How to find missing / orphaned attributes and rules?

Hunnenkoenig

I didn't find anything about it, so I ask.

Is there a way to find missing "links" to attributes etc?

My game crashes when I want to try in GS Viewer and I was deleting some attributes and rules and I am sure, I missed to fix something somewehere.

I have read that it can cause this.

Is there any chance to find those orphan things, which cause black screen/crash?

Hunnenkoenig

You mean, I should start to redevelop the whole damn thing again?

I surely will not.

If I start a new scene in the current game and place actors on it, it won't solve anything, because if something missing elswere, will be missing on the new scene too and I don't even come to get the scene on the screen.

Hunnenkoenig

Ah ok, I will try that.

Thanks :-)

Hunnenkoenig

Ok, I tried what you said.

In my game there is not much on the opening screen and I couldn't find any problems.

The whole project has 3 MB and loading times are incredibly long even if nothing on the screen and just a few actors off screen, which fly into the scene, when a button is pushed. They have not even many rules on them.

I tried those actors one by one and even if it is only one actor on the test scene, it takes ages to load and sometimes it works, sometimes it crashes.

I think, it has to do with the "move to" rules.

In GS they are bugged and I believe, on the iPhone it is bugged too... otherwise I can't explain all this.

I still try to figure it out.

Damien

Check your behaviours for blank rules. I had my app crashing when it was missing just one. I found that if you copy from one project to another it blanks them out.

I agree it would be handy to have some type of output on why things crash, or be able to track variables etc.

I am building a game with around 20 'move to' rules, these are so processor intensive, it almost kills the 3G, runs ok on the 3GS tho.

Toby and I just released Lilli's Letters, this has a 3-10 second pause between scenes which I'd love to find a way to cut down.

Trying to invent new ways to work within the GS rules.

Good luck.

synthesis

I sometimes saveAs to a test file...then I delete a suspect attributes and/or actor one at a time. Usually it gives you a warning if its being used....but its not 100% reliable.

Then after a deletion...I test the game to make sure it still works. If all is well...I note the edit for integration into my real version...and proceed with the next suspect.

This is if I understand your issue correctly.

If you are talking about an empty field in a rule sequence...
I usually try disabling blocks of rules to try to isolate the source of the breakdown.
Often times it is a collider or something that was imported from "My Behaviors"

See my previous tip on this disabling method:
http://gamesalad.com/forums/topic.php?id=3913

adado

The devs built the functionality of finding what actors use which attributes when you try to delete an attribute. They should add a menu item called "Check Project" or something that can basically do the reverse of the above (i.e. scan all expressions for an ID that does not correspond to an object ID and then tell you the actor and behavior it is in).

Technically, that shouldn't be necessary if they handled this a bit better like not allow the delete until you change all the references (and provide you a list of those) or something like this.

As it sits now, if you delete an expression, it becomes "0" in some instances and "self." in others. Maybe if it highlighted those in red instead of the usual blue.

An industrious GS user could use an XML parser API to parse the files, load the actor/sound/image IDs (and their names) into an array, then parse all the XML files noting any IDs referenced in behavior/expressions generating an exception report when those IDs don't mate up with an actor/sound/image. I'd be up for it but then I'd be wasting what little time I have on that and not my piddly arse games! :-)

Hunnenkoenig

Thanks guys.

I just took a working earlier version and I build the whole thing again. Fortunately I know aproximetly, where I deleted things, so I don't need to make the whole game again, just add the game actors.