As for removing the sprite from the game and the .exe not changing size... did you remove all instances of the sprite, or just one copy of it?

All. Definitely all. In my simple test, there was only one layout and one object.

These were the sizes of the .exes in the test project:

Completely empty layout: 657kb

Layout with large sprite: 3.54MB

Layout with large sprite deleted: 3.34MB

In my large project, the file sizes didn't change at all when I removed several huge objects.

In trying to fix my complete-but-broken huge project, I came across the following oddity:

when I remove a large sprite from the game, the filesize of the resulting .EXE doesn't change. In one case I replaced a .bmp with a .jpg and the resulting file was actually bigger.

I also tried this on a new project and it still does more or less the same. It's as if Construct actually keeps all the information you've ever put into it.

Am I missing something or should I report this as a bug?

If you like, you can pm your .cap to me and I'll take a look. It might help to have another set of eyes on it.

I'm not sure that'll be so easy - it's nearly 20MB big, and very, very long. (And probably very silly.) But thank you very much for the offer. If I can't solve this tomorrow, I might send you something to have a look at.

However - it appears that despite my despair, at least one of these issues has a rational answer. I still can't explain the crashing, or why the damn thing was refusing to play anything via the channels, but I might be able to explain the tinny sound I kept getting at random. My computer has two sound drivers (and two sound cards) installed. I just ran the game on my wife's computer, and it seemed fine. Of course, when these things are so random it's hard to be sure, but it's a possibility. One that I will look into further tomorrow, when I've gotten some sleep.

By the way, many thanks to all of you for your advice and your patience. Another thing about Construct that is really awesome.

As far as I can tell, nothing works. In one version of the project I got the crashes to stop, but then it wouldn't play anything via channels anymore. None of it makes any sense. None of it follows any patterns. I've never felt this confused in my life.

What drives me crazy is that for more than nine months, while I was working on this game, none of these issues showed up once. I playtested it over and over, and I never had any of this.

*sigh*

Well, the official line has been Construct is still in beta (since it's pre-1.0) so it would be wise to think twice before starting a large project, but I think a few others are currently working on large projects without so many problems.

Oh, absolutely. It's not like I'm blaming anyone or anything. As I said before, Construct is awesome. But I do think it would be great if a large game (hopefully with some acclaim) was released before Construct even reached 1.0... because even in this state, I prefer it a thousand times to Game Maker (or regular programming, for that matter).

[quote:2kpg8c1i]The problem really has to be isolated for us to do anything about it. Another way you can try to find what's causing it is delete parts of the game away bit by bit (back it up first obviously) and see when the problems go away - then the last thing you deleted it probably caused it. Also, for the record, one global XAudio2 object is the intended way to use it, although there shouldn't be any difference to a per-layout system other than it forces all sounds and music to stop between layouts and might be a bit slower (since it's closing down and reinitialising the audio engine between layouts).

I've tried this, and it looks like the crashes are definitely being caused by XAudio2. My guess right now is that something went wrong when I copy-pasted it. If I manage to get everything working again and finish the game, I will experiment with this and see if I can create a simple example of what's happening. Unless, that is, this problem is somehow related to the size of the project (70+ layouts, even more event sheets, etc.).

[quote:2kpg8c1i]Did you try 0.99.72?

Will try it now.

I brought the game into more or less the state it started out in. I was wondering whether it was maybe the actual specific XAudio2 object itself that was causing the problems - I had copy-pasted it from one layout to the other a couple of times, and Construct sometimes reacts weirdly to copy-paste. I can't really tell what's going on. I've tried to many approaches and gotten so many different responses that I'm just confused. When I started out working on this game, it had no problems at all. Could it be that Construct can't handle the size of the game? It's certainly gotten a lot slower and crasher more often.

I'm still getting the random crashes in the second intro, even when disabling the music in the layout that it loads. Still no pattern. It runs fine 10 times in a row and then crashes. Both when running it in Construct and when running the compiled .exe on its own.

All I can say for certain is that something very strange appears to be going on with the XAudio2 object, and that it may be hard for people to submit bug reports because of the seeming lack of a pattern.

Back to the fight...

Can you reproduce these issues in a new .cap and post them to the tracker? I haven't heard anyone else having that kind of problem.

It is pretty weird, isn't it? I will attempt a couple more approaches, and then I will see if these issues can be reproduced. As I said, it's hard to see an understandable pattern. I have done actual programming before, so I'm always trying to think in terms of what the program might be doing, and this makes little sense.

Will keep you posted.

(Currently it appears that the huge times it takes to load new layouts seem to be related to me using oggs. When I switched to mp3s again, it went really quickly. I guess they're played differently? Edit: re-read the wiki entry. OK, obviously this makes sense. The rest is still crazy, though.)

Maybe every layout should have an XAudio2 object of its own? Don't make the thing global, just have a copy of it in every level? Sounds kind of insane, but maybe that will be more stable?

Despairing a little... so close to releasing this game.

Edit: Nope. Separate non-global XAudio2 objects still having the same effect. Everything becomes tinny at random and going from one layout to the other takes ages.

I have no idea what the hell is going on with XAudio2. It keeps making things sound all tinny, but with no understandable pattern. At first I thought it was because I was using mp3s and the "play music" command, and switched to just "play channel" and oggs. But now it's starting again.

I wish I could find a pattern in this, but I can't.

(Originally I was using separate XAudio2 objects for my intros and the game itself, but thought that might be causing problems somehow, so I switched to one global object. This caused everything to go wonky. What on Earth am I doing wrong?)

Edit: To make things more bizarre, it now takes ages to skip the introductions. Before it was quite simple: when hitting any button, the game would take you to the next layout. This was pretty much instantaneous. Now it takes several seconds. WTF? Shouldn't what I'm doing now be cleaner and simpler?

Thanks everyone! Lots of useful advice - time to try it all out. Will let you know what happens.

Is it just certain layouts that cause the bug?

Also what version of Construct?

At first I thought so. It only happened when I tried to skip over one of the game's two intros - a feature that would be disabled anyway. (That's the intro when you're starting a new game, just to be clear. Otherwise it would be pretty annoying.) But now it's cropped up on other layouts, and those have nothing in common. And it's only when going from one layout to other, it never happens on its own.

I'm using 0.99.62.

No, it still crashes. Damn.