Strange. Like I said I don't really expect a fix, just curious as to why it happened. Maybe my chrome is corrupted or something and needs a fresh install.

So I'm not reporting this as a bug because I have no idea what could be causing it, could be my computer but I doubt it as everything else is running normally. Basically, yesterday Construct 3 worked fine. Today when i started to work in it the program lags horribly. Not my game mind you, the actual C3 software lags. Things take like 15 seconds to copy paste, it can barely load layouts or event sheets, even typing things into text boxes lags significantly. The debugger hardly works as well, and if you try to mess with something in construct while the game is previewing just forget it.

Nothing changed on my computer from yesterday to today as far as I know, no windows updates or anything. The only change I've noticed in construct itself is that some of the UI for the engine seems to have changed slightly. It's a bit hard to explain but check boxes are different and in game text boxes have a slightly different feel as well, I uploaded a quick image of the check boxes below. I find it hard to believe that a minor UI change caused the entire engine to die, but like I said it's the only change I can see.

I'm running version r201. This happens in both the desktop version and the browser version of the engine. In case a dev looks at this my computer specs are also listed below. I don't know that I expect anything to be done about this, I'm mostly just curious if this is just happening to me or if other people have seen the same issues. I can work in it but needless to say its quite a hassle.

Specs

OS: Windows 10 V1903

CPU: Intel I5 3.40Ghz

RAM: 16GB

GPU: Nvidia GeForce GTX 1050 Ti

Good to know that I'm not just going crazy. Thanks for all your hard work.

Not sure if this is an issue or not, but I figured I'd ask to see if anyone else has run into this. I've looked around and haven't found anything, but maybe I just haven't looked hard enough. I considered making a bug report, but I can't imagine this is a bug because it seems far too basic for that.

Before anything else I should say I'm on version 178 Beta, for C3. Anyway, if I put a timeline in a project in C3 and then try to use the in game "save" action the game just crashes. Its one of those crashes where everything just freezes up and you can't do anything but close the window. This happened in both the desktop version of the game and in chrome. I ran the project in chrome only because you can use developer tools to sometimes get an idea of what happened in your code when C3 crashes like this but in this case I don't really know what the error message is saying, seems like it can't read the timeline to save it or something, image of the error code below.

I'm also attaching a capx that I just threw together, mostly just for posterity to show I'm not doing anything crazy with timelines, link below. Just press 's' which triggers a save and it should freeze. The sine behavior on the sprite is just serving as a visual representation of the freeze.

drive.google.com/open

Like I said before I can't imagine its that broken, unless timelines were just never meant to work with saving, but I find that hard to believe. I'm assuming that I'm somehow doing something really stupid and breaking things as a result. If anyone can clue me in I'd appreciate it.

Thanks for the insight. I did check if multiple NPCs were starting at the same time but that isn't the case. While most of the start times in the schedule events are similar (since they are on the hour or half hour) each event gets off-set by the time it takes an NPC to travel there from where they are so they end up getting randomized. I put a for each in the "on path found" just in case, but no luck.

If I had to guess I'd say you are probably right. The pathfinding in my game is fairly complex and it wouldn't surprise me if I broke it somewhere along the way. Honestly though I think I'm just going to make my own pathfinding system and ignore C2's. I think if I set up some stuff manually it can be done easily.

The way this game is set up doesn't really play well with the pathfinding engine anyway. There's lots of jumping around since NPCs are going into and out of buildings and those interiors are actually placed across the map so they have to teleport there then path again, it all sort of becomes a mess. Not to mention just pathing across like the massive layout feels like it would invite problems.

Anyway, thanks for your help, but I think I'll just do something a little different to cover the issue, I mostly just wanted to make sure there wasn't some weird C2 bug regarding families and the pathing behavior.

First off, thanks for your reply. That is actually exactly what I'm doing. I'll try to tell you what happens in the code, hopefully that can better explain what happens. The one thing to know preemptively is that each NPC has a schedule telling it what to do. The schedule is stored in an array and broken up into events. So the first event in the day would be like walk to your kitchen table, or something. Once the NPC has done that it will grab its next event which also has a time that it should execute. Once the game reaches that time it will perform the next event, so on and so forth.

Without delving too deep the basic logic is as follows.

1. Call initial event to tell each NPC to grab its very first event in their schedule.

2. Each second there is an event that checks if any NPC should be starting its next event.

3. When the prior step triggers a function is called which passes the NPC UID.

4. This newly called function does a few extra things but then using the NPC UID is was passed tells the NPC to find a path.

5. Last there is an "on path found" trigger that tells the NPC to move along its path, I will say that this "on path found" event doesn't reference any UID, I figured it didn't need to since only one NPC should ever have "found a path" at a time.

Another note for step 5, from what I've seen only one NPC can be finding a path at a time, so I'm assuming the engine should know exactly who found a path without needing to reference a UID. If one gets stuck trying to find a path it holds up the rest until it is done. From what I've read, assuming I've read right, this is intentional for C2.

Not sure if this is the right place to ask but I thought it was worth a try. Maybe this could be considered a bug, but I don't know nearly enough to post there.

Basically, my question is about the pathfinding behavior and families. I'll try to keep it simple for this question. In short I have NPCs in my game that need to navigate around the map on a schedule. I am using pathfinding for this. All of these NPCs are in one family, the pathfinding behavior is attached to that family not the individual NPC. The NPCs are pathing around solids and not some crazy custom settings. The only other thing they are told is there is a tilemap overlaying the game world that has a cost. Basically this tilemap just keeps them on roads and prevents them from taking the quickest route to their destination.

The problems seem to arise when there are more than one NPC in the game world. For whatever reason pathfinding seems to grow volatile. Seemingly at random when an NPC is told to find a path it will sometimes take around 15 seconds to find it, other times finding the same path will be instant. Sometimes NPC's just calculate their path forever. I also can't say for sure but I'd swear I've seen the wrong NPC trigger the "On Path Found" event. There are also times when NPCs just ignore the tilemap that has cost attached and walk through it, this seems to only happen when there are multiple NPCs in the game world, if there is one the NPC will follow the tilemap cost.

The best I can describe it is it feels like the whole system is breaking down. As far as I can tell there is no problem when there is only one NPC but if you add in more it all becomes shaky, I say shaky because like I said the errors seem to occur randomly.

I guess my question to anyone out there is, has anyone had similar issues? Are there known issues when combining pathfinding and families or is my code just bad (which I'm willing to believe)? I'd post the capx but its massive and I'd rather not just put it out there, also the system surrounding pathing is complex enough that I can't just recreate it in an example. The only other relevant piece of info I can think of is that the game is a one layout game, I was told C2 could handle it so I took the devs at their word, the layout size is 20184, 9664. If anyone has ideas I'd welcome them, otherwise I'm gonna get to work on making a custom pathfinding solution.

Colludium Yeah, I have no idea how to do that, I just spent a half hour trying to figure out how to open the debug menu in visual studio but it doesn't seem to exist.

Even the part about the access violation being the cause of the crash?

Agreed, that's fine, I just looked back at that post and from what I'm getting the only thing left to do is jump back to r265 and test. It may be a little hard for me to find time to have an extended session on r265 but I'll see if I can do something with it when I get a chance.

At this point I'm sort of wondering if its even a widespread issue anymore. Seems like no one else is really replying so maybe its something specific to my computers at this point. That or people are just staying quiet/not on the forums.

On a separate note you may want to look at this. I was going to look into some application monitoring stuff and found something called "reliability monitor" that apparently is built into Windows. Anyway, maybe this is useless to you but it tracked when C2 crashed the other day, below the report it gave. Might be useless information for you but on the chance it isn't here it is. Also one last note, the only important sounding thing I saw was the "Exception Code" that's listed, I googled it and according to google that code is passed when the program in question accesses memory it doesn't have rights to, so I guess its something related to that.

Description

Faulting Application Path: C:\Program Files\Construct 2\Construct2.exe

Problem signature

Problem Event Name: APPCRASH

Application Name: Construct2.exe

Application Version: 2.0.0.0

Application Timestamp: 5cc70180

Fault Module Name: Construct2.exe

Fault Module Version: 2.0.0.0

Fault Module Timestamp: 5cc70180

Exception Code: c0000005

Exception Offset: 00000000006cbd1c

OS Version: 10.0.17134.2.0.0.256.48

Locale ID: 1033

Additional Information 1: 379a

Additional Information 2: 379a7b5ebf6f82bcefd8e8ce707a4819

Additional Information 3: 9ecf

Additional Information 4: 9ecf75b42781a6e5b426653fc27c1b7c

Extra information about the problem

Bucket ID: 051aab5b4d221a6a2899034bbc76537b (1772451552166302587)

Possibly a dumb question but you say the only thing that happens when you zoom in and out is that openGL redraws itself which seems reasonable. Does anything happen when you click on a layout just to get focus on it so you can zoom in and out. I don't know if that's a thing but I believe you have to click in the layout before you can actually zoom in and out of it. Does that initial click trigger anything? I only ask because I clicked and then immediately tried to zoom in so if that first click does anything significant it could have been that triggering the problem and not the zoom.

Again sorry if that's a dumb thing to mention, I'm a bit out of my depth here.

Ashley Just an update for you. Switching C2 over to using generic icons hasn't changed anything. C2 crashed once about 2 hours from the copy-paste bug I was talking about before. Just now it crashed again. This time I had minimized a chrome tab, then re-maximized C2 and tried to zoom into a layout via the mouse wheel. It never zoomed in and then just closed.

I've been thinking for the past few minutes but I can't think of any reason zooming in would cause C2 to close. The only tangentially related thing I can think of is some sort of bug with C2's UI or how it handles rendering layouts. Anyway that's all I got if there is something you'd like me to try I'd be happy to, otherwise I'll keep going and see what happens.