As you can see by the first 6 comments, @grazer helped me figure out that large objects with too many animations can cause a data overflow, crashing the website. But since then, I’ve come across three new problems… and I am not 100% sure if they are really caused by data overflows.
1. Crashing out of nowhere: Sometimes, in the editor, whether it is the game, behavior, or sprite editor, the website crashes and deletes all progress you have made if you did not press OK before the crash or during the 3 seconds the website freezes before displaying a blank screen. This is the case in small objects with few animations… the COMPLETE opposite problem that I have discovered. This can be seen in Pixel Sports. 2. Alert blocks move on their own: You can move blocks in the behavior editor by clicking and dragging. However, with alert blocks, you could just click on it, release the mouse button, and then move your mouse anywhere. Sounds easy? It’s not, because this completely takes away your ability to edit or delete the alert block. This is noticeable in objects with several alert blocks, but that’s not always the case. I hate to announce this game this early, but in my game “Superstar Team: Energy Boom”, the object named “Flare Lord” has only 4 alerts, yet this bug still affects it. 3. Tab at the bottom cannot be clicked on: Occasionally, the tab at the bottom of the screen that allows you to play the game, see the object library, etc. will become unclickable after some time, forcing you to reload the website to get it to work again.
I have not seen anyone complain about these problems, so I am not sure if its just me or if anyone has not bothered to write a discussion about it, but I really want to hear a solution to all of these problems.
This sounds really bad, and I have not experienced this or seen reports of it. I definitely want to track this problem down, but I need some more information:
You implied that this has happened before. Do you have a link to a game where all the sprites were deleted? The client should not be able to delete all the sprites from the server no matter how badly it crashes, so I would definitely like to see what’s going on with that.
I took a look at Porky’s Nightmare, and I’m not sure what you mean. The sprites and behaviors seem to be in place and working, at least the begining. Can you describe a particular object that has been corrupted, or maybe some a screenshot of the problem?
When you say the game “crashes” does something specific happen? I mean, does an error show up, or does the game behave in some other way that indicates that it has crashed?
Also - please feel free to email me directly about this issue (grazer@flowlab.io) and I’ll try to help get this sorted out ASAP.
I do not have any specific examples of this happening before because I was able to fix this really fast, since those incidents were minor. And even when they were major, I didn’t make much progress into the sprite art anyways.
In Porky’s Nightmare, if you go into the user interface, and select the “Interface” object, you will see that all of the animations are blank. These animations were supposed to display visual effects, like flickering and jumpscares, which add eeriness to the game, but now there are none. And hovering over the “OK” button in the editor instantly makes the site crash, making the problem worse.
The site does give you a SLIGHT warning before it crashes. The editor freezes before going completely blank, but normal behaviors and sounds continue behaving as normal. Pressing escape or clicking any buttons on the site doesn’t do anything except for showing the error icon where the game is supposed to be. This seems to be happening to games where multiple things are happening at once.
I can email you directly once I can get more information for you to check. If you want to see what happens when the site “crashes,” the following can help replicate the issue so that you can take a closer look:
Using Google Chrome
Games with multiple objects/levels
Games where multiple game behaviors are happening at once
Clicking “OK” in the sprite editor
Screenshot of on-screen game crash:
Example of what is supposed to show on corrupted object:
Hey @Superstargames - I’ve done some investigating into your game, and I think I have gotten to the bottom of why things are crashing and/or not saving.
So in the sprite editor, there is not a limit in the editor for how many animations you can add to a sprite, or how many frames an animation can have. This was because every game and computer is different, and there isn’t really a natural maximum value for these, so I left it up to the game creators.
What has happened here is this:
The interface object is pretty large to start with (1024 x 768 pixels). What this means in terms of resources is that every pixel requires 4 bytes of memory, so that sprite is ( 1024 * 768 ) * 4) = 3,145,728 bytes of memory (that’s 3 Megabytes for just the main sprite).
Now 3 megabytes (a.k.a. 3MB) isn’t all that big, so that’s fine. But there are also some animations, and quite a few. It looks like 10 total. Each one of those animations contains more sprite frames, and each one of those is 3MB each.
There are 71 total animation frames, meaning this one sprite is using (71 * 3) = 213MB of memory. This is a really large sprite image, and is probably causing your browser to choke up, fail to upload or download it, and possibly even crash, even if your computer is pretty powerful.
Now, none of this is really your fault so I’m sorry that you have encountered this problem - it’s not made explicit in the sprite editor how much memory is being used, and I haven’t added a hard limit.
Unfortunately, this doesn’t help you right now, but I’m going add some limits to the sprite editor and some sort of messaging that explains what is going to happen when trying to create sprite animations that are either very large, or with many frames, or with some combination of both.
@grazer Whoa, that’s a lot of download data. I didn’t know any of that. Thanks for informing me.
So, from what I understand, you are saying that there are too many animations for a way too big object. What would happen if I made multiple objects of the same size (1024 x 768 pixels) and had them all have just 1 animation? Would the same problem happen, or would everything be fine?
Hey @Superstargames - I think you have the right idea, but you would still definitely need to be careful about the number of frames with a large sprite object like that.
Another way to optimize things would be in cases where you just have a small area of the screen changing (like a character just in the center of the screen), it would be a lot more efficient to create a smaller, separate sprite and animate that.
As you can see by the first 6 comments, @grazer helped me figure out that large objects with too many animations can cause a data overflow, crashing the website. But since then, I’ve come across three new problems… and I am not 100% sure if they are really caused by data overflows.
1. Crashing out of nowhere: Sometimes, in the editor, whether it is the game, behavior, or sprite editor, the website crashes and deletes all progress you have made if you did not press OK before the crash or during the 3 seconds the website freezes before displaying a blank screen. This is the case in small objects with few animations… the COMPLETE opposite problem that I have discovered. This can be seen in Pixel Sports. 2. Alert blocks move on their own: You can move blocks in the behavior editor by clicking and dragging. However, with alert blocks, you could just click on it, release the mouse button, and then move your mouse anywhere. Sounds easy? It’s not, because this completely takes away your ability to edit or delete the alert block. This is noticeable in objects with several alert blocks, but that’s not always the case. I hate to announce this game this early, but in my game “Superstar Team: Energy Boom”, the object named “Flare Lord” has only 4 alerts, yet this bug still affects it. 3. Tab at the bottom cannot be clicked on: Occasionally, the tab at the bottom of the screen that allows you to play the game, see the object library, etc. will become unclickable after some time, forcing you to reload the website to get it to work again.
I have not seen anyone complain about these problems, so I am not sure if its just me or if anyone has not bothered to write a discussion about it, but I really want to hear a solution to all of these problems.
