Buglist Oct/Nov'17

Bug Reports
1

October is half over, so this list will carry on into November as well. All known bugs were addressed in September. Please comment any new bugs you have found.
To help organize a checklist, I will be making a list of confirmed and unconfirmed bugs. Please feel free to test these yourself, and contribute your own bugs to the list.

Thank you.
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CONFIRMED
A dash - means that grazer has also confirmed the bug, and has been checked.
(These bugs have been tested several times by at least a few members, or by myself, and do exist.)

[FIXED] Game layer objects (Possibly GUI objects as well) cannot send messages until you refresh the page
Massive freezing lag spikes in games like Vortex, that use a lot of animations and emitted objects
Cache errors for editor, when hitting play, cache doesn’t clear, so rotations and other behaviors stay, and objects may stick to the mouse
[FIXED] Website game “Last Updated” sections are all updated falsely, likely caused by other users playing or opening the games, not from being updated by the creator
White screen camera error when camera starts off screen in editor testing
Run and Jump bundle needs to be fixed
[FIXED] Emitted objects while spawner is flipped causes emitted objects to also be flipped, but vertically instead of horizontally.
The first emitted object from a spawner does not get detected by proximity if emitted by a timer or once, but does if emitted by a button press.
[FIXED] New Game tutorial places “browse” prompt over the upload button
[FIXED] Proximity circle sometimes does not appear, or gets stuck on the mouse
[FIXED] Clones and emitted clones are sharing click data with each other, and the wrong objects get destroyed.
[FIXED, finally!] Proximity appears to be detecting incorrect objects under some circumstances

COMMUNITY TESTED
(These bugs are not confirmed nor unconfirmed, but have been tested by several people in the community, and likely do exist.)

UNCONFIRMED
(These bugs have not yet been tested by either grazer nor I.)

Possible proximity bug not detecting blocks that share the same grid space.

DEBUNKED
(These bugs have been shown to not exist for others, or could not be recreated, and may be a result of the game itself having bad wiring.)

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If you have any bugs, comment them below. I will add them to the list.

BUG TESTER
[spoiler] Here’s a build of a simple Bug Tester engine. You can clone it and use it yourself.
Directional Keys
(Use to check if your buttons are being pressed right, if something they do is not working.)
Up = 1 ; Right = 2 ; Left = 4 ; Down = 8
Collision
(Shows a collision marker for 1 second. Use to determine if you are actually touching an object.)
Bottom = 1 ; Right = 100 ; Left = 10 ; Up = 1000
X/Y Velocity
(Use to check your movement, jump, or fall speed.)
-Left +Right ; -Up +Down

Bug Tester
[/spoiler]

2

I have one…

Having to refresh if you want an object to send a message to a UI object

3

So if I make a new game layer object and have it send a message to ui object, it won’t work when you hit play, but it will work when you refresh the page? Sounds similar to the old cache thing that makes you have to refresh if you upload animation frames, that show up as white. I’ll add it to the list and see if @grazer can easily fix that.

4

Game to GUI message bug on refresh confirmed.

5

I have a bug problem, I sent the link to a friend and he can open the editor, make some changes, click play and play the game edited, I tested and its true. There is something that I can do to dont leave other people make changes to my game?

6

As far as I know, everyone can edit each other’s games to see how they work. After leaving then page, the edits go away. Nothing is permanent.

7

Another bug:

When you play a game, then go to the editor, then play the game again, the rotations and flipped sprites are saved, although you’re not actually facing that way.
http://flowlab.io/game/view/732951
Use this as an example

8

@Luminous What? That sounds odd. When I play a game and walk left, my sprite flips, but when I open the editor it looks normal. You’re saying if you play a game, go in the editor, and hit play again, the sprites flip? I won’t be home for a couple hours, so maybe explain it a bit more so I know what to look for.

9

In my game, try rotating the ship 90 degrees or so, open the editor and play it again, the ship’s sprite stays at its last rotation position until you command it to change.

Also, if you delete a proximity behavior, the proximity circle rests in your mouse until you open up another proximity behavior.

And sometimes, in my game, clones of sprites I made, though without any behaviors, appear when I reload or refresh

10

These sound familiar. Back in old flowlab, sometimes emitted objects would also stay on screen in editor. Occasionally I’ll have blocks get stuck to my mouse that won’t go away, or scrolling gets wonky. Also, sometimes if I zoom out in the behaviors window and hit play, back in editor, the screen is still zoomed out, but it’s not, so the + - buttons have to be clicked a few times to get the screen normal. If all these things go back to normal when you refresh, they are cache errors. They’re just annoying issues with old memory that don’t get cleared when you hit play, and have nowhere to go. When I use alpha, rotation, and other changing variables, I always have a once set them, so I don’t have to deal with those cache errors. Every time I hit play, the rotation, alpha, and any other number is once to a default. In the future, I’ll have a UI object send messages to those onced numbers, for things like health and points, so each level updates them to what they were on the last level.

11

@Luminous I added a once -90 set rotation to your ship and it always spawns pointing up now, so go ahead and do that if you want. I did -90, because you set forward as up, so 0 would point right.

12

@grazer I just noticed a website glitch. The “Last Updated” date on all games is false. Half my games I haven’t touched in two years, and this applies to many users that stopped using flowlab, like @muddyapples. I know he isn’t still updating all his games every day.

13

@grazer I just added back some core aesthetic features of Vortex, and the intense lag spikes are back. Start the game, fly around a bit but don’t shoot anything, wait a minute or however long it takes for the vortex to spawn more black holes, and you will quickly find yourself unable to move and the game will freeze frame with any key press on the keyboard. I was under the assumption that the laptop I was using at the time was bad, but this new laptop is far better with Intel i7 and 8GB of ram, while the other computer was using an older version of AMD with 4GB of ram, and it did the same thing, so it is definitely not my computer. These lag spikes never happened last year, so flowlab is really going to need some beefing up if you want to see people make high quality games loaded with massive complex levels, animations and particle effects. You don’t need to worry too much about it, since I’m the only person that ever pushes the limits of flowlab, but bug testing is one thing I like to do, and pushing the engine to its limits is the best way to find some of these bugs. In due time, I really am going to need faster load times and lag control, even if that means my game is running on a special version of flowlab, while everyone else uses the normal flowlab. I can’t do anything more with Vortex if I can’t even have particles emitting without freezing the game, so I’ll add this back on the list and continue logic testing for Shifter.

14

Updated list, we now have 4 confirmed bugs. Please continue to contribute any bugs you come across.

15

After some testing, it seems more than just GUI messages aren’t sending. I have tons of messages not working in the game layer until I refresh. There are definitely a lot of cache bugs now that I’m beginning to notice.

16

I think the last updated shows the last date someone played it from the website.

17

@“Mhx Ar”

I reject your bug about the last updated…

I think its set to when the statistics were updated

18

I also had that problem with the flip thing that @Luminous was talking about.

When the sprite is flipped, and the editor is opened and closed. The sprite remains flipped

19

Hey @“Mhx Ar” - I just checked out Vortex, and you’re correct that the performance is terrible. I ran it in a profiler, and it looks like the biggest bottleneck by far is Proximity checks. Proximity checks are are super slow, and the more objects that are in the world, the worse they get.

I can probably implement some optimizations for this, but it’s probably worth verifying whether you have any Proximity blocks that could be eliminated. I didn’t check the emitters this time, but definitely make sure that the emitted objects have the shortest lifespan possible if you haven’t already.

20

@grazer The unique spiral effect you see in the vortex and exhaust trails are emitted squares that move and rotate while moving and rotating, while the vortex rotates while emitting, then shrinking and lowering alpha. I have them set to expire at 98 which is pretty short, and the lag gets bad when there are 3 vortex emitters or more, but like I said, this never happened back when I first made the game.

As for proximity, the grid is made up of blocks that play an animation, rotate 1080, and change alpha when in proximity to the emitted trails, so you may have a few dozen trail blocks triggering a dozen grid blocks, all animating, all rotating, multiplied by each source of emitted blocks, at once. This sounds like a massive ordeal, because it is, but it never was a problem when I made this last year, so it peaked my curiosity.

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