |
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| Benyboy, what problem are you having? I just clicked the link to check it out and it's working fine for me. SpaceAce |
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