GLITCH! Please fix Animation Glitch!

Hi everyone!

I'm having quite a struggle with random crashes of my game. I have been talking with Clickteam about this for a time and they already mentioned to fix an issue that might cause this in a patch. But even with the current version, it is not fixed!

What happens is this (I hope I understand Clickteam correctly with that, if not, you're welcome to correct me)

When you spawn lots of objects in rapid speed and give randomized animation sequences (to change appearence), sometimes the animation numbers of these sequences screw up somehow and become impossible values (for example animation sequence -14, which is not possible to do with regular events). Because Multimedia Fusion 2 cannot handle these animation sequences, it appears to use animations from entirely different objects (look at screenshot) or simply crashes the game. Clickteam already tried to do a work-around by catching "impossible values" and simply replacing it with 0, but this seems not to work in this case.

This screenshot shows a random "sparkle" object appear at the enemy. But instead of showing the "sparkly object" animation, it takes the animation from a different object and appears as a solid block!
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I only have basic programming knowledge, but this glitch might possibly lead to memory leaks and other issues like crashing, so it's not a "visual glitch" that I'm addressing here. I'm posting this, because maybe this might be the reason for other people's issues with their games as well and they might report this glitch under different circumstances.

Please Clickteam have another look at this issue, it might fix the random crashes of my game for good!
Very much appreciated

What other event except "change animation sequence to..." is there to do a workaround?

Quote from Skyhunter

Well "change animation sequence to..." doesnt make any crashes or use animations from different objects in any of my games whatsoever, and i tend to use it a lot. So it's rather obvius your game is using it in a certain manner that causes these issues to occur...

thats why an example of the mfa that does crash would be helpfull to see why and to see what fixes there might be to it...

I can guarantee you that I'm not doing anything "out of the ordinary" with my events. Basically I have an alterable value that gets set to a random(#) and then there are events for each #, that change the animation of the object to one that I have selected by hand from the animation selection menu of that object (no expressions are used with the animation sequences!). So with this method, it should be impossible to screw the animations up that bad that they get taken from entirely different objects. Maybe I'm using way more different animations within the same object as others, or maybe it's caused by the use of Global Events - but these two things are ordinary features of MMF2, so I suppose I'm allowed to use them as much as I want, right? I've already sent an MFA to Clickteam and they have acknowledged that it's a problem on their part, they know this issue exists and it was causing the game to crash for them too. They said they make a work-around for it in the current version, but like the screenshot shows, it is not working.

Quote from Chaos

I actually have this happen all the time with CoI and found that using 'Load on Call' was the culprit in most cases. I haven't been able to forcefully re-create it, but again I've fixed pretty much all occurrences I've had of this by un-checking that pesky Load on Call box. I haven't been able to get a solid answer to what causes this from my talks with CT staff or other developers, but try what I mentioned above and let me know if it works for you.

Thanks for your help - I've checked my MFA again and all the "load on call" have always been unchecked. I'm pretty sure I've never even touched that checkbox before, so in this case, I'm afraid it's not the problem/solution.

Quote from Konidias

Yeah... an example that can recreate the issue would be super helpful... I'm not sure Clickteam has much to go on with "please fix animation glitch!"

I'd love to do that, but my time is very limited. The issue is extremely hard to recreate and appears at random, so it might take days or weeks to create a "example MFA" with the same conditions to have this issue appear. As I mentioned in my first post, I've sent an early version of my game as MFA file to Clickteam before, but I will not make this public.

Yes, you should already have the MFA. We talked about this over PM in june last year. The MFA should be called something like Pandagame_frametest. If you don't have it anymore, I can upload it again for you.

I'm not sure if the problem still exists if I just try to isolate the single object, since it uses animations from all other objects as well. It would take a lot of time to find the exact mix of objects that causes this issue again, because it appears at random and is not recreated that easily. Maybe it's better for this "investigation" to use the whole MFA that I've sent you back then.

Many thanks!

Quote from Francois

Sorry, cant find it. Can you send it to me again?

No problem, you have a new PM

Quote from Pixelthief

I've noticed that MMF2's set animation number, frame or direction logic can easily go out of array bounds and take images from subsequent memory, particularly in directly setting it from xLua where there is no sanity check afaik. Now normally, MMF2's bounding should prohibit this and preclude the possibility, and I use the set anim value functions all the time with no problem. But you mention that your problem is tied to generating tons of objects of different kinds

Without seeing your code it is difficult to test, but I'd hypothesize one thing to test for is if this is related to the "create object scoping" glitch. Is this only occurring when the number of objects in your frame reaches the maximum #, particularly if you didn't raise the frame from the default 500 up to the maximum 20000? In MMF2, if you have a line of code that creates an object and then sets its values, that line will malfunction if the create event fails, scoping all objects of that class and applying the actions to them without creating anything new. Its a particularly common cause of screwing up peoples maths and references in code, and if you had any particularly complicated math going on in terms of setting the animation values, maybe that math is getting screwed up from what *seems* sound and stable, and setting it to something out of bounds, which in turn yanks animations from other objects in memory, as after all they are all stored next to each other

If anything, can you post a screenshot of the event editor / event list editor snippets of code where you set the animation values for objects directly?

The object maximum value has been risen to 5000 for each frame and currently in the most busy frames I'm at 1500-2000, but not higher, even with all kinds of objects spawning.

Here's a screenshot of the events:
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Oh, I just noticed an error with the red arrows that I drew on there, which suggest all animations get set to health as shown in the box. Actually the stuff in the right box is different for each event to give everything different looks and properties. Each number has a different animation, just as the comment above them all shows (1=health, 2=mana etc.). But good to know you don't see any red flags