Construct 2 v269 Closes Randomly

This problem will probably never be solved, I decided to downgrade my C2 and had no more problems.

I am using version 259.

If your project was saved in a later version, you can easily change the project to work on older versions, so you have no rational reason to be angry and beg for a solution, as the team is committed to C3 only.

Colludium - thanks for the project and repro steps - I could reproduce what you showed in the video, which meant I could finally make some progress on this.

It looks related to the fact the Properties Bar is cycling through the objects really fast. When the Animations Editor is closed, it refreshes the Project Bar, which involves deleting all the items and recreating them. However as it deletes items it keeps changing the selection to a different item, which in turn updates the Properties Bar, redraws the layout etc. which is slow and probably thrashes CPU & memory. I'm not sure when this started happening - perhaps it was an update to the third-party UI library we use that changed how selections work while deleting items, or maybe it was always there and people only just noticed this specific case.

Anyway I adjusted the code to make sure it doesn't try to handle selection changes while deleting items, and it doesn't do the cycling through objects any more, is much faster, avoids hanging, and probably avoids spiking the CPU and memory, which may well fix the problem where it crashes in some cases. I guess we will have to wait until the next beta release to verify this though, since it's possible there are different cases involved here. I'll try to get that out in the next couple of weeks (but in an unrelated matter, at the moment we're having to wait for an unexpectedly lengthy certificate renewal before we can issue another C2 update).

For the record this demonstrates the importance of having a project that reliably reproduces the problem, and is why our bug report guidelines require that. Without any way to reproduce the problem we have no way to investigate it, and the problem can hang around for months. As soon as someone can provide a project that reliably reproduces the problem, we can usually deal with it right away.

Ashley - That's great. I'm glad it helped and I hope this resolves the issue for everyone. 👍

Our certificate renewal came through, so I've done a new beta release r276 which includes the fix for the issue Colludium reported. Normally I'd avoid doing a Friday release in case any unexpected issues come up but we'll probably be busy next week with a scheduled C3 stable release, so I just went ahead with it now. It'd be interesting to hear if this also clears up the issues others have been reporting.

Ashley Thanks for looking into the issue and making a new beta release and also big thanks to Colludium for creating the project that replicated the issue!

Hope this clears up the other issues as well :)

Is anyone who experienced issues in this thread able to confirm if r276 fixed the problem?

WrathOfAbe - it sounds like you have a reliable way to reproduce a problem in r276. Can you provide a project and the steps to follow as Colludium did? This is the only way we can make progress on this.

Not completely. But it seems to be better now.

I tested with the crashes.capx on my very low-end laptop, to see what is the difference between r276 and r265.

With r276, i had about 500 large sprites on layout,then opened editor and duplicated few frames, then deleted them, then exited the editor and saved,and while it was saving, i moved around with ctrl+mouse wheel, it crashed every time.

With r265, C2 was unresponding for a moment, but always recovers and never crashes.

With my high-end desktop PC (r276), it crashes, but not as often as it used to.

Yesterday i had 2 crashes, today 1. On both days i worked around 6 hours, using the editor occassionally.

Earlier today i tried to make it crash using my project, which is 22mb in size and has a lot of sprites, between 600-800 per layout, and i did manage to make it crash by quickly deleting 40 frames from one sprite, then exiting the editor, saving, and moving around with ctrl+mouse wheel.

If you have a low or mid end PC or laptop, you can make C2 more easily crash, and with high-end PCs it might take a while before it crashes, but eventually it will.

Before r276 it crashed in 1 to 10 minutes after using the editor.

Now it seems that it may take a very long time for the crash to occur.

Do not try to make it crash with very small project + high-end CPU, it most likely won't work, since there is not enough stress on the CPU with small project. Use low-end PC or laptop if you have one. And have a big project with a lot of sprites and frames.

Try also having a lot of objects on layout, so that saving takes a bit of time, and is not instant.

The reason why with some people it crashes instantly, and with others takes a while, is the differences in peoples CPUs!

If you have not altered the editors code since autumn 2018, it must be the third-party plugin the editor uses.

Talk with the creators of the plugin, maybe they are not aware of the problem.

You can send it privately if it is a personal project that you do not want to make available to the public.

So far, I haven't experienced a crash since updating.

Also, the lack of object refreshing after closing an animations window is a god-send for larger projects - I always assumed it was just a quirk of Construct that I had to live with.

Is anyone who experienced issues in this thread able to confirm if r276 fixed the problem?

Still crashing on r276, but not as often as in r275. You wanted video? streamable.com/v8wgj

Working on tilesets in this case, though I had been working with animations earlier. Tabbing back from a preview and the program just closes without a crash dialog box.

Mine is also a pretty light project and my specs are more than adequate; i5-6600K 3.5 GHz, 16 GB memory.

Came back to Construct for a project after a long time away. Never used to get these crashes.

I'm afraid that, once again, without a project and reliable steps to follow to reproduce the problem, there is very little we can do. We can't debug videos. As soon as you can provide a project and reliable steps, we can usually fix it quickly.

Even on my exact computer with my exact project file, repeating what I did in the video, I can't replicate the crash on command, so I see no point in posting my file. I had hoped that by sharing some more footage I would help someone more knowledgeable about Construct 2 than myself narrow down a cause, but apparently not.

Again, my project is light. A half-dozen sprites with a few animations and a couple tilemaps. If you want to experience the crash for yourself, I suggest you work on anything in Construct 2 instead of Construct 3 for a day, and you probably will.

As for myself I will try downgrading to an earlier version, editing the <saved-with-version> line in my project file in a text editor, as another user already suggested.

Good to see this topic discussed. WrathOfAbe has put it together what I have experienced so far since R265. Wanted to downgrade but some of my projects were already saved in later versions.

Was happy to see R277 being released. On my mid-range PC with 8Gigs of Ram it still crashes regularly. But at least it now takes some time. If I have an open browser or other ram swallowing programs running it will crash if I Alt-Tab over to or out of Construct. Sometimes just by clicking something in the editor. Same if I have more instances of Construct running. Always having my fingers crossed when I switch windows. Not exactly... most of the time I forget to save and this makes it pretty annoying. :-p

Funny thing is right now - it works like a charm. Yesterday I was upset enough to install R265 again and after a while of pondering about I revoked my decision and installed R77 again. Now I have three instances of Construct, one program is test running in NWjs and an open browser with around 20 tabs. Opened the image editor, tabbed over, another image editor (still running?!?) then deleting some frames... writing some words in the forum, switching over and it works, whiskey tango foxtrot?!

I will test this further but today it looks surprisingly good.

Hello. Recently, many users of the social network Vkontakte (Russia) have noticed a random crush. If you switch the language (ALT + Shift) in an empty active text field (for example, a comment or variable), then crash occurs. Crush is random and cannot be reproduced in 100% of cases. But this only happens when the field is active. If you make field inactive (for example, click on a sprite), switch the language and make field active, then all normal. This crush works in r272-r277 versions, and don`n works in early version (many users use r265).

https://vk.com/wall-57855408_226425