Whole screen goes black and destroys all of my artwork, why?

Bug Reports
1

I’m fuming rn.

All of the sprites and colouring I made for an object in my game was just deleted with no warning. All of the animations, sprites, gone for this one object. The whole screen went black, with only the labels in the UI able to be seen. When I exited the game, nothing was able to be seen. When I reloaded the page, all of my art (which WAS saved beforehand) was obliterated.

Somebody please give me an explanation as to what the ■■■■ is happening so at the very least I can avoid it in the future because this ■■■■■ so much. I spent a literal day making the spritework for it and now its all just gone with no reason. I did everything right.

1 Like
2

I don’t know what happened but, I can help you remake your sprites if you want.

3

Could you give a link to the game?

2 Likes
4

btw we could flag you for swearing, but I won’t

5

Missile Command - Flowlab Game Creator – Missile Command

The “POWERUP” object is what got affected. I was literally doing nothing but drawing stuff for the “RANDOM” animation when the whole sprite editor went black, leaving only the text visible. It also got extremely laggy, and all of my sprites for the animations were just obliterated when I reloaded. It should have all been saved, but literally everything in that sprite was destroyed.

Not that they were very complex, but this has happened three times now, and this one ruined ALL of the stuff that should have been saved for literally no reason. This is 100% inexplicable.

6

I didn’t even swear.

7

the what was the blocked out parts?

8

I’m sorry if I seem mad, it’s because this has literally been destroying my progress on this one specific object for what seems to be no reason at all and I’m guessing there’s no way for me to get the sprites back, so I can’t comfortably continue using flowlab if I’m always at risk of having my progress, saved or not, bulldozed with no trace at any given time.

9

I asked “what the is happening” and that “this <translate from old english: sūcan + the letter s>”.

10

Thank you for offering, but please don’t worry. I just need to get to the bottom of this ridiculous situation so that either it gets fixed or I can prevent it.

11

I think its a hardware error

12

I see, there are 3 things I recommend check and do it to prevent this from happening again:

  1. Save animation after you’re done/you still get some ideas while you make animations of the object.
  2. If your device has weak CPU or RAM, you should delete some tabs that take pretty much of CPU and RAM, which help the Flowlab page run easier.
  3. Check your connection to make sure it’s strong so you can make sure it saves your code/animation of the object you work on.
  4. Clean your device by deleting some update files and apps that you don’t usually use. If you use a computer likes PC/laptop, you can use window search and go find Run, turn on it and type “temp”. After you do that, double click a file and Ctr + A and delete them, if something pops up like “Files can’t be deleted”, click skip and do it again with “%temp%”. If you want to clean your device entirely, I recommend you search for them on Youtube.

If it still happens, it could be a serious bug or you could accidentally click “Ok” and lose internet connection at the same time which could be the reason why it happens. It’s just my theory and what I recommend for you, I’m not the developer of Flowlab and I’m not sure why the above unfortunate incident happened so you have to wait for developers reply.

13

Thanks for the advice.

Still, I cannot believe it would have the audacity to overwrite my saved animations. I literally did everything right and it still screwed me over.

14

You got a very rare bug so we have to wait for developers to fix it. Crash is pretty normal, such as old devices but I have never heard of someone talking about this bug so it was a surprise to me.

1 Like
15

simple should I tag the mods? and ask them to tell grazer?

16

I asked Grazer on the discord, though he probably missed my message. I can ask again if you’d like

1 Like
17

yeah you probably should. could you also ask him to make a badge for me?

I was thinking something like useless information fountain

18

@badabadaba Yeah don’t know what the issue is, grazer said it’s an issue usually caused by the texture getting too large and crashing the graphics card. It’s not an issue I know anyone else has encounter except rarely on really large sprites (it happened to me before, but I was editing the same object when it crashed and my computer had been running nonstop for a long while)

What are your hardware specifics?

Also no @the_calvinator, you don’t need a badge.

2 Likes
19

darn it!!! I just wanted one for some stupid reason, because I look up to grazer, and I love flowlab! plus this is the only coding site other than code.org thats not blocked for me, so I just wanted a badge for comedic reasons, but I know that’s selfish, so for that, I’m sorry @CodeAlpaca also your games are amazing, also I love gone feeeshing

20

I shouldn’t have any issues with it, its a MacBook Air from 2020 with Intel i7 1.2 GHz Quad-Core using 3733 MHz 16 GB LPDDR4x RAM and 1536 MB Intel Iris Plus Graphics. This computer should be able to and has been able to use the animation editor. And its not a particularly large object, its a 2x2 with simple 2- and 12ish- frame animations.

And even if it exhausts graphics memory, I shouldn’t have to fear saved work being wiped from existence. There should be either a patch that either protects saved work or a functioning autosave.