Life Flashes By is released!

[Squinky]

Hey, everyone! Just thought I'd let you all know, if you didn't already, that I've released Life Flashes By! It's the first game I've worked on using the brand spanking new open source version of SLUDGE, so thanks, Trum and BigMc, for all your work on the engine and dev kit!

You can grab the game here: http://www.deirdrakiai.com/my-games/life-flashes-by/

[BigMc]

Hey hey and a Happy (belated?) birthday! I already downloaded it and it of course looks and sounds like a charm! Can't comment on the contents yet, as I just played the beginning. I was a little bit afraid to turn it off because I didn't know whether the progress would be saved.

BigMc

[Squinky]

Cool! It should autosave when quitting to the menu or going to the map screen. It's also a little-known fact that you can press 's' and 'l' to quicksave/quickload, if you're particularly paranoid.

[BigMc]

After restarting the game once I knew that it was saved. But when you play the game for the first time and don't find the save button you don't know whether you have to play up to some save point or if the game is saved automatically.

[Squinky]

On another note, I've gotten a bug report that seems to be engine-related, and I'm wondering if any of you can shed some light on it. Here are some snippets from the e-mail exchange:

I've been trying to play your latest game but whenever I hit New Game it immediately crashes. I can get to the options menu but the game just won't start for me. I'm running windows xp if that matters.

I don't get an error message when it crashes, the whole program just suddenly closes and that's it.

There was no fatal.txt file in the Application Data folder for Life Flashes By.

I have a Gateway GT5056 with a dual-core 64-bit 2.0ghz processor, 1gig of ram, Radeon X1600 video card, and I'm running Windows XP SP3.

[Trumgottist]

That's not good. A crash without an error message is always bad. (I'll boot up my Windows computer…)

[BigMc]

I can't reprode that on XP. Please tell him to turn debug mode on by editing "Documents and Settings/username/Application Data/Life Flashes By/LifeFlashesBy.ini" and setting DEBUGMODE to 1. If he then tries it again, there will be a file called debuggy.txt in the same folder. I'd like to see that.

[Trumgottist]

I'm already on it. (I have received a debuggy with extra content, and will look into it when I get home later tonight.)

[Squinky]

By the looks of the debuggy, it crashed at snapshotGrab, which I was using to crossfade between scenes.

[Trumgottist]

Now my fix is confirmed to work for both people experiencing the crash. (The crash was due to buggy graphics card drivers on older ATI cards, but I was able to find a workaround.) The fix will be in the next build of the engine.