Switching back from NW.js to browser, crashes frequently

I've been running Construct on the NW.js to build my game for a long time now, and unfortunately switching back to the browser is causing preview builds to crash 2/3 of the time. There's no crash log or anything, it simply produces a black screen and the layout goes blank with a little broken image icon. I've tried different browsers. Vivaldi seems to be the most stable so far, but it still crashes very frequently. I know my game is very image intensive, but it was working fine with the NW.js editor. It seems to happen randomly, and it's really slowing down my productivity.

Any ideas to prevent this? Thanks!

Hey Joe,

One thing I've found with preview builds is they don't work a lot of time for me if they're in fullscreen mode. For whatever reason, I find that the previews run more consistently when windowed.

Not sure if that's what you're dealing with, but thought I'd throw it out there.

Hey Joe,

One thing I've found with preview builds is they don't work a lot of time for me if they're in fullscreen mode. For whatever reason, I find that the previews run more consistently when windowed.

Not sure if that's what you're dealing with, but thought I'd throw it out there.

Hey Luke, thanks! Unfortunately, it seems to happen whether windowed or fullscreen

Is the editor itself crashing for you, or just the preview? Since 308 I've had a lot of editor crashes, seemingly at random.

I wonder if this is a RAM issue. How much RAM does your computer have, and what GPU do you use?

Do you use a gaming laptop? If so, perhaps the browsers you use are not using the dedicated GPU. This might be fixable with the nvidia/whatever software you use to configure your GPU, but in my case, I had to disable switchable graphics in my bios or something (this was years ago so I don't remember exactly what I did).

I assume you have very busy layouts with many sprites and such placed everywhere? Could you try opening your project, then open a "smaller" layout that has less objects within? Does it crash?

Can you open Kiwi Story or some of the example projects in C3, and see if it crashes?

I know it sucks to be forced to use a browser when you've been happily using NWJS all this time, but I'm hoping you will find the cause to this problem, and I hope it's a smooth experience beyond this. I used to use C3 in NWJS ages ago, but I had so many terrible problems, such as NWJS unpredictably silently closing, without allowing me to save, even on a fresh install of Windows 10. I now use Chrome to run C3 (I don't use Chrome for anything else except C3) and I use remote preview, along with the remote preview tool, to test in NWJS. And I got to say, using Chrome has been the MOST stable C3 experience I've had so far - I wish hadn't faffed around with C3 in NWJS for so long. The only slowdown I get is when I have long event sheets with many sub-events and groups expanded, but I just collapse everything and it speeds up again. I don't really use layouts for my current project though, so I don't have any "busy" layouts to test if it crashes for me, other than my object repository layout, which is a bit slow, but no crashes.

> it simply produces a black screen and the layout goes blank with a little broken image icon.

That sounds like a graphics driver crash that takes out the WebGL canvas. There might be more details if you press F12 and check the browser console.

I'd guess either you're using too much memory and it's overloading the graphics hardware, or the graphics driver is crashing. If it's a graphics driver crash that is unfortunately difficult to deal with; your best bet is to install any available system software updates and hope that a fix comes through.

OK thanks for the insight!

In case anyone else has this issue, I may have found a solution. So far it hasn't crashed yet after doing this.

I went to chrome://flags "Choose ANGLE graphics backend" and set it to OpenGL. I have an NVIDIA graphics card, and it says "Using the OpenGL driver as the graphics backend may result in higher performance in some graphics-heavy applications, particularly on NVIDIA GPUs." Anyway, so far so good!