Creators of Caveman Craig, Teka Teki, and more.. 

The Strangest of Glitches

Hi all,
Greg has been working dilligently on some beautiful landscapes and other bits and pieces for CC2.

For a while though I thought there were glitches in the way he was rendering the images. Whenever I checked for collisions between the sun and one of his images, the game would lock up / crash. No error message from Game Maker.

But that theory soon vanished as I found that other objects could collide with the images just fine, and that while many sprites did collide with the sun ok, some larger ones, seemingly all with some form of transparency in them, would just lock up the game. Even changing masks in the sun’s object made no difference.

What was even stranger was that at one point, the game would lock up only for a fraction of a second, and then re-appear with a large number of steps processed. So, if Craig was running right at the time of lock up, half a second later the screen would go back into motion, and Craig would be on the other side of the map!

I trial-and-errored all the sections of code in the sun, and none seemed to be the culprit. The only commonality I could find was that it would lock up if the sun collided with an object containing one of many sprites that seemed to affect it (the sun had to check for a collision via an event or via place_meeting for it to lock up – it made no difference what the following action was).

So, how did I overcome this? I created a dummy object to follow the sun around and report to it when [i]it[/i] collided with something. So instead of the sun checking for a collision, it checked if the mask had a collision. And it works fine! But I can’t just continue on without looking back and wondering.. seriously, what the hell is going on?

-Rhys