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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.

2

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.

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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 / 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?

6

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

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Ask a Question / Giant number managemnet

« on: October 11, 2020, 04:12:56 pm »

So, one of my projects has rather large numbers. I made some overly complicated code to work past the limit of the engine, which overflows somewhere between the quadrillions and quintillions.

I have tried to work around this by making one variable which is "normal" then a second variable which that one rolls up into which counts "quadrillions of the previous variable"  Unfortunately, the method I've used is very clumbsy, buggy, and difficult to work with, changing something which would ordinarily be a few lines of code into a bit of a mess; if statements to check which variables are being used in a calculation, and then doing all the math involved multiple times for each instance. This unfortunately makes every instance of using the main resource very complex, prone to errors, and tedious to update.

I am wondering if anyone has worked with extremely large numbers and knows of a more elegant solution to this issue than what I am currently using.

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Ask a Question / Endless "Must install Android SDK" loop

« on: September 10, 2020, 09:29:57 am »

So i am trying to get stencyl set up to export to .apk, on version 4.0.3. But I am having an issue that it is stuck on what the wiki says should be an automatic step. When I go to either test or compile to .apk, it tells me I need to install the android SDK, and takes me to the window to download it automatically. I do so, try again, and it again tells me I need to install the android SDK.

Is there something else I need to do, or is this step out of date and I need to do something manually here? I get the feeling the stencylpedia might be quite a bit out of date as it says to get the 1.6 version of the java sdk and it's up to version 14 now...

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Ask a Question / Key Rebinding options

« on: May 28, 2020, 01:55:46 pm »

So, I am working on an action platformer and am finding that no matter what I make the controls, a large number of players complain that they can't use them. I've tried adding aliases between popular control schemes, but it seems like things don't work if you have three aliases to the same key, and I can't do that for control schemes that have button overlap.

I am wondering if there is any way to set up a settings menu where the player can rebind the keys to their preference. I've searched on google but the closest thread I found was tagged obsolete.

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Ask a Question / Solving for Slopes

« on: April 22, 2020, 12:55:20 am »

So, I am trying to get slopes to work in my platformer, but am having some difficulty, as the old behavior which used to handle slopes in the version I am currently in appears to be empty. Downloading it from stencylforge also produces an empty behavior. So, I'm not even able to look at what the code used to be to try to emulate it.

Currently, having the game check that I'm not jumping, and that I'm touching the ground, then multiply Y speed by .97 allows me to stand on, and run up slopes with minimal issues; though my character switches into jumping for a moment at the top of the slope, and very slowly slides down still. Running down slopes, however, my character just runs past the slope and alternates between touching the slope and falling which isn't even close to working right. 

from google searching, I mostly seem to be finding threads where it's said that slopes haven't been really figured out, but those threads are a few years old. I am wondering though if some answers have been figured out in the meantime.

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Ask a Question / Hitboxes and hurtboxes

« on: April 04, 2020, 08:53:26 pm »

So, I wasted most of the day tinkering with this before remembering that the "member of group" detection detects the actor's default group, and not the group the hitbox belongs to. This leaves me with difficulty figuring out how to make hitboxes and hurtboxes work.

I am trying to make combat for a platformer, where actors can touch each other without automatically dealing damage, and deal damage using their attack animations. The only way i can think to make it work without being able to identify to colliding hitbox's group would be to have invisible actors spawn in just to act as hitboxes, which feels like a very messy and unnecessarily complicated way to handle it.

Is there any cleaner way to handle detecting specific hitboxes, or is there any plan to allow them to work more intuitively at some point?

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Ask a Question / Black Boxes after enabling full screen

« on: March 22, 2020, 08:05:15 am »

So I recently enabled full screen and 1.5x scaling in one of my projects. I am getting reports now that during the game sometimes actors change to black boxes; even when in normal scaling mode and not in full screen. This also sometimes leads to crashes. It doesn't seem to be happening to many users, but seems to be happening most to actors who are being tweened; such as rotating or growing.

Does anyone have any thoughts on what the cause could be and how I could troubleshoot it?

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Ask a Question / Full Screen question

« on: March 04, 2020, 04:59:37 am »

Edit: I figured out the solution to my initial problem; turns out I should have been using true and false, rather than full screen enabled and "not<fullscreen enabled>"

But I do have a bit of a blurring issue that I'm unsure of how to solve. I want it to stretch to fit the screen, However, the amount the game stretches causes too much blurring when it's a large stretch. Is it possible to mix the fixed scaling and stretching such that it picks the fixed scale option which is closest to the screen resolution in use and scale from there? Or does it already do that automatically?

Additionally, is there a good way to add in higher resolution versions of an animation after the fact if applying this to a previous project that is at 1x scale currently?

14

Ask a Question / Having a lot of issues with big numbers

« on: March 01, 2020, 06:44:42 pm »

So, in one of my projects, I have been having a lot of issues with big numbers. The first time it was rounding causing it to become an integer, which made the numbers overflow in the billions range. I stopped rounding the numbers, but found that they would still overflow somewhere in the quadrillions to quintillions range.

I attempted to make a workaround by having a stand-in variable that represents a quadrillion of the previous number, but that seems to have only made things worse. I have several screens of code dedicated to making the math work every single time I need to use this variable, and it is extremely prone to having unexpected errors due to just the sheer volume of how much code I need to write every time I use that variable.

I am wondering, if anyone else has dealt with this kind of issue, is there an easier way to handle numbers large enough to cause overflow?

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Ask a Question / Managing randomly created characters.

« on: January 18, 2020, 06:21:23 pm »

I am working on a new concept which would be a management simulator, so characters would be added to the game in-engine. A normal global attribute profile would not work well in this case, as once I ran out of sets of global attributes, I would no longer be able to have the game create characters.

I do, however, need to be able to save the randomly created characters appearances and stats so they are consistent once created. I had considered making a list to handle it, so whenever a new character is added, it could add it's set of attributes to the list, but I don't see an intuitive way to make a list of lists as the stencylpedia mentions in passing, and I am not sure if making an individual list for each attribute would be manageable.

Has anyone else made something similar enough to this to suggest what an effective way to deal with this issue would be?