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How I see player last message? — Gideros Forum

How I see player last message?

edited May 2014 in General questions
Whatever I am coding is causing a bug that makes the player show the message dialog box and immediately crash.

The problem it is crashing so fast that I cannot read the box, and I could not figure other way of doing it (I tried quickly trying to copy and paste the contents, screenshot, taking photos... I am not fast enough).

So, how I read the player last message so I can know what is the issue?
I make games for children: http://www.kidoteca.com

Comments

  • ar2rsawseenar2rsawseen Maintainer
    Message dialog box sound like something OS specific have occurred. Which OS are you using, maybe there are OS based crash logs?
  • I mean the dialog box that opens when you have a Lua error.

    Not a os dialog box.

    Anyway, I found out what the message was, I was attempting to read it again, and when Gideros crashes, OSX froze too, and as it was frozen I could read.

    It was just strict .lua complaining of undeclared variable (I wrote System.myFunc() instead of system.myFunc() )

    I still want a answer to my question though.
    I make games for children: http://www.kidoteca.com
  • ar2rsawseenar2rsawseen Maintainer
    Oh I see, so the error message box appeared and as player crashed OS closed it down together with the message box?

    The same error is usually also printed in the Output pane in Gideros studio (where all the print() statements appear), wasn't it there?
  • ar2rawseen

    Errors that trigger a player message box never print on output pane in gideros studio (at least on my OSX machine...)

    Also the player is getting awfully crashy as I develop my game... I wish Gideros had better debug capabilities to tell me why it is crashing so much.
    I make games for children: http://www.kidoteca.com
  • Alright, I found another error that causes a message and a crash, now dealing with sound.

    Seriously, Gideros team you need to get your shit together, Atilim said he would send me some debug plug-in "tomorrow" when was May 1.

    Using Gideros might prove to be worst mistake of my career, since the slowdowns in development because of your lack of support are making me fear for my job, I am seriously worried I will get fired over this.

    I am very, very disappointed with you guys, I convinced the CEO to shell out your most expensive license, when he wanted to buy Corona most expensive license instead, I assured him you would do better than Corona, and now I have to live up with him telling me all the time that if we were using Corona the game would be done already, and to make it worse he is likely right.

    Sorry for the rant, but crashes, performance issues on the devices, lack of debug capabilities, crappy animation system, crap support, Atilim's inability to stick with his own promises are seriously taking a toll on my side.
    I make games for children: http://www.kidoteca.com
  • hgvyas123hgvyas123 Guru
    edited June 2014
    is there any debug functionality which corona provides and gideros doesn't ? how about to try some 3rd party software to debug ?

    you can also use gideros desktop player in this case error message will come in studio itself and you can easily see them you can also make apk or ipa and use that in your device this way also you can see error message in xcode or eclipse. in my opinion Gideros system is much stable and most of the crashes are just because of our own mistakes in corona i had tons of problem due to their system i had developed almost 6 games with corona and 8 games with gideros and currently developing 5 games in gideros in my day time job ( i am not counting my personal games here) and so far i had no problem with gideros

    also performance is quite better than corona and why you feel that animation system is crappy ?

    :)
  • edited June 2014
    I am using the desktop player. It shows a message (or tries to) and promptly crashes, no message on studio.

    As for performance, I am making a game on Gideros that I made the same game before on Corona, and on Corona there was much less slowndowns, Gideros is riddled with slowdowns, and because the animation system don't have frameskip it is very, very noticeable, specially when long animations that block gameplay take VEEEERY long on Gideros to the point of being annoying.

    I don't see any reason for the Gideros version of the game to have those issues, in fact we use even less of the system (our Corona version had all textures to be 2048x2048 on iPad, on Gideros I made a couple textures be 1024x1024 to have less loading time)

    EDIT: I found why it was crashing, it was a typo in my JSON file that resulted in a nil variable, and thus we have a player that crashes because it tried to index a ? (as Lua writes the error usually). Very disappointing it is so unstable.
    I make games for children: http://www.kidoteca.com
  • I also used Corona, and still use it for an app until now.
    Regarding how Gideros is kind of "unstable", well, every Engine is unstable.
    I did report some bugs to Gideros, and if it is very noticable, oftenly used, and reproducable, they would tackle it as main priority.
    Corona is also unstable in other things, so you might rant with the other thing at there, if you found them.

    Sometime it is our job to do things like how to handle those, which i think of course, not a good thing for consumer. "We pay, we want great thing!".
    Something like that.
    But still, when we bought Machine / Electronic Device, we also somehow, waiting for it to be broken...

    Not sure, but i might be someone who having fun at finding bugs and such, so i kind of still happy, even they are unstable. lol.
  • NascodeNascode Guru
    edited June 2014
    @speeder_kidoteca
    Hi, hope you could overcome your bugs, i bet it is really frustrating to pinpoint the culprit. I am curious to ask more about your case though.
    • Do you use native json to parse your json file? Have you tried lua based parser?
    • For performance, what devices do you use for testing?
    • Are you using Movieclip API of Gideros for animation? Have you tried building animation system yourself which is time-based instead of frame based?
    • As for long loading time, have you checked loading time for same image on both Corona and Gideros yourself? Preferably tested on same device - could you do some benchmark on both system? You could try 16-bit texture loading mode too, and see whether it make image loading faster
    As far as i know, desktop player for Gideros haven't been optimized that much, since it main purpose is to help development only. So, testing on device is a mandatory thing to know real performance of Gideros game, luckily we have wirelles device testing :)

    I hope from your information, together we can understand which part of Gideros needs improvement
    have fun with our games~
    http://www.nightspade.com
  • Hmm... Time-based Movieclip have a weakness. Sometime if you messed up, a sprite might show up 2 image of frame.
    But i'm using it, with much of test (checking each time creating animation, whether it is messed up or not).
    It have better performance than setting visibility of sprite in a group,
    and for movement, also have better performance than Gtween.
  • @Nascode

    The JSON parser don't matter, the crash was not its fault.

    The player still is hell crashy here, it crashes even when I close it (ie: do a control+q on OSX).

    For animation, yes I was using Movieclip API, hoping that it being the native animation API it would have decent performance.

    It does not have decent performance, and cannot frameskip (I need FRAMESKIP not time-based animation).

    This is the most serious problem I have now (because seemly I will have to rewrite all my animation code, either to use a custom animation library, or Atilim's prototype time-based animation system).

    As for long loading times, the game is very image heavy, Corona don't support 16-bit, among other things, so when porting the game to gideros I changed lots of things on the design in a attempt to make loading times more torelable. Loading times are not the main problem now.


    And for performance testing, I am using a Xperia Play, a Ainol Novo cheap tablet, a first gen Kindle Fire, iPhone 4, iPhone 5, iPad 3, Galaxy Tab 10, and a couple of other devices.

    On Xperia Play at least, that is my personal phone, the game is totally unplayable on the Gideros version, when I have to show the game to investors or other people I show the Corona version instead.
    I make games for children: http://www.kidoteca.com
  • @speeder_kidoteca

    On our workstations, only one pc have problem with latest Gideros Studio IDE. I hope after the IDE upgraded to QT5 again, we will have much more stable IDE.

    As for your frustation, i am sure you could help Gideros team improve Gideros by sending @atiim or @ar2rsawseen a test project containing the problems. Even better, you could ask them on Skype too to have discussion with them since every project has different trait.

    Based on our experience, we also have done a lot of projects with weird bugs popping up but we could overcome it, and become list of Gideros gotchas :P
    have fun with our games~
    http://www.nightspade.com
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