I see what you mean about the regenerating resources. But to some degree, most games of this sort are open to some sort of grinding, and it would be far too much work to disallow it - and would probably cause other problems, like some players running out of resources all the time.

Your points are valid, but I think I'll keep things the way they are.

[quote:jwypp9vz]This may be what I was referring to earlier as grinding. At a certain point in the game the only thing to do is to repeatedly return to the same resources (so you can afford the better equipment/research). While there are other areas where you could get resources they are significantly harder and don't offer any substantial reward for the risk, in general. So instead of resource gathering being tied to plot, it is simply just resource gathering.

Actually, there do tend to be rewards - mainly big resource piles - in the harder areas. Not everywhere, of course, but they do exist.

And I do see the resource gathering as related to the central idea of the plot. But your mileage may vary. Some people have found the grinding to be at just the right level, others find it a bit too difficult. I think it's that fuzzy area where different styles of gameplay and different ideas of fun make a game good for one player, and slightly less good for another. A matter of taste, so to speak. I think my games tend to fall into that fuzzy area rather often.

(Edited to add: If this sounds dismissive or arrogant, it's really not meant to. I just know that some people really enjoyed the difficulty level, and they would be bothered if I changed it. You can't win them all, I guess.)

But after a few hours, a crash erased my save file (--> finally, it seems it's a relatively frequent problem :/). The game (v1.4 + patch 1.5) crashed around 5+ times in total, I think (I didn't count), particularly when I clicked on the laboratory icon on the map. It crashed 1 time on launching (but not the 1st time I launched it).

This seems to be extremely system-specific. Very, very few people have reported savegame-erasing crashes so far.

[quote:dbtpdqev]- The ressources farming is irrelevant (even if their reappearance is "justifed" by the plot...) ;

Why? That's not really something I've heard before.

[quote:dbtpdqev]The game should be playable in windowed mode. It's too large, too pixelized (though I'm far to be an anti-pixels guy !).

Will be in the next patch.

[quote:dbtpdqev] You said that the bigger a game is, the more it has a chance to crash. Are you sure of that ?

With these bugs being so erratic, I'm not sure about anything, but that was very much the sense that I got as I developed the game. Maybe it was coincidence, but I doubt it.

[quote:dbtpdqev]With the size of this game, this bug is a real deal breaker. If it can't be fixed, at the very least give the user the option to backup their save file!! or as a secondary solution tell us where the save file is so we can manually back it up.

As I said, the bug seems to be rare. But obviously I understand that it can be most annoying.

The savegames are in the AppData folder (usually C:\Documents and Settings\User\Application Data\Phenomenon 32 Saves). You would need to copy all the files there.

There's a new patch out which fixes a few bugs and, more importantly, adds a more common and accessible control scheme.

The download link is:

http://gamejolt.com/freeware/games/phen ... 2370/3492/

Well maybe the computers were too slow to make the game run all the actions.

I would've tried to add like a split second pause till the engine run all the events.

Only in this case I'm pretty sure the guy has a fast computer. He's a game developer, too.

Very odd.

Update: Making the ground thicker does actually work. It was a mistake on the part of my tester.

Still, this is an odd issue, isn't it?

OK, another weird problem with my new game.

On some rare computers only, on some levels, the player falls through the ground when the level begins. It's as if the player object is created before the others, and so has time to fall through the terrain. In one level that meant the player was underneath the ground; in another, where you lose if you fall out of the level, he was destroyed, but then was actually in the right place when respawning (which involves leaving the layout and coming back).

Now, at first I thought it had to do with how "thin" (just 3 tiles) the ground was. When I made the ground thicker in one of these levels, it seemed to work (I also moved all the tiles upwards a bit). But in another level, adding more ground underneath the player did nothing at all.

I've tried disabling the platform behaviour when the layout starts and waiting 300 milliseconds before re-enabling it, which seems to have made it so that at least respawning works. Before it just kept spawning the player the wrong way.

So... what could be going on here?

I'm surprised to hear some people lost their savegames. I hadn't heard of that or experienced that before. Very peculiar. This didn't happen after you installed the patch, did it? Because I changed the location where the game saves its files after v1.0. (It now saves them in AppData, which is much better.)

The game is now at v1.3, with another update in the works, and several problems people were having have been solved.

I fear some of the crashes and problems people are having are not due to me, but due to deeper problems with Construct. It's hard to tell, because the game is so massive, but I don't think any of the current, seemingly random crashes are due to any screw-ups in the code (or rather event sheets). I think the cause is more likely to be tiny bugs in Construct that only start appearing when you make a game this absurdly big. I guess we'll find that out as more people make huge games...

As for those of you who are enjoying the game without issues... yay!

The best candidate is probably the user's AppData folder which applications are allowed access to, or you could settle for My Documents if necessary.

AppData seems to be the way to go. Thanks for the tip!

The folder "my documents" (hope it is called so in english^^) is the default storage location for saved files. It should be writable without admin rights.

Yes, but Construct seems to be having problems writing to MyDocuments on Windows 7, probably because Windows 7 has different folder structures.

So, either I make the game create its files in AppPath, meaning the player needs admin privileges (given that most players are likely to install the game in Program Files), or... what else could I do?

Would it make sense to just have the game create a save games folder in C?

If you right click and 'Run as administrator', does it work? Windows Vista/7 have protected file systems, so if you try to write to a protected directory (eg. in Program Files), access is denied unless the application has administrative privileges. For example if your game is installed to Program Files and tries to write files to its own folder, it will be denied access.

For that exact reason, the current version of the game tries to write the files to My Documents, like a lot of commercial games do. It works fine on Vista and XP, but not at all on 7, even with admin privileges. I thought it might have to do with the fact that 7 structures its folders differently, but I'm not sure.