STEAM v 1.0.64: 'Freezes' without error reports

#1

Hello!

First, I’d like to say thanks to the developers for making a really great game - despite the bug I’m experiencing, I thoroughly enjoyed it!

My operating system is Windows Vista Home Premium, Service Pack 2. The bug started after my first completion of the game - I’ve not been playing New Game+, just getting the last stars in the standard game.

I’m getting a strange kind of ‘freeze’ - not a crash to desktop, nor even a true crash, really, in which all animations seem to stop. Once or twice the game has progressed - nothing has moved, but after a while the lost battle screen shows, implying that the enemies have been moving towards Azra and I’ve just not been seeing it. More often, though, everything stops, and even if I leave it running overnight I’m not told that I’ve won or lost the battle. I wish I could provide information about how to reliably reproduce the freeze, but I’ve tried and I can’t discern the cause: at first, I thought the problem was my ice mages, so I tried a few battles without using them and the same thing happened. I thought it might be my dragon, so I stopped using her, and the same thing happened. I thought it might be the Knockback spell, and, well, you get the drift.

I’ve tinkered a little and found that there are some things I can make move:

  • I can bring up and close the menu.
  • Because I can bring up the menu, I can quit or restart the battle.
  • I can pause the game (with the icon updating), and.
  • When paused, I can use Azra’s spells. However, most spells’ animations do not display correctly: Frenzy freezes on the first frame and Heal leaves an image of a plus sign in the top left corner, for example, but Lightning displays correctly.
  • If I select a new speed, the icon does not update. However, if I select a new speed, pause the game, and then unpause it, the icon does update.
  • Pausing the game also causes the summoning circles to display their animations.

Though it’s hard to show what I’m talking about with screenshots, here are three that I hope demonstrate the problem at least a little:

FMFniwJ.jpg800×600 81.4 KB

s5rjXLh.jpg800×600 127 KB

5os46Hs.jpg800×600 129 KB

I hope that’s enough to go by! And again, thanks for making a great game. :smiley:

#2

Wow, awesome bug report. Thanks!

#3

An update: I’ve been playing New Game+ (save attached) and the same thing is starting to happen there. I’m not totally sure, but I have a feeling it might be something to do with splitters.

#4

There was a bug with splitters causing other monsters to disappear when they were killed. That got recently fixed, so maybe the fix introduced something else. I suppose you do NOT have an older version of the game available, right? 1.0.62 would do.

#5

No, sorry - since it’s Steam, I don’t think I can roll back to an earlier version, either.

#6

Hello,

I have been experiencing the exact same bug, but I’m playing on Mac OS 10.7.5

It seems to me that it appears when the game is… under stress? a lot of animations at the same time.

This bug started to appear yesterday, but then was not really a problem. Now I’m trying to get a perfect extreme difficulty and I can’t get it because of that bug.

I also noticed that when this occurs, I can toggle pause/unpause and watch the enemy move to Azra frame by frame, but they’re not being hit. This explains why sometimes the game will unfreeze but azra will be almost dead.

I hope this helps!

PS: Awesome game!

#7

I think I’m getting the same problem as well, but with the slight variation that my client completely locks up. I can’t pause or cast spells, and the cursor is totally frozen as well. However, the window is still responsive, which is to say I don’t have to go into Task Manager to kill it.

I’ve been setting the game to 4x, but it seems to lock up at 2x as well in the same, or nearly the same, spot each map. However, with 0% particles and Numbers Off I was able to get through the map at 4x.

#8

Ya, mucking about with it further I think the client just gets to a point where there’s too much shit going on at once to handle. You can stave this off by setting the game speed slower and turning off particles and numbers, but eventually I hit a level (sheep Advanced) where I couldn’t go further.

#9

Seems that way - the problem is far, far worse for me at higher levels than at lower ones, and turning off numbers made a pretty big difference. High levels on New Game+ are pretty much impossible to get through.

#10

New post for another update: I was just playing and managed to kill all the mobs on screen during a freeze (the kind that updates if you pause/unpause the game, but where none of your defenders attack anything while the game is invisibly running) using the Dragon Fire spell. Once the last of them was dead, the freeze stopped.

EDIT: It appears to be unrelated to killing the mobs. The same thing happened again in the same battle - I just kept pausing and playing alternately and eventually it unfroze. It was like an enormous, buggy lagspike, I guess. (Still managed to complete the battle with a perfect rating on Advanced, too. :stuck_out_tongue: )

Edit again: More testing! In http://i.imgur.com/qOQO6Fg.jpg, I had a movement-between-pauses freeze. When the mobs reached the corner where there’s a big stack of them at the moment, they stopped progressing any further between pauses. The rest of them didn’t move between pauses, either.

#11

Hi.

I’ve had this issue. If you press Pause the game functions as normal (responds to all actions etc), but when pressing Play at any speed it freezes (yet something seems to be going on in the background since if you leave it alone sometimes you get a game over).

In another post somewhere on this forum someone pointed at the Healer class being the culprit. I started experimenting and found that indeed: The issue would go away if I paused and removed all healers.

Further testing has revealed that, for me, the issue only happens when my healers are Max level (all 5 segments). And the weird thing is that if I spec them to NOT have Zeal (max level ability), I still get the issue. So the bug is not with the max level ability, it’s with the level itself. Or something. :slight_smile:

For now I’m managing to beat all Extreme levels on Play+ without max lvl healers, but who knows what happens towards the end… :smiley:

#12

I’ll try that, thanks!

#13

— Begin quote from "Boundsoy"

Hi.

I’ve had this issue. If you press Pause the game functions as normal (responds to all actions etc), but when pressing Play at any speed it freezes (yet something seems to be going on in the background since if you leave it alone sometimes you get a game over).

In another post somewhere on this forum someone pointed at the Healer class being the culprit. I started experimenting and found that indeed: The issue would go away if I paused and removed all healers.

Further testing has revealed that, for me, the issue only happens when my healers are Max level (all 5 segments). And the weird thing is that if I spec them to NOT have Zeal (max level ability), I still get the issue. So the bug is not with the max level ability, it’s with the level itself. Or something. :slight_smile:

For now I’m managing to beat all Extreme levels on Play+ without max lvl healers, but who knows what happens towards the end… :smiley:

— End quote

Dude, that’s awesome. I still slowed down a bit at 4x Advanced Sheep on the base game, but it wasn’t that bad and I didn’t freeze up. Thanks man.

#14

Forgot to report back - works a charm! Level 4 healers, no slow downs; level 5, and a crash every level. Thanks, man!

#15

— Begin quote from "Boundsoy"

Hi.

I’ve had this issue. If you press Pause the game functions as normal (responds to all actions etc), but when pressing Play at any speed it freezes (yet something seems to be going on in the background since if you leave it alone sometimes you get a game over).

In another post somewhere on this forum someone pointed at the Healer class being the culprit. I started experimenting and found that indeed: The issue would go away if I paused and removed all healers.

Further testing has revealed that, for me, the issue only happens when my healers are Max level (all 5 segments). And the weird thing is that if I spec them to NOT have Zeal (max level ability), I still get the issue. So the bug is not with the max level ability, it’s with the level itself. Or something. :slight_smile:

For now I’m managing to beat all Extreme levels on Play+ without max lvl healers, but who knows what happens towards the end… :smiley:

— End quote

You are my hero! Thank you so much!
I love this game and at some point, this bug started to happen and it depressed me so much, that I lost the motivation to play it, because it always stopped working.
But now, I can move on! :slight_smile:
I’m so happy!

#16

Sorry for my absence. I’ll look into this and see if I can fix it, I’ve had multiple reports of this.

#17

Found something already. The immediate cause of the bug is the “curr_attack” variable for a healer getting set to null.

#18

Okay, here’s what happened. Using Thorril’s save file (thanks!) I used this setup on the normal-challenge for “Armor Schmarmor” in New Game+:

tdrpg_freeze_bug.gif800×600 179 KB

I was able to consistently reproduce the bug - the error would fire sometime just after when Bakal started using his attacks on the first wave of enemies.
For some reason, his “curr_attack” variable was sometimes null at that point in the code and I wasn’t checking for that. I threw in a safety “if not null” check and now the bug doesn’t happen. I revert the change, bug happens every time. Put the fix back in, bug never happens.

I would call this solved.

The fix will be in version 1.0.67, which I will upload shortly to the test server (PM me for tester credentials if you want them) and I will await confirmation from you guys that this bug is resolved.

I’ll post again in about 10 minutes to indicate the upload is complete.

#19

Version 1.0.67 is up on the test server now. Please let me know if this fixes the bug for you guys, and then I’ll move on to the other problems people have been reporting.

#20

how’s this test going?

Since I’ve found out it’s because of the max lvl healer (which I indeed had pretty fast every game, so that would explain my freezing) I’ve been playing with lvl 4 healer… And it seems to be working!

So I think we’ve found the bug…

Can’t wait for the update, so I can max my healer xD