Hello,

I feel very obligated to write on this forum to ask for extensive favor about a game I created a few month back: "Meeklits", but I am running out of options.

Every so often, a customer will tell me the game crashes. I tried over 10 different variations on the game (hoping to isolate the bug) and still they tell me the game crashes.

It is very fustrating and I am hoping, if you have time, can you please try it out and see if it also crashes on your computer. With more knowledge on programming, you might see things the customers missed.

You can download it here: http://www.blueteagames.com/TestMeeklits1.exe

Thank you for your help!

Sincerely,

Steve Z.

Can you give a description of the bug itself? Like when it crashes? that would be more helpful for testing purposes.


I tried the game, and didn't notice a crash but I didn't really give it a thorough workout. Nice game btw.

Steve, downloaded it and played it. It's a bit sluggish (the shooter thing), but no crashes.

My work pc is a:

Windows 2000
128 megs of ram
cel: 266

this was the EXACT reason why i'm using log files.
it shouldn't take more than 10 minutes to write
an object that writes lines like "initializing DX device"
to a file, and fill it with If's and try&catch.

try to do a "bug-tracking" version like i described
and maybe you could isolate the bug in your game.

good luck.

Originally posted by gilzu
this was the EXACT reason why i'm using log files.
it shouldn't take more than 10 minutes to write
an object that writes lines like "initializing DX device"
to a file, and fill it with If's and try&catch.

try to do a "bug-tracking" version like i described
and maybe you could isolate the bug in your game.

good luck.

Yeah, that would help us find the source of the bug.

Interesting. As I recall, Meeklets was written in Flash or Director , or something like that(edit...I found your post that said it was MMF). I would think those tools would be more structured and isolated to make it very difficult to do something wrong that would cause crashing. Maybe I'm wrong, but that's just the impression I got about those tools. Likewise, I didn't think they would support things like exception handling either.

The bug crashes when the user is actually playing the game. It happens sporadically and users could not find a pattern. They tell me the following things the crash can do:

1. Exits the game and go back to the desktop.
2. Crashes and display this error message:

MEEKLITS caused an invalid page fault in
module <unknown> at 0000:00000000.
Registers:
....

3. Turns the computer off.


This game is made in MMF, it is one of the higher level program which is more limited in design and usually produce less buggy builds. MMF does not have a bug test that I know of.

Originally posted by LordKronos
Interesting. As I recall, Meeklets was written in Flash or Director , or something like that(edit...I found your post that said it was MMF). I would think those tools would be more structured and isolated to make it very difficult to do something wrong that would cause crashing.
But on the other hand, it's much harder to isolate a bug in MMF, Flash or Director themselves, let alone getting a quick bugfix.

In the two projects we done so far for that networks which plays cartoons, we had weird bugs in Flash that caused it to GPF when playing in preview mode. We had really weird bugs in Director, where playing the game inside Director worked fine but the standalone DCR didn't.

One more reason to use only open source libraries :)

Steve, are you using any extensions? What about VRAM? DirectX? I assume you ticked the Multi-Samples preference to turn it on...

Are you doing anything else unusual? Are you using the built-in routines to play music?

This is one of the downsides of using an authoring tool like MMF (you are using MMF for it, correct?). If the bug is in MMF and not your code, then it's going to be very hard to track down.

How often do people report the problem? How many free downloads between reports?

Just curious,

Hanford

Hi.

For Meeklits, there has been a reported of 40 different cases. There are +1k customers, so ~ 4% people find this game crashes. That is very bad.

The game uses only Mult-sample , no VRam or DirectX. I use DirectShow for the music where I loop the wma file over and over again

Yeah, 4% is high enough where you have to do something about it.

At this point, if I were you I'd start disabling major sections of the game one section at a time, and test with that: remove all sound, for example.

I ran into a problem like that with Rocknor's Bad Day where the crashes were really, really random and few and far between, and I eventually pinned it down to the cursor-changing library I was using.

~Hanford

Steve Z, I played it for about 5-10 minutes. No problems, runs pretty slick.

Athlon 1Ghz
WinXP Home
385Mb RAM
DirectX9
SB Vibra128 soundcard.
GeForce2 GTS.

I played it for about 15 minutes, trying to do "unexpected" stuff, but no crash. 1.8GHz Pentium, WinXPPro, 256MB RAM, DX 8.1, GeForce2 MX w/64 MB VRAM, generic on-board cheese-ball sound card.

I tried your demo before and I've used up the whole demo. I never had any problems. If you haven't done so already maybe you should adress this issue with click team. I just started using MMF a few weeks ago and hearing this problem kinda scares me away from using it further. The way MMF is setup this would be very hard to patch if there was a fix? You would have to have customers redownload the whole game since MMF packs everything in the exe?

My system was P4,2.26ghz 768mb mem, running WinXP, with a GF4 Ti card.

John

Have you been asking about hardware and software configurations? Do the crashes only seem to happen on older computers, or perhaps only on computers running Windows 98?

Your problem kind of scares me because I'm about to finish and release *my* MMF game. I did a fair amount of research on the stability of this development platform before I started the project, but as many Fusion games are "freeware" I suspect that a lot of problems don't get reported.

Have you EVER seen a crash on your system at home? (Final version.) If not, you are going to have a hell of a time debugging the darn thing.

Originally posted by Steve Z
The bug crashes when the user is actually playing the game. It happens sporadically and users could not find a pattern. They tell me the following things the crash can do:

1. Exits the game and go back to the desktop.
2. Crashes and display this error message:

MEEKLITS caused an invalid page fault in
module <unknown> at 0000:00000000.
Registers:
....

3. Turns the computer off.


This game is made in MMF, it is one of the higher level program which is more limited in design and usually produce less buggy builds. MMF does not have a bug test that I know of.

Does MMF allow you to allocate memory and use pointers? If so, look in areas of the game where you are allocating memory, and make sure your pointer is valid. an invalid page fault usually occurs when an invalid pointer is being used.

MMF has been developed for the last 10 years so It's relatively stable. I would think it may be the custom extensions made with the SDK that might be causing the error.