Post by TheRogueShadow in Stormside comments

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I believe it is either caused by incompatibility on the graphics side with Ren’Py.This is unlikely, IMO, unless you approached the overlay differently than other people have, as I don’t see the same artifact in their animations, and they certainly use animated overlays and containing alpha.

Alternately, I noticed that this issue was emergent; for the first 6 or 7 onions it was fine, then started to be an issue. This points to it being a garbage collection or memory issue. Thinking back through the use leading up to the behavior, I did review the onion images a number of times. Moreover, when it started to happen on the 8th onion, I scrolled back before the onion to the phone and the onion was still flashing and animating which seems to indicate a possible scripting issue, I think with triggered events.

TheRogueShadow1 year ago

Thank you for the workaround though, I’ll keep it in mind.

Atemsiel1 year ago

Hmmm, an interesting problem. I have only ever had this reported when it comes to alpha masks for videos, but generally speaking the difference is that you either have one, or you don't. It's possible that the actual file format of the video makes a difference. I'm using webm, so maybe it makes a difference for mp4 or something along those lines. I don't get these issues at all though so it's quite hard for me to test.

Ren'Py is meant to handle garbage collection by itself, and unfortunately doesn't have a massive amount of tools to debug something like that, but what I may do in future to avoid this is just create an ATL version of the same animation (Basically a simple version that can be played as an alternative) that people can swap to if they start to get issues with the animation on their system. It's one of those things I could probably pour 20 hours into and not fix, so instead I think I'll just make a setting to allow people who get the issue to essentially disable it. I'll likely do that for 0.23. Thanks for the report, and I hope that aside from the flashing issue that you've been enjoying the game so far.

TheRogueShadow1 year ago

Yeah, it’s been an interesting take, given the disparate paths for content.

One interesting thing I noticed that pointed to some sort of memory issue (though likely not exclusively garbage collection) is that, since the emergence of the flashing to black background on the onions, there has also been a sing flash to a girl’s static picture, in a pose from earlier, near the beginning of a sex scene with said girl. Though Python doesn’t handle these the same way it seems like a single frame during playback is referencing the incorrect memory location. I’ll follow up in your discord if I can localize ift for you.

Atemsiel1 year ago

When you say near the beginning of sex scenes, they wouldn't happen to be right as an animation of some sort starts, would they? Usually that's a case of the video being called, but not actually loading immediately, resulting in it removing the current image and showing the one below for a brief moment before the animation starts. Ren'Py isn't great at playing video, but I hear there's some new updates out that help with that, so I'm looking into converting it at the moment.

TheRogueShadow1 year ago

Which version of Ren’Py did you use? Which version of Python did you have installed when developing?

No, they are 10-30 frames into the animation which makes me think it is a different type of error. Moreover, the onion issue behaves in a way that is not specifically graphically related; loading an older save, where no onion was available causes an onion to appear graphically properly, but illogically.

Another possible issue was that when I traced back to an older save the options in saving the childhood friend leading to non slave routes were available briefly, but then did not work later down the line in the following scenes. However, this may be intended behavior as perhaps earlier choices would have lead to “better” outcome, and the scenes where identical for narrative purposes. (Basically, from saving Riley to the next day, no matter what choices are made in my game, she is punished at night, and I do not seek her in the morning).

I did notice that for whatever reason, your game did not end up using the GPU, unlike the games which did not have a problem on my machine.

Ghryst1 year ago (1 edit)

i get this in a lot of games. i always thought of it as if the frame hadnt unloaded, and was still in the background (kinda how gifs can be layered in the background), which then flicks up on screen when loading a new scene takes more than a split second

TheRogueShadow1 year ago

I believe this is an incompatibility between system python and any python interpreter that may be packaged with the download. I have not confirmed this hypothesis.

itch.io

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