Couple of glitches I'm getting

I'm inclined to believe that these aren't engine implementation related, so I'm calling them glitches instead of bugs.

First, I've got the problem again (only in Game.exe!) where alt-tabbing or clicking away, then coming back to it leads to impossibly slow gameplay. Basically this means that I can't jot down notes in notepad while working on my game! I actually don't know if this was ever fixed, but I'm pretty sure I didn't have this issue earlier this year. And when it happened to me a couple years ago, Custom.exe was also affected, but it isn't this time.

Second, something really wonky is happening when I quit and reload the game. If I start Game.exe, start my game, play for any amount of time, and then quit, everything works fine. I'm taken back to the game selection screen. If I then load my game from here again, I get the "Updating Obsolete RPG" message, along with two others (Updating song format, Adding UI colors) and then the game starts as normal. Except... the UI is all messed up. Character and map graphics and such are fine, but boxes, borders, and text are all the wrong colors.

If I quit and load the game properly (as in, it's the first load) then everything is fine.

This might have been going on for a while, because I normally make a game.exe copy and rename it so that it directly loads the game.

Yeah, the "quit game, then go back to it without closing game.exe first" thing has been around for a while. I noticed it all the way back when I was testing out Fat Frog: The Movie; same thing as you mentioned--maptiles and characters are unaffected but everything textbox-related goes screwy. If you do it with two different games instead of the same game twice, you might also get music from the wrong game showing up in odd places, if I remember right.

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FYS:AHS -- Swapping out some step-on NPCs for zones + each step script
Puckamon -- Not until the reserve party is expanded.[/size]

For the first bug, I do remember that, but I thought we had fixed it a long time ago. What version are you running? Have you tried using the SDL backend? Run game.exe -gfx sdl and see if it still happens.

I was aware of a problem with not cleaning up game temp files, but I thought that was also fixed a while back (Zenzizenzic?) and that applied to sprites, not box border palettes. I think this might be a different bug than what Fnnrf remembers

Fnnrf: are you still seeing those bugs in the Alectormancy+2?

This is the 20120905 version, the latest (I downloaded it today.)

It does work with sdl, I'm just confused because custom.exe does not have the same problem.

Are you running game fullscreen but custom in a window?

Nope, both are windowed

Are they both running from the same directory? (I ask because I wonder if they are using the same copy of gfx_directx.dll)

Does game.exe use 100% CPU usage when it happens?

There are two major low-level differences between Game and Custom: audio and mouse input. Can you produce the same problem in Custom by changing focus from menus where the mouse is active, or in the Import Music menu?

I have never seen any problem with box borders, and I can't easily reproduce it. I guess it's specific to some games. I guess I'll try FF:TM.

Also, you've got a really buggy idea of what a bug is.

Yeah, they're running from the same directory.

It doesn't use 100%, it appears to be using the normal amount.

Mouse activity doesn't do it in custom. Import music (while music is playing) doesn't do it either - I'm wondering if I'm testing it correctly though.

By a menu with an active mouse, I meant the map editor or one of the sprite/tile editors.

I'm out of ideas as to the cause. I would try creating a special build that times lots of stuff (but it'll have to be later, as I don't have a Windows dev machine at the moment), or otherwise interrupt it randomly with GDB to see what it's doing (which would require you to do all the work).

Yeah I looked at a tile editor and it seems fine.

Anyway, I've got another problem.

The battle music for one particular battle is not looping. Now, this song is different in that it is a .ogg, while the rest of the songs are .midi.

However, the only change I've made is upgrading nightlies, it looped fine in the last one I was using (August 16th I believe)

Argh!

That's extremely strange because very little has changed since August 16th, and certainly no changes to anything related to audio.

I think someone recently mentioned that music (just MIDI I think?) would stop looping shortly before the program crashed.

Does the music loop when you play it in Custom? Does it loop if you use gfx_sdl instead of gfx_directx? What OS are you using?

It does not loop in custom or with -gfx sdl.

Here's a kicker: I imported another song (.ogg) and it loops in custom and in game.

But, I was mistaken on the last time it worked. It doesn't work on the August 16th one either. I'll have to download some older versions if I want to check those.

I'm using Vista Home Premium 64-bit.

I remember this one, too--battle sprites weren't getting cleared when you switched from one game to the next, so enemies from one game would show up in place of another game's enemies (funniest example I found was a pink recolor of the Crystal Chasers vampire showing up for the "Sunburned" enemy in Okédoké.)

That one does seem to be fixed; I haven't seen it show up in a while.



Yep. I just tried loading a game in game.exe, quitting, and reloading the same game and I'm getting exactly the same "textbox borders don't show up and text/textbox colors get funky" problem as before.

It seems to happen with almost all of my games (and Vikings of Midgard), not just Fat Frog; I know it happens with Okédoké! and I just tried it with Puckamon and Alleghany Hell School, getting it to happen on my first try.



I just tested it out with most of the games I have on my computer, and it does seem like there's games that it doesn't ever happen with.

Master K's Grayscale demo did not cause the bug when loaded into game.exe twice in a row. I can't tell if JSH's Harry Potter movie-games had the bug or not, since there's only text and not boxes/borders (though the text color didn't seem strange, so I assume they don't cause the bug.) Not even all of my games do this--The Kirby Lands and the 2006 unfinished version of Fnrrf Ygm Schnish don't cause the bug when opened twice in a row without closing game.exe between the two times.

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FYS:AHS -- Swapping out some step-on NPCs for zones + each step script
Puckamon -- Not until the reserve party is expanded.[/size]

I'm trying to reproduce this with Vikings of Midgard, and I just can't get it to happen :(

Maybe it is windows-only?