Zenodyne R - 2017 Dev news

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BPzeBanshee
Posts: 4859
Joined: Sun Feb 08, 2009 3:59 am

Re: Zenodyne R - 2017 Dev news

Post by BPzeBanshee »

kane wrote:Folks, I felt like going back to this game today, but alas, that Stage 3 crash thing everbody's talking about over on Steam is very real.

Thankfully I still had the older version (the latest that doesn't have the normal vs arcade mode selection) backed up, and that works just fine. The latest version is not playable. FYI in case you wanted to do some source diffing. Other than that I don't see anything that could help me debug this on my end.
We're looking into it, time and energy willing, but unfortunately source diffing is proving to be no help here on my end either, and while I can get the game to crash/show erratic behaviour sometimes I cannot consistently trigger any kind of meaningful error at all. If you're doing better than me in this regard I would appreciate a bit of your investigative talent.

I have also noticed that the crash reports have only started occurring since February this year - which was long after we released the build - and I couldn't even get the game to crash at all until after some updates a few days ago which makes me suspect something in Microsoft's runtimes have decided to not play nice with Zenodyne R. Yet our other games have no recent crash reports to my knowledge.

Still, for the sake of a complete picture, computer/OS specs, which ship/difficulty mode you picked, Step number at the point it crashed etc (if you can get it to do so consistently) would be of some help.
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BPzeBanshee
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Joined: Sun Feb 08, 2009 3:59 am

Re: Zenodyne R - 2017 Dev news

Post by BPzeBanshee »

We haven't forgotten about this game or the people playing it. Unfortunately I have mixed news on the problem at hand.

Zenodyne R is built using Game Maker Studio 1.4. Despite my hopes it was something simple that was probably my own fault and therefore could fix myself, it seems in an update somewhere along the line YoYo Games (the creators of Game Maker Studio) have introduced a bug in the engine that is the cause of the crash. It seems to be related to some behaviour with the first midboss - if I removed the boss the game seems to run fine at least throughout the rest of that stage. The strange thing is we did nothing special with it, and there's common code in Zenohell and Jet Buster but no reports of crashes of any kind are present there.

Unfortunately, despite me reporting the issue two months prior to Studio 1.4's support cut-off date YoYo Games have ignored the ticket and now will not provide any kind of advice or support unless I migrate the game to use Studio 2.

The good news is that the runner problem has apparently just been fixed in the last weeks in Studio 2.1.5, and I can confirm the inconsistent behaviour and crashes in stage 3 no longer occur when running from Studio 2 despite playing for extended periods. I'm also told that a final maintenance update for Studio 1.4 is still set to happen at some point this month, however the runner fix for 1.4 is not guaranteed and if I have to migrate to Studio 2 I'm concerned there'll be some performance regressions especially when running the game in windowed mode.

I know this issue has been frustrating people for months now, trust me nobody's more peeved off about it than I am. For now I'll have to ask everyone to be patient for a few more weeks till I know more about that update (a short stretch compared to the months we've had this bug for), I'll keep you informed as and when I know more.
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