Bug (maybe old) on extended

[samishii]

I had placed many Flamethrowers at the beginning of my map (Field of Broken Dreams) and noticed that when enemies start spawning and all the flamethrowers start targeting those enemies, the sound starts getting messed up. For example: I had 2 Cannons also on the map, and I would not hear their shooting sounds with all the Flamethrowing going on above. (Edit) When the menu breaks. This bug also happens: When you have a tower selected, and you click Send Wave, it'll deselect the tower.

Also I noticed the Menu stopped working shortly there after (as I did not click on it til about 30 rounds later).
Will make an attempt to reproduce this tomorrow.

[samishii]

Also. There seems to be some kind of bug that stops the game from loading until user clears websites cache.
Only started doing it with extended.

[jgold]

I will look into it the issues you have mentioned. The menu bug people previously talked about I could never replicate after trying for hours and playing all this time, but maybe these steps you have given me will help. There is a limit as well to how many sounds that can play at once i think 16 , so maybe that is the cause to ?

The issue with loading I think is temporary and related to mochi servers which have been hurting pretty bad the last few days.

[samishii]

I made an attempt to duplicate all the above bugs... Or issues rather.

I was able to get the sound issue again without the menu bugging out.
I have noticed a general trend with the menu bugging out. But its only a general deja vu idea. I'll get back to you on my next round of testing.

Edit: Heres a thought on the sound thing. Maybe have a priority system. Like the flame throwers which sound isn't really a loud sound, only play (if at the 16 sound playing limit) if theres Room. Like placing it a que of sorts. (edit: que sound in RTS game not such a good idea... dumb moment. lol)

[samishii]

I was on wave 176 when I tried something... Maybe the menu bugs out after opening and closing it too many times??? Maybe...
So I clicked on it 4 times and it opened 4 times. It broke on the 5th opening. Gonna try a new game and see if it'll "Open Too-Many Times".

Heres a thought though. Maybe theres too many textures on the map at the same time, and since the game auto-generates the Towers, enemies, bullets, explosions, etc... Maybe theres a limit to how many "Objects" can exist at once on the map.

One idea: All the "Burn Patches" that enemys leave behind when they are blown up. Gradually decrease opacity to 0, when 0 delete that texture from the map.
I knew of one game that had a "Pre-defined" limit to how many Objects could be on the map at once, and it caused attacking enemies to be almost 95% not possible. lol Thought I would throw that out there.

Edit: I don't know if you dynamically generate the menu on the fly, but in the case of the above mentioned. Maybe thats why its not generating. Also. Maybe its your Pause function that is erroring out and causing the processing to stop before it gets to the menu show/build function. Maybe even the fading... I noticed its Fade out, Pause, Menu... So yea. Just a thought.

[jgold]

well the game slowing down could be a factor, but there shouldn't be any problems with the amount of content on the screen.

The burn marks and the background in the game are flattened into a bitmap image.. so when burn when new burn marks are drawn there is no cost to rendering as it is just the same bitmap image with some new pixels drawn.

Anyways, I will keep an eye out for the problem and thanks for any help identifying issues.

Jeff G

[jgold]

I made some changes to the menu to try to fix this.. I still could not reproduce locally, but tried a few hunches.

let me know if it helps at all.

[samishii]

New Bug:

Was on Wave 201, hadn't opened the menu in a while. I go to open the menu and, of course, it the menu bug kicked in. When I spammed the Menu Button with clicks... The all the game sound effects stoped playing. I can still hear the BG Music... No shooting sound effects though. =\

Seems the menu bug only happens later in the game... Meh.

Edit: Oh yea. It seems when the meny bug kicks in, and the game is LOST, the menu from that doesn't work either. =\ Although everytime I clicked "Return To main Menu", the MochiGames thing in the upper-left corner refreshes... Don't know if that'll help.

[jgold]

hmm.. well one thing you can try, if your up for it , is installing the flash debug player which you can get at http://www.adobe.com/support/flashplayer/downloads.html

Basically once you have that installed and you hit a error it will then popup a error window telling you what the error was and then copy and paste that here and it will help me identify the issue. I warn you though it opens you up to a world of error popups on allot of sites =P

[samishii]

Code: Select all

TypeError: Error #1009: Cannot access a property or method of a null object reference.
   at com.jgp.audio::AudioInstance/pause()
   at com.jgp.audio::AudioControl/pause()
   at com.game::GameMain/pause()
   at com.main::MainApp/showPopupMenu()
   at Function/http://adobe.com/AS3/2006/builtin::apply()
   at com.jgp.functions::Callback/call()
   at com.jgp.functions::SimpleDispatcher/dispatchSimpleEvent()
   at com.main::InGameMenu/showMain()

@ Wave 258 ... Again with the trend of later in the game.

Maybe it has something to do with the sound? The error Begins at a Sound call. Hmm. I wonder if turning the volume down all the way would stop this from happening? Or disabling the audio recompile the swf and see what happens? You said the Audio limit is 16 simultaneous calls. Maybe with that "Bug" or limit is where the null reference is happening. The reference is where some of the audio that should be happening isn't. Or try just doing some simple if statements to make sure the object isn't null before you call use it?

It does always happen toward the end of the game and theres the most activity on the board. Shit I think the game is slow enough on my computer now at wave 258 that 1 real-time second is roughly, 2.5 seconds in the game due to all the activity...

Can swf's multi-thread? lol Hope all this brain-storming i am doing is helping.