Lucky Day's Wizard War! for Android development thread

@Pongo - I hate those kobolds!

@Satvut - I have had similar issues during development but there were many reasons (which I quickly made an effort to fix). It was mostly due autosaves coming from old versions of the game or just being blank because the load option didn't work and loaded my playing maps with 0's.

I'm guessing in your case there may have been a difference with loading a manual save, then death, then the autosave kicks in from a previous day's play causing confusion. I have thought of overwriting the autosave when a manual save is loaded but I felt that could get too frustrating for the player such as accidentally loading the wrong save.
 
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Hello again.

I've had the chance to do a bit more testing, and sadly it has become worse than previously.

I have reported the crashes via the editor that pops up upon crash.
Mainly it stems from entering combat (especially with priests but also occurred on skeletons and spiders but to a much lesser degree), equipping robes or other pieces of armor and when trying to drop items mainly seems that sometimes a slot is corrupted and when I try to drop the item the game will crash.
Also when picking up gear and my bag is full, if one of the corupted items are attempted to drop, the game does not register the drop and essentially nothing is picked up after the pick up item is chosen.
I tried with sound on and off but really no difference, game is quite sluggish and now crashing quite often. Not sure if some optimization can be done for the S4, but at this point I'm probably putting it off for a bit until more optimization is done as performance is still sluggish and crashes happen quite frequently. Also with regards to the savegame issues, when I load a game and enter camp mode to heal if I was wounded at the given savegame, it would put me at the random starting point and my inventory would be empty and I would be at 0 exp and have to reload.

Edited: Also after starting a new game to check, the tunic the character starts with cannot be dropped, when something else is equipped and the tunic gets the itemslot below the Fist, one cannot drop the tunic.
 
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the tunic and the fist are supposed to do that. its how I revert the player to a default weapon and armor without crashing the inventory slots. I also was concerned and didn't want the player to find themselves running around naked ;).

speaking of crashing the slots, what's really going on are out of memory errors on your system, according to the log you sent. This is consistent with what my wife's phone is doing. The 2nd Level Wizard, The Priest, has one of the most complicated images and therefore takes up a lot of memory (grr, thank you Albrecht Dore!)

Its mainly the images on your system that are doing it because of the really high resolution of the Galaxy S4. Its terribly ironic. It just that the other actions that are sending it over the top, the external buffer limit.

It took a look at it this weekend and I can do one of three things: create a set of lower resolution images (and hopefully they won't become the same size as the higher res images when they scale); create a set of images specifically for that size screen - its tacky but its the only way to guarantee the size; or to run the images through the bitmap factory like here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/...ing-an-image-to-a-bitmap-object/823966#823966.

I'll try to get on this ASAP. I'm leaning to the last one as the fix. Its difficult to find the time unfortunately as I have to commute an hour each way from work or I would have done this already.

Really sorry for your problems.
 
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the tunic and the fist are supposed to do that. its how I revert the player to a default weapon and armor without crashing the inventory slots. I also was concerned and didn't want the player to find themselves running around naked ;).

speaking of crashing the slots, what's really going on are out of memory errors on your system, according to the log you sent. This is consistent with what my wife's phone is doing. The 2nd Level Wizard, The Priest, has one of the most complicated images and therefore takes up a lot of memory (grr, thank you Albrecht Dore!)

Its mainly the images on your system that are doing it because of the really high resolution of the Galaxy S4. Its terribly ironic. It just that the other actions that are sending it over the top, the external buffer limit.

It took a look at it this weekend and I can do one of three things: create a set of lower resolution images (and hopefully they won't become the same size as the higher res images when they scale); create a set of images specifically for that size screen - its tacky but its the only way to guarantee the size; or to run the images through the bitmap factory like here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/...ing-an-image-to-a-bitmap-object/823966#823966.

I'll try to get on this ASAP. I'm leaning to the last one as the fix. Its difficult to find the time unfortunately as I have to commute an hour each way from work or I would have done this already.

Really sorry for your problems.

Ah ok, makes good sense with the tunic! I thought the corrupted item slots was because of it or somewhat related to it.
Great to hear that you found the real culprit, I'm looking forward to try out the game in the future when the matters have been resolved. I fully understand the time constraints, and it will be nice to have something to look forward to when I'm taking the train to work as well.
 
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The train to work was exactly what I was going for. Actually, it was playing with your thumb while waiting for the bus specifically.

I made some progress using that link above. I got it to work surprisingly but since it also implements the old way not recommended as a hybrid I've seen very little improvement in memory.

What I have seen is very ugly images. I'm sure I can get the memory down by removing the old system but I'm concerned about the cost to the picture quality.

The images on the dungeon screen take up the most memory - about 41mb. Getting into combat puts it to 43mb right away but can send it over the top. The limit seems to be 70+mb on the S3.

There might be some improvement if the old images on the dungeon screen are still in cache when they get overwritten. If they are, maybe I can clear the cache and keep the external heap from growing as well.

As it is I'm only looking at the possibility of reducing the default picture quality for the dungeon and if its bad, well, that's not acceptable.
 
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The train to work was exactly what I was going for. Actually, it was playing with your thumb while waiting for the bus specifically.

I made some progress using that link above. I got it to work surprisingly but since it also implements the old way not recommended as a hybrid I've seen very little improvement in memory.

What I have seen is very ugly images. I'm sure I can get the memory down by removing the old system but I'm concerned about the cost to the picture quality.

The images on the dungeon screen take up the most memory - about 41mb. Getting into combat puts it to 43mb right away but can send it over the top. The limit seems to be 70+mb on the S3.

There might be some improvement if the old images on the dungeon screen are still in cache when they get overwritten. If they are, maybe I can clear the cache and keep the external heap from growing as well.

As it is I'm only looking at the possibility of reducing the default picture quality for the dungeon and if its bad, well, that's not acceptable.

Excellent thinking on that part, as the game is great for these type of shorter trips, but also for longer sessions when at home.

A shame that the trade-of between the game working and image quality is so severe, hopefully there is some good middle ground, although having a fluent game matters much more to me than graphic quality but I can understand the pain of downplaying something where much work was involved, but being able to traverse quickly and having lower quality images at first for a possible image upgrade in the future, would be better than crashes/sluggish performance at first for a possible quickening up and more stability in the futre. But I also understand if you would want to find the balance straight away, rather than fiddle with half-solutions, but if the balance was very time consuming a playable "uglier" version would be nice.

Either way, I look forward to checking up on it when it's done, take all the time needed, as the game seems very promising. I spent hundreds of hours on Decklen's Mordor and have been amazed that none really have been able to capture a similar level of finesse and detail in its simplicity.
 
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I did a mass conversion on the size of the dungeon images to 75% and there was a considerable amount of improvement on my wife's S3. Not perfect mind you , I had one crash, but its pretty stable. The external buffer went as high as 64mb but it tended to free up a lot of memory. I may try for a 50% quality texture too, just to see.

I'm going to release this version in the next couple of days and in the future put both resolutions out and default to the lower for the S3 and S4 and give the option for other devices.

I created an audio bug in the start screen trying to get the S3's music to kick in. I have to fix that first.

After this I need to set it aside for awhile. I just started a second job as a part time college professor.
 
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