Well ...

didnt need too spend much time with either Firefox or EDGE to rule them out as viable browsers for using C3 editor

EDGE is laggy as fk in every department of the C3 editor except scrolling, . Even trying to resize one of the tool bars was a chore and forget about selecting any text you'll wait 20 seconds for it to highlight.

Firefox although, the latest update looks and feels really good and is almost as performant as Chrome with the C3 editor, it got hung up on Preview enough times that it still gets a "No Go" again (for C3) for now. (Once it gets hung up on preview you have to restart it again before it will preview properly.

Hmm. Back to chrome then to try and figure out this memory issue.

Haven't had any time to test properly.

But I did preview Kiwi Story about 30 times in chrome on my surface pro 4 which displayed the exact same memory issue leading to crash but in much smaller increments.

So it is not specific to my game.

The issue is not replicating in EDGE with my project though!

so looks like I can go ahead with development using EDGE, although it takes ages like (2 minute vs 10 seconds (actually it hangs for ages at 100%) to save (download) in EDGE for some reason and the layout view is very sluggish. Also every time I preview in edge it leaves an entry in the volume mixer (see below) ? could this be related to the memory issue?

My project is big not because there is any great content, but mainly because it is essentially still my first game and has a lot of legacy test textures and full length music files which I will sift through in coming days as I begin to get first pass placement art in.

anyway I will test Firefox and try to narrow it down, but it looks like it might be a chrome issue then..

If anyone reading has a reasonably large project I would really appreciate if you could do a test by previewing your project about 20 times (just keep clicking preview as soon as it loads) in chrome and monitoring the memory usage in task manager and report here.

or if you could test kiwi story (select a later level layout and preview layout rather than project so you go straight into the game, once it is in game just press preview again. on systems with lots of memory you might not notice it but with 8 GB it should become obvious after a while (about 30 previews) that your free system memory is going down.)

Multiple volume entries in EDGE ......?

Right, update,

Ive tried both tab preview and pop up preview. I get the same results for both.

Also, I was wrong, closing the preview window each time has no effect. The memory issue occurs no matter if you close or not.

Basically the browser uses more and more memory on every preview and never lets it go.

Can anyone else test this on reasonably big projects ? Im sure it would have come up before if it wasn't just me. Just pull up task manager performance and keep an eye on memory after each preview.

ASHLEY. hi, I will do some more test on another PC at work tomorrow to verify but do you have any idea? A C3 thing ? a chrome thing ? my game thing ?

everything is vanilla, no add ons , no chrome extensions etc,

fwiw

free memory charted during previews

5.7 gb = nothing running bar spotify and whatever background services

start chrome with c3 = 5.2 gb

open my project = 4.9 gb

first preview = 3.5 gb

2 = 3.2 gb

3 = 2.8

4 = 2.4

5 = 2.6

6 = 2.4

7 = 2.2

8 = 2.1

9 = 1.8

10 = 1.8

11 = 1.4

12 = 1.8

13 = 1.4

14 = 1.4

15 = 1.1

16 = 1.0 gb

17 = briefly hits 560 mb then "awe snap"

Cheers Mikal , sadly I haven't worked on it for weeks now. Im just trying to get back into it the last few days but the C3 editor keeps crashing on me which is driving me nuts.

Yea I originally imagined a very clean high def almost 3D look,

but shock horror I think Im going to make the move to a more pixelarty look of late 80s early 90s arcades.

Ive been trying a few resolutions, ive found the usual 220 to 250 horizontal lines as per the old consoles and arcades looks bit too pixely on the bigger monitors and tv screens so ive settled on 360 h-lines and a CinemaScope aspect ratio which just about gets away with it.

there are a couple of reasons for going pixel arty,

one is simply that I love the old shmups and want to capture that feeling of playing an arcade, and I think the pixel art contributes to that vibe.

two is that it should allow me to the minimize memory and GPU use so there may be a chance to get it running on at least higher end mobiles, right now it wont run at all on mobile.

three, im hoping it should minimize the art workload to there may be a small hope of this being finished one day and being playable. (although im learning that pixel art has it own issues to deal with especially around sizing etc, you cant just scale it to whatever size needed.

and lastly my 11 year old daughter has shown an interest and some actual skill in the pixelart department so she has just been promoted to lead enemy graphic artist!

so yea,,,,

It wont look as clean but lets see , Im sort if interested to see if I can capture that arcade vibe....

No video this month,

hopefully we can get this C3 crashing sorted out and get me back on track for next month video installment.

if not I go back to being a pro genji

ps have been watching your devlog with much intrigue, i haven't commented but have been there, lurking in the shadows, wondering what delightful and dark story is to unfold.

Guys I figured it out !

If you continually preview without closing the preview window. (cancel this, see update below) (im using pop up but I think it also happens with tab)

Chrome or C3 uses more and more and more system memory.

Until at around 500MB available memory left the preview window crashes the editor crashes and you get the message above.

Again , tonight, preview crash/quit "Run out of memory"

so thus crashes the editor and I lose work ;(

dev tools always shows disconnected in this instance so no help there.

chrome cache cleared yesterday showing 260 mb today (assume that is mostly my game assets) and PC showing ~3 GB free to use during preview (though didnt see at crash) & SSD has ~80 GB free. object count constant in game and will run fine 29 out of 30 previews

So no memory issues as far as I can see

kind of on the verge of quitting and getting on with some badly needed DIY ........

See this issue: https://github.com/Scirra/Construct-3-bugs/issues/476

In short it's difficult to work around since at the moment we can't guarantee the popup window will get its own thread. However we're working on getting the C3 runtime to run in its own Web Worker, which explicitly gives it its own thread so it can never freeze the editor; hopefully this will serve as a fix in the long term.

This is good news, It cant come soon enough.

Im getting preview window crash almost every session now were im loosing up to 30 min work. Which may not seem a lot but it is a lot for me and very often I cant remember what I have changed which wastes even more time when I go back.

Im not 100% sure that is it my game at fault as I will have previewed my game 10-20 times before it happens. The message is that there is not enough memory to open the page when it cashes. Ive cleared browser data cache etc and there is nothing running except construct 3 and spotify. But it will still happen after an hour.

For me right now this is the most massive issue working with C3. And pretty much a showstopper.

If there is any workaround you could implement with the current run-time to close the preview window / tab before a it might crash due to memory or cache issues that would be awesome.

Im looking on the net and it seems there can be multiple reasons for this error including things as random as a corrupt chrome user profile. So just FYI im not saying its C3 but that C3, as a tool, needs to be as rock solid as C2 was in this respect.

Anyway I not going to quit just yet. But roll on the C3 run-time ASAP if there are no workarounds for now.

wow dude.

pro skillz!

yep that dont look right

Hi tunepunk

Is this when previewing from C3 or when playing actual hosted/nwjs

i have found there is a huge difference in jank between C3 preview and actual hosted/nwjs

I haven't really explored animation yet in construct 2/3 so am a bit in the dark on this but set animation definitely sounds like something you want in a trigger or trigger once sub event as otherwise you might be asking for multiple repaints of the same thing , especially if the animation is looping, which could cause a gpu hangup. But I'm just speculating.

The request animation frame time is where the c2 runtime is running through your events once to tell the graphics card what to draw to give to the browser for the next frame of your game. If the whole process takes more than 16 ms then you will have jank.

There are 3 main things that can cause a super long animation frame request.

An issue in your events at this time like an loop issue or a huge parsing sorting array issue or performing a calc on 100 objects at once etc , ie something that will hang up the CPU.

Or

An event that is producing a lot of sprites all at once, big sprites, or lots of sprites with effects all at once like in a for loop. Basically something that will hang up the GPU.

Or

Something running in the browser on a different tab or another program running on the pc that is accessing resources or network every couple of seconds eg YouTube streaming video or your

face book or email update. even Spotify playing in background will cause

regular janking as the pc or browser prioritises this operation over the animation frame request.

I think....

If you are seeing exactly the same timing on different devices then it sounds like an events or graphics thing. Maybe disable some of animation s you think and test performance again.