Macromedia Projector Bug=Constant Crashes

[McBan]

I have the same problem with the Macromedia Projector crashes. It seems to affect only certain campaigns. The Edward Teach campaign is completely unplayable because of the crash bug. I tried a different campaign (I can't remember which one) and there seemed to be no problem after about a dozen turns. I didn't have time to play any further. I won't have time to really experiment to track down the crash conditions for several days. I just wanted to pop in quickly and let you know that someone else is having your problem.

[Lord Hammer]

McBan said:
I have the same problem with the Macromedia Projector crashes. It seems to affect only certain campaigns. The Edward Teach campaign is completely unplayable because of the crash bug.I just wanted to pop in quickly and let you know that someone else is having your problem.

Thanks, ironic that Edward Teach was the campaign that wouldn't even run more than a minute, it was by far the worst ctd wise as well as my first choice .I uninstalled Salvo...i'll check back.
@Andrew: I tried all the "Pirate Campaigns", none of which would run, and a couple English of which i can move forward in at least one. So it does seem to hint at something in the game itself unless McBan has my same specs/hardware and we all know what the chances of that are .

[McBan]

I scraped up a little bit of time to experiment with Salvo! to reproducibly crash the game. Playing the Edward Teach campaign, the game runs fine until I use the arrow keys to move the viewpoint while a ship has been selected, but not moved yet. Then the Macromedia crash occurs after pressing an arrow key once or several times. Use of the arrow keys without a selected ship does not cause any crashes. I have not tried the other campaign where the game worked without any problems. It might be that for whatever reason I never used the arrow keys while a ship was selected. Anyway, this hopefully narrows the problem and provides a work-around for anyone having this problem.

[Andrew Lonon]

McBan: (& Lord Hammer)

Thanks for your excellent detective work- that will help us get to the solution faster, but we are not there yet. With something of a lump in my stomach, I tried the arrow keys on all the pirate missions, and I was not able to crash the program. That’s good for me & Salvo, but does not help you and Lord Hammer, nor get us anywhere closer to the solution.

Macromedia Crash:
I should clarify that when you get the system message that the “Macromedia Projector” has crashed, then there has been a crash that Salvo could not recover from. Errors that are directly the fault of my mistakes in programming will show up as “Script Errors” and should be recoverable, unless they loop. The system crash might still be caused by one of my errors, or it ~could~ be due to the development package that I used to make Salvo.

Turbo Mode?
Just a thought: What if it is not the keypress that causes the error, but the redraw that happens as you rotate around a selected ship? It would look like the kepress, but it may be something else. To test this, you may want to turn on Turbo mode in the Settings panel. Turbo mode will reduce the depth of the display, as well as removing some of the visual frills, thus reducing the work needed to redraw the screen and maybe helping this situation.

Wireless Network:
I just remembered something that happened fairly early on in Salvo’s development. I was using my brother’s notebook while visiting him in Ithaca. It turned out that when the system did not have a good connection to his wireless network, Salvo was very unstable, and I got the same sort of projector crash. Right next to the Hub, or with the Wireless turned Off, Salvo was rock solid. So – You may want to try running Salvo without any network, and even try running with no external connections at all.

Still…
I keep returning to the idea that the Demo worked. That suggests that something is different in the Gold code. The nature of the error suggests that it is something that the software can not deal with, something fatal. <Sorry – thinking out loud.>

Action:
I will check my system to make sure that I have the latest components of the development system. I was up to date when I finished Salvo, so I don’t expect there to be any updates, but it can not hurt. Also, I’ll proof the arrow keys and anything else that I can think of and create a new build of SALVO.EXE for you to try.