My project is still crashing after playing a few randomly generated missions. Problem has persisted for around 1 year now. Still can't continue working on my magnum opus game.
I went over to Nightly 13.2, but it crashed out on the first mission ("Memory Pressure"), ... also tiling isn't working properly, and the main menu (parallax scrolling landscape) run sat about 3 frames per second. Thoroughly broken.
Good to see Game Salad consistently degrading with each new update. Keep it up guys.
While running the Viewer through Xcode, it says "Terminated due to Memory Pressure".
Can anyone recommend the best and most informative way to identify the source of memory usage?
For me, removing / resizing images, and removing sound and music has never helped this problem. It just seems to be code executing, too many objects or something.
In 10.4, I had the amount of spawning and objects balanced so the game would run indefinitely on my iPad 2.
But in builds since, including the newest ones, it crashes out within a handful of missions, even on an iPad 5 Air. I'm not sure if there's any way for me to clearly identify places in my actors where I could reduce this blowout of memory. I'm not sure what's triggering the excessive memory usage, etc. Is there a good way to pin-point things like that?
I've been trying to find / fix this issue for years, and I've tried many many things, and nothing seems to help. And I was the Lead QA tester for 4 years at a game dev studio, and game designer at renowned studios for another 5, so I'm not a stranger to getting games developed, tested, fixed and out the door.
The lack of a clear culprit within my project has made it impossible for me to address the issue, and I've not had any useful fixes or feedback from Game Salad about the cause of the problem.
Bug #103 in the database has been the main point of interest, regarding memory leaks and things to do with writing to tables, and such things. But I really have no idea what needs to happen to improve the situation for my specific game, beyond a good programmer at Game Salad looking into the issue and trying to address the problem at the source.
I turned off all enemies in the game, and it still crashed while playing the 3rd mission.
Became quite jerky before crashing.
Each time a mission ends and goes back to the main menu, memory usage is higher than before. 167mb, then 215mb, then crashed in the 3rd mission while at 264mb of memory usage.
Would it be possible to add a "Memory Cleanup" behaviour that we could call manually at certain points in our games?
Surely the ideal situation would be - if I were writing my own game from scratch - to clean up excess memory usage whenever I go back to the main menu.
Surely when I'm back at the Main Menu, I should be able to drop memory usage back to the same level every time. Shouldn't I be able to return to the main menu, and my app is using 164mb of memory (for example) every single time I'm there, seeing as all previous missions played are no longer loaded, no longer being used.
Why is the memory higher every time I return to the same Main Menu scene?
If this problem were fixed, I think all my problems would be fixed, and I could get back to work on my game.
Could we have a MEMORY CLEANUP behaviour we can call?
@BlackCloakGS My game isn't loading at all with this Stable Release (it shows a white loading wheel in the middle of the screen when the initial loading screen appears, the screen dims, and then the wheel just keeps spinning)..I tested the ad hoc with the previous RC 12.19 and it works fine though. My iPhone 5 is running iOS 8. Anyone else experiencing the same?
Could we have a MEMORY CLEANUP behaviour we can call?
Put it on the feature list. I along with dozens of others will vote for this.
Who cares about AdMob and collision areas if games won't even run without crashing?
PhilipCCEncounter Bay, South AustraliaMemberPosts: 1,390
edited February 2015
@djdee said:
Why does the images with 16 bit rate doesn't support transparency when dropped in GS creator. And can i know when is the iAds bug b fixed??
There is an entire thread about this from May/June last year.
See: Working with GS (Mac) > Problems with PNG images? Use these methods to fix your PNGs
Quite simply GS does not support 16 bit per channel. It explains how to batch convert them to 8 bit per channel, i.e. 32 bit images with transparency.
@supafly129 I'm having the same issue on Ipad2 (not on air or Iphone5 &6). Stuck on the loading screen and game never snaps out of it. I hear sounds triggering in the background though...but loading screen is stuck and the loading wheel is near the middle of the screen...keeps on spinning and sending me into a hypnotic tunnel of despair. Testing on the Ipad2 was an afterthought...after submitting 4 Apps to Apple. Time to flush em and wait for a fix.
I just tried loading my other game I'm working on, which works fine in 0.11.13.
It crashes as it loads into the world in 0.12.20.
I think I'll try to finish that game off in 0.11.13, so PLEASE keep those publishing servers online, or it'll be another project dead on the shelf of unfinished projects.
Any chance of putting up a publishing server for 0.10.4? I think that's the only way I'll ever be able to release my other main project I'm working on.
@Figuromo said:
supafly129 I'm having the same issue on Ipad2 (not on air or Iphone5 &6). Stuck on the loading screen and game never snaps out of it. I hear sounds triggering in the background though...but loading screen is stuck and the loading wheel is near the middle of the screen...keeps on spinning and sending me into a hypnotic tunnel of despair. Testing on the Ipad2 was an afterthought...after submitting 4 Apps to Apple. Time to flush em and wait for a fix.
Yup hoping this will be fixed soon since it's a pretty major bug! In addition to this, I'm also experiencing random crashes while playing...
@QASalad and @BlackCloakGS I can confirm that there is a major bug in 0.12.20 "stable" which will crash apps on "iPad mini" (1st gen) and "iPad 2" and soon after loading which in practice renders builds made by 0.12.20 unusable on older devices.
GS developers can expect bad reviews coming from reviewers cause of crashes on such devices. This is not any small little thing that may go unnoticed.
What @Figuromo and @Hymloe and @supafly129 wrote above made me bring out some older devices and run some quick tests with the following results:
Note: The tests below were done using the exact same project version with no changes done in the project between testing adhocs in the two versions below.
Devices tested with adhoc builds;
iPad 2 running IOS 7.1.1
iPad Mini running IOS 6.1.2
iPad Mini (2) retina running IOS 8.1.2
iPad 3 running IOS 8.1.2
iPad Air (1) running IOS 8.1.2
Publishing build settings:
Universal Build
Overscan
Legacy resolution independence (so @1x and @2x images were produced)
Published adhoc build using: GS 0.11.0.13
Result: All devices loads the app and it's possible to play the game for quite some time without any issue
Published adhoc build using: GS 0.12.20 "stable"
Result: All devices loads the app but within 2 minutes after playing the game it will crash on iPad 2 and iPad Mini. The Mini 2 and Air seem to perform as the 0.11.0.13 build.
Since the iPad Mini and iPad 2 both have 512 MB of RAM I suspect the issue is related to that for 0.12.20 builds.
Recordings using xcode instruments may be helpful for the GS team here, I did not do that in these initial tests.
(Tested ok: The Air and Mini 2 retina which both have 1 GB RAM and are 64-bit devices, the iPad 3 has 1GB RAM and is 32-bit).
To the community and the GS-team:
The easiest way to reproduce this on iPad 2 and iPad Mini (1) is probably to load up an 0.12.20 adhoc of any graphic intense game and just play it for a couple of minutes and then enjoy the crash
In my opinion it is way to early to kill off support for iPad 2 and iPad Mini at this point.
@JSproject said:
To the community and the GS-team:
The easiest way to reproduce this on iPad 2 and iPad Mini (1) is probably to load up an 0.12.20 adhoc of any graphic intense game and just play it for a couple of minutes and then enjoy the crash
In my opinion it is way to early to kill off support for iPad 2 and iPad Mini at this point.
The oldest device i have is an iPad 2 running 8.1 and i can't seem to reproduce this. By any chance, are the projects you are testing have ads?
@Lovejoy no, no ads. An app that loads many images/animations might be required to reproduce quite easy. Out of the top of my head I would e.g. guess that "Twin Swords" would experience this crash. @POM can you try an adhoc with 0.12.20 and test it with that game on iPad 2 or iPad Mini?
@JSproject said:
Lovejoy no, no ads. An app that loads many images/animations might be required to reproduce quite easy. Out of the top of my head I would e.g. guess that "Twin Swords" would experience this crash. POM can you try an adhoc with 0.12.20 and test it with that game on iPad 2 or iPad Mini?
Same here, no ads and the app loads tons of images on startup.
I have a problem with GS over the years, that as I keep working on my projects, the newer releases of GS cause my projects to crash, and I get to a point where I am unable to finish or release my games, which take a year or two to make (I work on them part time), and I'm now left with 2 projects which are crashing in GS 0.12.20, one of which has been crashing since the move away from 0.10.4. The old publishing servers go away, and I'm left with a game I can't work on anymore.
It's heart breaking. And I feel helpless to enact change and fixes at GS.
I can understand that the requirements of iOS itself change, and memory usage may increase from the OS' point of view, but it bewilders me how GS itself can't just manage memory better, clean up better, etc.
It seems to be that the games just keep using more memory, and never really clean up after themselves.
@JSproject said:
Lovejoy no, no ads. An app that loads many images/animations might be required to reproduce quite easy. Out of the top of my head I would e.g. guess that "Twin Swords" would experience this crash. POM can you try an adhoc with 0.12.20 and test it with that game on iPad 2 or iPad Mini?
Ah man, not sounding good. Gonna test my massive project and report findings on older devices.
I'm planning to submit a few bugs tonight, and add a feature request for a "Memory Cleanup" behaviour. If anyone has anything to add to that concept, please post here so I can include it in my post.
I'll post here with a link to the feature request for others to chime in, once it's up there.
@Hymloe said:
Keen to hear everyone else's experiences.
I'm planning to submit a few bugs tonight, and add a feature request for a "Memory Cleanup" behaviour. If anyone has anything to add to that concept, please post here so I can include it in my post.
I'll post here with a link to the feature request for others to chime in, once it's up there.
How about not asking for a new feature?
Hiw about asking for current features to be fixed.
How about just asking them to fix everything that has been going wrong since October of 2013, which is when I first got GS...ask them to stop working on new stuff. Ask them to go buy a regular mac like everyone else NOT using a mega Mac software designers use. Whatever they are doing seems to be consistantly getting worse. Crash reports...something needs to change. I tried a nightly build one time and it was the worse thing I coukd have done...tried the release candidate...nuh uh! Not doing that again...cant trust to even do my own app nightly builds anymore. And they are working on something...new?
It is my understanding that a new RC will be out soon dressing certain issues. It was mentioned during the meet-up I'm sure. So lets see on monday when the gs staff gets back on the hot seat.
@Hymloe said:
I can understand that the requirements of iOS itself change, and memory usage may increase from the OS' point of view, but it bewilders me how GS itself can't just manage memory better, clean up better, etc.
It seems to be that the games just keep using more memory, and never really clean up after themselves.
I suspect some issues are unfixable without a huge redo of code. Hence graphene.
I really like this software but let me say the truth without and exaggeration. I have used gamesalad for years and it is the MOST unstable and buggy software i have ever seen, i mean really guys it has tons of bugs not just one or two and has the most ridiculous UI in game engines. The software is overpriced and the developers are lazy and retard and they don't want to make any real improvements on their product. i have enough of this app
@nadhim said:
I really like this software but let me say the truth without and exaggeration. I have used gamesalad for years and it is the MOST unstable and buggy software i have ever seen, i mean really guys it has tons of bugs not just one or two and has the most ridiculous UI in game engines. The software is overpriced and the developers are lazy and retard and they don't want to make any real improvements on their product. i have enough of this app
You're wrong on so many levels. And also right. You are Ying AND Yang.
Comments
Is this normal , Project size 184KB APK size 6.4 MB Installed size ~ 20 MB
Homepage: freneticgamez.eu/
https://play.google.com/store/apps/developer?id=FreneticGamez
My project is still crashing after playing a few randomly generated missions. Problem has persisted for around 1 year now. Still can't continue working on my magnum opus game.
I'll try Nightly 0.13.2, I guess.
I went over to Nightly 13.2, but it crashed out on the first mission ("Memory Pressure"), ... also tiling isn't working properly, and the main menu (parallax scrolling landscape) run sat about 3 frames per second. Thoroughly broken.
Good to see Game Salad consistently degrading with each new update. Keep it up guys.
I just have no idea how I can finish my game and put it out before Game Salad is gone forever. It's very hard to accept, I must say.
While running the Viewer through Xcode, it says "Terminated due to Memory Pressure".
Can anyone recommend the best and most informative way to identify the source of memory usage?
For me, removing / resizing images, and removing sound and music has never helped this problem. It just seems to be code executing, too many objects or something.
In 10.4, I had the amount of spawning and objects balanced so the game would run indefinitely on my iPad 2.
But in builds since, including the newest ones, it crashes out within a handful of missions, even on an iPad 5 Air. I'm not sure if there's any way for me to clearly identify places in my actors where I could reduce this blowout of memory. I'm not sure what's triggering the excessive memory usage, etc. Is there a good way to pin-point things like that?
I've been trying to find / fix this issue for years, and I've tried many many things, and nothing seems to help. And I was the Lead QA tester for 4 years at a game dev studio, and game designer at renowned studios for another 5, so I'm not a stranger to getting games developed, tested, fixed and out the door.
The lack of a clear culprit within my project has made it impossible for me to address the issue, and I've not had any useful fixes or feedback from Game Salad about the cause of the problem.
Bug #103 in the database has been the main point of interest, regarding memory leaks and things to do with writing to tables, and such things. But I really have no idea what needs to happen to improve the situation for my specific game, beyond a good programmer at Game Salad looking into the issue and trying to address the problem at the source.
I turned off all enemies in the game, and it still crashed while playing the 3rd mission.
Became quite jerky before crashing.
Each time a mission ends and goes back to the main menu, memory usage is higher than before. 167mb, then 215mb, then crashed in the 3rd mission while at 264mb of memory usage.
Would it be possible to add a "Memory Cleanup" behaviour that we could call manually at certain points in our games?
Surely the ideal situation would be - if I were writing my own game from scratch - to clean up excess memory usage whenever I go back to the main menu.
Surely when I'm back at the Main Menu, I should be able to drop memory usage back to the same level every time. Shouldn't I be able to return to the main menu, and my app is using 164mb of memory (for example) every single time I'm there, seeing as all previous missions played are no longer loaded, no longer being used.
Why is the memory higher every time I return to the same Main Menu scene?
If this problem were fixed, I think all my problems would be fixed, and I could get back to work on my game.
Could we have a MEMORY CLEANUP behaviour we can call?
@BlackCloakGS My game isn't loading at all with this Stable Release (it shows a white loading wheel in the middle of the screen when the initial loading screen appears, the screen dims, and then the wheel just keeps spinning)..I tested the ad hoc with the previous RC 12.19 and it works fine though. My iPhone 5 is running iOS 8. Anyone else experiencing the same?
POLAR ROLLOUT (New Line-Drawing Physics Puzzler!) - FREE Download
Put it on the feature list. I along with dozens of others will vote for this.
Who cares about AdMob and collision areas if games won't even run without crashing?
There is an entire thread about this from May/June last year.
See: Working with GS (Mac) > Problems with PNG images? Use these methods to fix your PNGs
Quite simply GS does not support 16 bit per channel. It explains how to batch convert them to 8 bit per channel, i.e. 32 bit images with transparency.
@supafly129 I'm having the same issue on Ipad2 (not on air or Iphone5 &6). Stuck on the loading screen and game never snaps out of it. I hear sounds triggering in the background though...but loading screen is stuck and the loading wheel is near the middle of the screen...keeps on spinning and sending me into a hypnotic tunnel of despair. Testing on the Ipad2 was an afterthought...after submitting 4 Apps to Apple. Time to flush em and wait for a fix.
This update seems messy i will wait for the stable release…wait a minute this IS the stable release
I just tried loading my other game I'm working on, which works fine in 0.11.13.
It crashes as it loads into the world in 0.12.20.
I think I'll try to finish that game off in 0.11.13, so PLEASE keep those publishing servers online, or it'll be another project dead on the shelf of unfinished projects.
Any chance of putting up a publishing server for 0.10.4? I think that's the only way I'll ever be able to release my other main project I'm working on.
Yup hoping this will be fixed soon since it's a pretty major bug! In addition to this, I'm also experiencing random crashes while playing...
POLAR ROLLOUT (New Line-Drawing Physics Puzzler!) - FREE Download
@QASalad and @BlackCloakGS I can confirm that there is a major bug in 0.12.20 "stable" which will crash apps on "iPad mini" (1st gen) and "iPad 2" and soon after loading which in practice renders builds made by 0.12.20 unusable on older devices.
GS developers can expect bad reviews coming from reviewers cause of crashes on such devices. This is not any small little thing that may go unnoticed.
What @Figuromo and @Hymloe and @supafly129 wrote above made me bring out some older devices and run some quick tests with the following results:
Note: The tests below were done using the exact same project version with no changes done in the project between testing adhocs in the two versions below.
Devices tested with adhoc builds;
iPad 2 running IOS 7.1.1
iPad Mini running IOS 6.1.2
iPad Mini (2) retina running IOS 8.1.2
iPad 3 running IOS 8.1.2
iPad Air (1) running IOS 8.1.2
Publishing build settings:
Published adhoc build using: GS 0.11.0.13
Result: All devices loads the app and it's possible to play the game for quite some time without any issue
Published adhoc build using: GS 0.12.20 "stable"
Result: All devices loads the app but within 2 minutes after playing the game it will crash on iPad 2 and iPad Mini. The Mini 2 and Air seem to perform as the 0.11.0.13 build.
Since the iPad Mini and iPad 2 both have 512 MB of RAM I suspect the issue is related to that for 0.12.20 builds.
Recordings using xcode instruments may be helpful for the GS team here, I did not do that in these initial tests.
(Tested ok: The Air and Mini 2 retina which both have 1 GB RAM and are 64-bit devices, the iPad 3 has 1GB RAM and is 32-bit).
To the community and the GS-team:
The easiest way to reproduce this on iPad 2 and iPad Mini (1) is probably to load up an 0.12.20 adhoc of any graphic intense game and just play it for a couple of minutes and then enjoy the crash
In my opinion it is way to early to kill off support for iPad 2 and iPad Mini at this point.
The oldest device i have is an iPad 2 running 8.1 and i can't seem to reproduce this. By any chance, are the projects you are testing have ads?
Fortuna Infortuna Forti Una
@Lovejoy no, no ads. An app that loads many images/animations might be required to reproduce quite easy. Out of the top of my head I would e.g. guess that "Twin Swords" would experience this crash. @POM can you try an adhoc with 0.12.20 and test it with that game on iPad 2 or iPad Mini?
Same here, no ads and the app loads tons of images on startup.
Lordy...
Complete Guide to iOS Publishing {} Complete Guide to Mac Publishing
Yep, no ads but lots of images in general
POLAR ROLLOUT (New Line-Drawing Physics Puzzler!) - FREE Download
No ads in mine.
I have a problem with GS over the years, that as I keep working on my projects, the newer releases of GS cause my projects to crash, and I get to a point where I am unable to finish or release my games, which take a year or two to make (I work on them part time), and I'm now left with 2 projects which are crashing in GS 0.12.20, one of which has been crashing since the move away from 0.10.4. The old publishing servers go away, and I'm left with a game I can't work on anymore.
It's heart breaking. And I feel helpless to enact change and fixes at GS.
I can understand that the requirements of iOS itself change, and memory usage may increase from the OS' point of view, but it bewilders me how GS itself can't just manage memory better, clean up better, etc.
It seems to be that the games just keep using more memory, and never really clean up after themselves.
Ah man, not sounding good. Gonna test my massive project and report findings on older devices.
Follow us: Twitter - Website
Keen to hear everyone else's experiences.
I'm planning to submit a few bugs tonight, and add a feature request for a "Memory Cleanup" behaviour. If anyone has anything to add to that concept, please post here so I can include it in my post.
I'll post here with a link to the feature request for others to chime in, once it's up there.
How about not asking for a new feature?
Hiw about asking for current features to be fixed.
How about just asking them to fix everything that has been going wrong since October of 2013, which is when I first got GS...ask them to stop working on new stuff. Ask them to go buy a regular mac like everyone else NOT using a mega Mac software designers use. Whatever they are doing seems to be consistantly getting worse. Crash reports...something needs to change. I tried a nightly build one time and it was the worse thing I coukd have done...tried the release candidate...nuh uh! Not doing that again...cant trust to even do my own app nightly builds anymore. And they are working on something...new?
Name the bug report "GS NO WORKY"
Complete Guide to iOS Publishing {} Complete Guide to Mac Publishing
It is my understanding that a new RC will be out soon dressing certain issues. It was mentioned during the meet-up I'm sure. So lets see on monday when the gs staff gets back on the hot seat.
Fortuna Infortuna Forti Una
I suspect some issues are unfixable without a huge redo of code. Hence graphene.
I really like this software but let me say the truth without and exaggeration. I have used gamesalad for years and it is the MOST unstable and buggy software i have ever seen, i mean really guys it has tons of bugs not just one or two and has the most ridiculous UI in game engines. The software is overpriced and the developers are lazy and retard and they don't want to make any real improvements on their product. i have enough of this app
it doesn't do anything the memory still leaking until my 16GB of ram dry and the app freezes
Yea I had spoke way to soon. There are more issues and still the lag...even sooner sometimes now.
Complete Guide to iOS Publishing {} Complete Guide to Mac Publishing
You're wrong on so many levels. And also right. You are Ying AND Yang.