Need to know when iTGB will be released

#1 i've been waiting for 5 months, how do you think I feel?

#2 There will always be a new and better version of the engine to look forward to, so it's not really the best way to try and have your problems solved. A number of decent iTGB v1.2 games have already been released. If you shared with us some of the problems you are having, perhaps we could help you debug them and get things worked out? Then you'd be good to go even before the next iTGB.

#3 I've been waiting for almost a year. BAM! Seriously though, busy atm though so it's alright (for me), I might come back to iTGB development in 3 months. Surely that's enough time for the update, right? No? :(

@Ronald, how's your platformer?

#4 @Dave,
I´m having two problems:

1. Game crashes after 20 minutes of play. This has been posted in a thread already and it seems that nobody knows how to fix this. No crashes in the editor neither in the simulator.
2. The game becomes slow over time while playing in the iPhone (but not in the iPod) and for what I´ve read in the forums, it seems that the device memory is not freed after objects deletion. This seems to be a problem with 1.2 and not with 1.1 so I will try 1.1. tonight. But I guess that if lots of people are complaining of the same issue the problem should be 1.2.

Thanks

Mike

#5 When you delete an object, do you use .delete() or .safeDelete() ?

#6 1 and 2 both indicate the same: raising amount of memory usage to the point where you run out of RAM and crash.

I've recently compared 1.2 and 1.1 and the only really obvious modification is the larger modification around the current script function handling. Not sure though if that is able to mess something that badly.

#7 I know I have personally not had these problems occur just yet, though I've been doing a mix of reusing existing objects instead of deleting, and doing extra checks to ensure objects either do or do not exist to make sure they are properly freed if no longer in use. But, our game also never has a stage open longer than about 3 minutes, as there is a stage timer. When it runs out, the entire scene is destroyed to free memory. Let me try setting my stage timer to 25:00 and see what happens...

#8 Mike , definitely let us know if 1.1 works better for you. it does for me.
My game hasn't crashed since I switched back to 1.1 and we've been testing it on 2 iPhone and 1 iPod playing over an hour.
It used to crash in less than 20 min.

#9 Just ran a number of tests on my game, having it run for 20, 30 + minutes and so forth. I haven't been able to get it to crash.

Could you guys share with us how you are deleting objects, and how you are cleaning up your scenes? I'm curious what the difference between our code is...

#10 I'm using safeDelete() for objects. at the end of each level I run a levelEnd() .
For Gui's I'm only loading them as needed and immidiately after I make sure to .delete() them

I ran the iPhoneTest game that comes with 1.2 on my phone. I just clicked gravity and waited for about 30-35 min untill it crashed.
Also, if you run the iPhoneTest on the Mac and check the activity monitor you will see the real memory rising slowly but constantly. if you wait long enough it'l go from 20Mb to 50Mb.

#11 I´m using safedelete() to delete objects. Not doing anything onlevelended() but I´m calling SceneWindow2D.endLevel(); when gameover function runs.

Mike

#12 Hrm... right off the bat, I can say I'm not doing any level loading after the initial done when the game starts. I had a lot of memory errors there, so I reworked my game to just dynamically empty and repopulate that initial level with what was needed.

I'll run some of those other tests with the demo games and get back to you with what I find.

#13 @Dave,

That´s exactly what I´m doing here. Level is loaded once and then everything is dinamically cleared and repopulated until the game crashes. Something notable is that there is no any warning when the game crash, it just quits suddenly while playing.

#14 No warning at all in GDB? That's weird... I used to get crashes when doing loads, but then I changed how I was managing objects and those went away. However, whenever it would crash I would always see some sort of status message, things like "Exited with Status: 0".

What are the last few lines in your GDB display after it crashes?

#15 @Dave,

GBD? Don´t know, the game crashes only when played on iPod/iPhone. It doesn´t crash while playing in the editor...

But it also crashes in 1.1... :(

I´m really wondering what could be wrong here. All the game scripts seems ok, and there is no crash on the MAC or PC...

Mike

#16 GDB... it's the output display in XCode. You can use it to see errors, warnings and messages displayed by the iPhone and by iTGB when it is running on the device. After you compile your game and it is running on the iPhone, look for a button that appears above the code window that is a black button with the yellow letters GDB inside of it. Using this is absolutely crucial when developing anything for the iPhone no matter what engine you're using, so become good friends with it. :)

If you wouldn't mind, compile your game and run it with GDB open. Then, when the game crashes, copy/paste the output at the end of the GDB log in this forum. Then we can get a better sense of what exactly is going on.

There are a large number of reasons that the game could crash on the device and not on PC / Mac, so I'll be curious to see what the results are!

#17 Back when 1.2 came out I did some intensive tests and 1.2 has some core scripting issues which became apparent after stress testing on devices; so being lazy as I am I switched all my codebase back to 1.1 and it works without hitch. Also one thing I did was borrow some minor changes from 1.2 that actually made an impact on load time and don't affect overall stability. In general I was highly dissatisfied with 1.2 release, as it was unstable to be used in a polished game without major tweaking, at least that was my first hand experience.

#18 @Ee -- slowed to a crawl. real life etc. i might take up puppy-slapping again for additional motivation .. .