SMC Freezes when a UI dialog shows up.

It appears that SMC appears to freeze when a user click on something that would bring up a dialog box or window, such as when clicking options or changing the speedfactor, or (edit) exiting the level editor. It however (in my experience) only does not occur when selecting a level.

Edit: Here are two videos demonstrating the issue.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LYso0glghTw
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oPPKMV9RVHE

[Quintus]

Hu, that looks interesting. Can’t reproduce this on Linux right now, but I’ll run the Windows version and see what will happen. Did you notice how the music continued playing? This strongly suggests that SMC doesn’t hang totally, but just the dialogs did not appear. The graphics however seem to be stuck in some kind of loop.

And let me suggest a screenrecorder to you :-). For Linux, there’s recordmydesktop, but I’m sure there are free Windows programs that allow you to do this.

Vale,
Quintus

[Quintus]

@dlpenguinlover, I tried to reproduce this both on Wine and on Windows 7 32-Bits today, but I didn’t succeed, i.e. everything just ran fine. Can you try the current Git again? Ideally, with a supported version of Windows?

Vale,
Quintus

[Quintus]

I’ve not seen this issue in mrvertigo’s video either. I will close this as invalid if I don’t get more info on this.

Vale,
Quintus

I just built 87002fd and tested on Windows XP Pro SP3 32-bit, and unfortunately the bug still occurs. I'm sorry I can't provide much detail as I don't know what I should be looking for.

I'll try leaving it open for a while and see what happens and will report back.

~penguin

EDIT: Well it appears that the UI is coming up, just very slowly. It's been running for about 5 minutes now, and the black UI has come up with only the Reset button in the corner. Guess I might not be patient enough!

For reference this is being tested on an old Gateway E-4000 (made all the way back in 2002!) with the following hardware:
Pentium 4 at 2.0 GHz ( http://ark.intel.com/products/27433/Intel-Pentium-4-Processor-2_00-GHz-512K-Cache-400-MHz-FSB )
Intel D845GRG Motherboard
1 GB DDR at 166MHz
ATI Radeon X1300 Pro at 256MB VRAM
Windows XP Professional SP3 32-Bit

After running for an hour and 15 minutes, I still cannot get the Options menu to fully load. the music still plays, the CPU is at 100% usage, however it still appears as if its frozen.

Thoughts on this?
~penguin

[Quintus]

Pfuh. Hard to figure this out, I still cannot reproduce even on Windows. @sauer2, as a Windows user, can you confirm @dlpenguinlover’s problems?

Vale,
Quintus

@Quintus No. All I get is a 100ms or so freeze.
Only the levels take a very long loading time. And loading items in the editors toolbar takes time.

@Quintus
@dlpenguinlover
It could (attention, following is based on speculation) occur that smc fails to find the GUI definition files, which seem to get loaded in the click events. Because when I renamed the file options_main.layout, the game freezed for a second, then gets interrupted by the X-stopped-working dialog.
Win XP may not be that consequent and freezes until eternity.

The possible cause: (here comes the speculative part) The part of those files are hardcoded using slashes instead of backslashes. Maybe XP or some old standard library can't cope with it.

I will attempt to reproduce with @Quintus 's nightly build as I'm actually wondering if something happened during the crossbuild that I didn't know about. I'll report back in a few minutes.

Edit: Yep. It still happens.

[Quintus]

The possible cause: (here comes the speculative part) The part of those files are hardcoded using slashes instead of backslashes. Maybe XP or some old standard library can't cope with it.

Windows understands slashes as path separators since eternity, additionally to the conventional backslash ones. I think we can exclude this as being the reason.

If this turns out to be a WinXP-only problem I’m not willing to dig into it as WinXP has definitely run out of support.

Tomorrow I will try with renamed layout files.

Vale,
Quintus

I haven't tested the most recent build with Win XP, however I did get a new Win 8.1 machine. This bug isn't present on Win 8.1 so I can assume that this is a Win XP only issue.

penguin

[Quintus]

Hm, ok. I will see if someone else adds to this bug, and if not, I will close it as WONTFIX soon.

@sauer2 on a totally unrelated note, 2.0.0 feature-freeze is tomorrow. You will be able to rely on what is in SMC after that and safely do some level design, especially with regard to scripting.

Vale,
Quintus

@Quintus Damnit, I missed that. Sorry, but I don't look into my account every day.
There doesn't seem to be a moving platform API/Class in the API to activate/deactivate moving platforms.
If there already isn't some way in it, you really really better squeeze it in, given it's fundamental nature to scripting a jump and run game.

[Quintus]

@sauer2 Just for you I added a very rudimentary version of moving platforms to the scripting API. They’re entirely untested. For getting things into SMC, the best thing to do is to open an issue on the tracker; this way we won’t forget about it.

Vale,
Quintus