Title screen crashing

Stryfe01

Hi devs. I'm having an issue with my title screen crashing.Right now it consists of a background actor with cherry blossoms animated and sound, a title actor, a start actor with a change scene if touch is pressed, and an instructions actor.

For some reason, these things happen:

Touch anywhere on the screen and it loads the main menu (when it works), otherwise the whole app crashes. I thought it was the viewer after some review, so I built a beta. and yup, it is the title scene.

I just recently added the audio, so I'm sure that isn't what's doing it. I've completely deleted and recreated the scene several times.

quantumsheep

Check every actor in your scene.

Sometimes, if you've deleted variables, or 'changed scene' to a scene that doesn't exist, it'll crash things.

Hope that helps,

QS

Stryfe01

Thanks quantum. I did delete the scene and completely rebuild..twice. Going to do it again tonight though....

Stryfe01

Still no luck. The only consistent item is the title actor. But it has no behaviors etc...trying again.

firemaplegames

Does it crash as soon as you touch the title scene?

If so, you most likely have either a syntax error (maybe a missing parenthesis in some expression somewhere)

or a missing attribute somewhere (it will just say 'game' or 'self' without the rest)

If the title scene appears, the syntax error is most likely NOT on the title screen.

Check all of the otherwise sections in your Rules. Sometimes you can overlook them.

Actors can sometimes become corrupt. You can try deleting them from the scene and dragging them back out again.

Stryfe01

Yeah I'm at a loss. I've gone through and deleted unused behaviors....Checked for syntax errors...and nothing so far. I'm going to do another pass.

Isn't it weird though that it ONLY crashes when I use the title screen? If I move it to the end, of all the scenes, and boot to the game runs fine....

firemaplegames

It is most likely in the Scene where the title Scene links to. Check and make sure you don't have any code on the instances in the Scene as well.

I would make a duplicate of the game and start deleting actors in that scene one by one.

When it doesn't crash, you've found the corrupt actor.

Stryfe01

I just did what yous and deleted every scene of a copy except the title menu. Tried it with a copy of itself, works fine...Tried it with every other scene...crashes. Tried just the other scenes starting with the main menu...works fine until where I expect it to crash (incomplete scene on purpose).

I'm going to have to figure something else out....This is too frustrating. Thanks for all the help though!

Stryfe01

I think I've found the culprit. Please take a look at this screen shot. I know that it is something in here, but I can't figure out what. If I delete the whole actor, it runs fine. If I delete the actor and copy or recreate the code in another actor and insert, it crashes.

`http://gallery.me.com/stryfe01/100049`

Stryfe01

Please tale a look. I've been away all weekend.

beefy_clyro

From what i can see the problem is your top timer! Its not quite clear enough and blurs when you enlarge it.

It should be something like this;

Every X seconds
Change attribute game.choose to random (1,8)

That top timer looks weird as it seems to say every1, then some attribute to change an attribute.

Try adjusting that timer just to say every x amount of seconds change attribute, the rest looks ok

Stryfe01

Well I set the variable to an integer representing the spawn time. But I suppose that could be the issue.

Right now it is Every spawnTime
Change attribute game.choose to random (1,3)

The thing that looks like a 1 is the drop-down menu arrows.

Going to run home and give it a try.

Stryfe01

Going to try and send a better screen shot. I tried replacing the spawnTime variable with just a number....doing the same thing though. It just wants to load, but crashes at the last minute. I'm going to build a scene tonight with just that item on a blank background. It crashed last time, but we'll see today.

Stryfe01

Alright. So it is crashing. Do you think it could be the animation on some of the actors? When my actors get destroyed, they turn into puff of smoke. I'm wondering if that is the culprit...I had to ditch my cherry blossom animation for the title screen because of this.

beefy_clyro

take your animations out and see what happens, just keep taking out bit by bit like that until you identify it. It maybe getting confused on a trigger

Stryfe01

@beefy

It was the animations....Is there a limit to how many frames you can have? My smoke animations are about 35 frames each. I received the best animated look when I changed the speed to 15fps. But until I hear back from you guys i'm just going to play around with different settings....Including eliminating frames.

gyroscope

Hi Stryfe01

I realise your question is to beefy but I'll add my penny's worth if that's OK...

There's possibly a limit to how many frames in a single animation you can have but this'd be so many it'd not be a worry (except to file size). But if you've many different animations with lots of frames running at the same time, that could cause probs, certainly.

A couple of suggestions: by knocking out frames from each smoke animation, you'll not see much difference visually on-screen, I reckon. Maybe make your amount of animation frames to 20, 10fps, and my guess is you won't see any real difference in quality. (There might be other people who'd disagree with me; I wait to see... ;-)

Another thought: you wrote about animation for your smoke, in plural, i,e different animation sets for each smoke effect. Maybe, especially if as one smoke anim. moves off screen and another appears, you could use the old cartoon trick of using a copy of the same smoke animation; as you know, this is done all the time in games. You'd save some processing power/resources there as well, i'm sure.

:-)

beefy_clyro

going with what gyro said, sound advice, i would knock all your animations down, cut out every other image and it'll still look tight, you shouldnt really notice a difference. Start off with one set of animations, test it, if that works ok, move on to the next, test it and go forth like taht until you're happy with everything. good luck and i hope we've helped

Stryfe01

@gyro

Never hesitate to offer your thoughts to me. Good or bad. I get what your saying and I ended up cutting it down to about 15 animations each. Your right, in the preview if i play around with the animations, I can see a difference. But in the actual viewer on my phone, you can't tell. The other smoke animations were for different colored actors. Basically when you destroy an actor it would spawn the corresponding colored smoke. But I can work with just one color.

Thanks for all the help quantum, firemaple, beefy and gyro!

Now I have another frustration to deal with...I have the scene working, but adding music crashes the scene! LOL it never ends! I'll keep you posted and move that to another thread if I need to.