Strange Sprite replacement during runtime MMF2DEV - patched up to date

Quote from Chaos

Greetings!

So, I've been randomly having and receiving reports on some of my actives getting randomly replaced by other completely unrelated actives during runtime. It's very intermittent and seems to happen more after playing the game for an extended duration.

For example: I will defeat an enemy "Dragon" and it should create some "Flame" actives on death. What is happening is "Dragon" will be defeated but instead creates "Tree" actives in place of where it should be "Flame" actives.

If I get it to happen to me again personally I'll try to get video - but just wondering if there was something I can to do make sure that it doesn't happen at all? It's pretty rare (and quite funny, really) when it does happen but I'd like to have my game refrain from these shenanigans. Just wasn't sure if it's a known issue or not, its been happening for a good few MMF2 builds now. Perhaps my game is just getting too big for its britches. Heh.

-Don

Huh, that sounds weird. I personally have never had an issue quite this strange. Are you using the create by name object, by any chance? I doubt it would cause things this strange to happen, but that's the only thing I can think of that could possibly do it. Either that, or you have encountered a really strange programming bug on your end (or Clickteam's end). One other thing it could possibly be is a corrupted MFA, though that is the least likely of those to be happening.

You wouldn't happen to have "Load on Call" checked for any of these objects would you?

I've had this issue before and my .mfa was corrupted. Hopefully yours is not. Be really careful. Open up some of the objects that are swapping and look at the graphics inside them. If they're duplicates from other unrelated object then it's most definitely corrupted.

Did you do any copying and pasting of graphics recently? Or objects with the same name between frames?

Quote from Chaos

Just a quick followup: It seems that un-checking the Load on Call for the problem causers is fixing the issue.

I pray its not corruption of any kind! XD I'm almost ready to release! haha

Yeah, that would hurt big time if it was corrupted. There are some ways to recover from corruption, but they would take forever if the game was that far along in development, and they might not fix the issue completely (since I've never had that kind of corruption).

Basically, if you copy and paste all of the objects that aren't having issues into a new MFA file, copy all of the events that aren't related to the objects that aren't having issues, and then manually adding the corrupted objects back in (do NOT copy and paste them in, add a new active object for each corrupted object, and manually re-program them, and manually add their animations back in), and you do that for every frame, you can basically get rid of the corruption in your MFA file (the new MFA file with the manually re-coded corrupted objects). It's tedious, and it doesn't always work, but, quite often, it will work. Fortunately, it seems like you won't need to do this, but it is always a good thing to know just in case.

how would an mfa go about getting corrupted? Just a question, as it has never happened to me.(Yet. Hopefully never.)

This happened to me with Load on Call issues. I got rid of them by making the objects global and ticking and unticking the load on call checkbox, then making the objects local. It applies for background sprites, too, which is probably why you get the tree image replacement. I think doing this will fix your issue.

I've had another graphical issue when randomly MMF doesn't display an object's image at runtime, even though it's there at edit-time. If you change 1 pixel, then the background displays properly. It's probably some memory issue. I'm not sure if this is the case with your game?

Lastly, I've had issues when cloning/duplicating objects: MMF will suddenly not display any object's properties, and running the frame will result in a crash. I always open another instance of MMF, load my lastly saved .mfa, ctrl+c whatever objects I was working on when MMF got corrupted, and paste them on the new instance. I've never tried saving when I get such corruptions, but maybe you did save and are working on that mfa? I don't think this is the case, as you would've noticed+panicked+closed the mfa, but it's worth bringing up.

I didn't mean to scare anyone, just wanted to make sure you were backing things up. Corruption is very very rare, but devastating when it happens. It's not really known why things get corrupted.

Glad to hear it worked out.