Messages

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Ask a Question / Re: Getting rid of actors from memory

« on: April 11, 2023, 12:20:25 am »

One minute into the playtest would be right at the end of the tutorial and entering the first area in the game. I cannot fathom where 100mb worth of assets would be loaded in though. The assets that load in for the first time at that time are

The music for that area: 3MB
Background 1: 2.6mb
Background 2: 2.4mb
Background 3:  2.8mb
Sword Bandit assets: 300kb (3 instances)
Gun Bandit assets: 200kb (2 instances)
Slime assets: 150kb (2 instances)
Tileset 1: 75kb
Tileset 2: 26.2kb
Tileset 3: 172kb
UI: roughly 50kb between them

Even accounting for me missing a few things, it can't be more than 12-13mb worth of stuff loading in at that moment.

Edit: also, the entire game in total is 180mb large with all it's assets combined, so that would be like loading half of all the game's assets at once...

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Ask a Question / Re: Getting rid of actors from memory

« on: April 10, 2023, 06:38:15 pm »

I do know I am using an older version of player control because the newer version didn't work; I recall working with Luyren on it a while back trying to get the new slope system but had to revert it because something wouldn't work. I don't know if it's *the* older version that had that issue, or just *an* older version.

Though if it is more likely to be something else, maybe I'm not reading the telemetry right? Its my first time to use it, so I may not be looking in the right place to find the actual problem. I just uploaded the telemetry results to dropbox, so here's the link to it. https://www.dropbox.com/s/cc4hbei3agl6bqm/Succuquest%20Telemetry%20Results?dl=1

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Ask a Question / Re: Getting rid of actors from memory

« on: April 10, 2023, 12:37:39 am »

Unfortunately, I don't know how it works exactly either. It does look like it has a lot of events "listening" for triggers from it's updating event, would that cause it to remain in memory? I'll attach a screenshot of that.

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Ask a Question / Re: Getting rid of actors from memory

« on: April 09, 2023, 11:26:54 pm »

That allowed the telemetry to work, thanks. It looks like there are references to Luyren's PlayerControl behavior piling up in the hundreds over just a few minutes of play, but I am not able to read it well enough to understand where the issue is coming from exactly or how to fix it. I tried attaching the telemetry results to this post, but it seems its too big to attach.

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Ask a Question / Getting rid of actors from memory

« on: April 09, 2023, 05:57:57 pm »

So I posted this in the discord but as it's a holiday weekend I haven't had any response and thought I'd ask on the forum to avoid my issue ending up scrolling off and being missed.

I seem to be having a rather severe garbage collection problem; specifically, there is no garbage collection. I've been testing this a fair bit since it was reported to me and from what I've worked out, every time a new actor-type (type specifically, not every individual instance of an actor) appears for the first time, the game begins to use more memory.

However, this memory is *never* cleared. Even when memory is added as a result of an actor that is part of an atlas appearing, leaving the scene the actor is atlas'd to does not remove the memory used by that actor.

I have tried to troubleshoot this with telemetry, but doing so causes the game to no longer compile, and become unable to compile even after disabling telemetry until the project is cleaned. I attached the error log from that to this post. I also tried turning on "dispose images" in the settings but that leads to the game crashing a few seconds after starting up.

Is there anything I can do to get the game to clear out the memory? My best guess is that it's trying to keep everything in memory to load faster, but eventually there's just too much stuff and it crashes the game.

6

Ask a Question / Having an issue with jumping on slopes

« on: April 08, 2022, 11:03:15 am »

So, in a platformer I am working on I am using the slopes behavior from the player control set by Luyren. Its the older one since we couldn't get the newer one that lets you build slopes one brick at a time to work. I am finding that there is a new issue though I am encountering.

From what I can tell, if the player character jumps in such a way that they have upwards momentum but moves forward through the line the slope generates, the player will pass though the slope, and fall. I am thinking a tweak to make the slope grab the player regardless of their Y-Speed if they go below the slope's target line would work, but I am not sure what to tweak to cause that to happen, as I don't want to accidentally make it prevent you from jumping instead.

7

Ask a Question / Re: Making in-game map efficiently

« on: November 09, 2021, 06:32:59 pm »

What I mean though is that by the time I could draw a room with the correct location, size, and walls on the map image, I could with my current system input the values for several rooms. Either way I would only need to do it once, but drawing the whole map as it's own image would take much longer.

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Ask a Question / Re: Making in-game map efficiently

« on: November 07, 2021, 01:07:34 pm »

Ah, it looks like it depends on drawing the full map for the code to work from by hand? That seems like it would be more by-hand work than my current system uses.

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Ask a Question / Making in-game map efficiently

« on: November 07, 2021, 11:00:04 am »

So, I have been working on designing a minimap for a metroidvania style game. I have it functional now, but it's very inconvenient to work with, as I need to manually, by hand, tell the engine where every room should be.

Currently, I have the game set up so that each map has a list game attribute which holds a value for every room in the map. Each room is associated with one slot in the list, and a value of 0 means it hasn't been found, and a value of 1 means it has. Then, in the map's code, I have an individual if statement for each item in the list in which I, by hand, assign what kind of wall to put on the four sides of the room (no wall, solid wall, or door) then create the room in the location it should be in.

This functions, but it's extremely tedious to put together for each map since I need to manually input a lot of values. I am wondering if there is a more efficient way to do it that requires less by-hand work, without becoming too difficult to work with. I am thinking, for example, creating more lists so I can have the map assemble using a for each loop, but that may end up requiring 7 lists per map which might be a bit much.

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Ask a Question / Re: Standalone Slope Management

« on: October 16, 2021, 02:35:05 pm »

Ah, yeah that works. Thanks.

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Ask a Question / Re: Standalone Slope Management

« on: October 16, 2021, 11:22:15 am »

Yeah, that is what I used before, but the actor for one of my character's forms breaks it. They have a down thrust attack that has some animation that goes below the feet when landing, so the bottom of the actor is not the bottom of their hitbox. This causes them to walk right through the slope rather than following it, and you have to jump to get the bottom of the actor to connect, which causes them to walk along the slope in mid-air.

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Ask a Question / Standalone Slope Management

« on: October 16, 2021, 12:52:02 am »

So a while back I had asked about slope management and was recommended using a behavior that was part of a bundle.

It worked at the time, but as I have built more to the game, I have found that it no longer works; the issue appears to be that one of the protagonist's forms has an animation that goes below the feet so the bottom of the collision box is no longer the bottom of the actor and that messes it all up.

So, I am now looking to figure out a solution to have sloped tiles work using a standalone behavior coded from blocks rather than being a part of a bundled system that I cannot tweak easily. There are three challenges it seems like I need to overcome; stopping the player from being slowed upon touching a slope, ensuring the player does not "hop off" the top of the slope, and ensuring the player stays *on* the slope when running down the slope.

I am thinking that I can do the slope detection for running up the slope with tile data and tweak the physics for it until it seems right, but while that may work for going up the slope, I'm not sure what I might try to do for going down, as the actor flies straight off the slope and does not stay in contact with it to detect it's presence.  Any advice, tips, or guidance would be greatly appreciated.

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Ask a Question / Out of memory yet again B10814

« on: September 28, 2021, 08:58:25 pm »

So, I just got a new computer so I'm having to get set back up again. This new version of the stencyl beta though has abandoned the batch file that lets you access more memory, causing the game to fail when hitting 8gb memory again. The new batch file is far more complicated and seems to have a "max memory" line similar to the line that normally increases the memory limit, but it does not work; replacing this line with the line from the old batch file does not work either.

I cannot work until this is solved, so is anyone able to help with this issue?

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Ask a Question / Using Atlas without long wait times between scenes

« on: June 09, 2021, 08:07:16 pm »

Hey everyone,

So, some of my projects are starting to get sort of "up there" in memory usage, and are starting to demand enough RAM that it is causing images to fail to load; or at least from my research this is what causes the issue of black boxes appearing in place of actors.

I tried splitting my files into different atlases to help reduce how much needs to be loaded at once; but this seems to have had the effect of adding long waiting times between screen transitions when switching to a scene using a different atlas.  I am wondering if there are any "best practices" tips for atlases that are not mentioned in the stencylpedia, or other tricks that I can use to reduce RAM usage while minimizing load times between scenes.

Any advice would be useful, as I want my projects to be accessible on as many systems as possible, and not just particularly high end PCs. xD

15

Ask a Question / Re: Giant number managemnet

« on: October 12, 2020, 07:13:50 am »

Yeah, I haven't been using lists or maps either. Is there a list of every type of block that converts to integer? I'm pretty sure I've avoided all of them that I know about, but it seems like somewhere above the quadrillions causes overflows in my code.

I unfortunately don't know how to make an extension.