Random crashes of my app on WP8 phone

[dislam]

@Joshua\_Quick

The black glitches you see in that forum thread was fixed months ago, in build #2484, as can be seen in the link below. And I know both of these gentlemen were using AdMob as well.
http://forums.coronalabs.com/topic/52032-unscramble-anagram-corona-app-on-the-windows-phone-store/?p=271957

The only other thing I can think of is that somehow you’re having debugger issues. Instead of running your app via the Visual Studio debugger, try running your app manually on your device.

Hi Joshua,

Was revisiting that thread you quoted above, and I noticed those users exhibited the same problems I am seeing on my own app. I’ll quote:

“@doubleslashdesign Oh wow you are totally right. I’ve never seen that happen before… If you do that on the main menu screen the background goes black and the title graphic disappears (this is an actual image not the bitmap font).”

– The above is exactly what I am seeing, as you can see from the image I posted earlier. My title graphic is also an image, not bitmap fonts.

“As you navigate through the menus to the game, the background actually becomes the bitmap font spritesheet!”

– This has actually happened to me as well, about two or three times, as the sprite sheet which contains all the font characters suddenly became part of the background.

I was wondering if you or anyone else at Corona can look back at that issue and see if there’s anything else in their fix that was missed when patching it up. I know you said that no one else has seen my issue (since the October fix), but that shouldn’t imply this is not a real issue and I am left struggling with a defective app. I am sure this will pop up with more users as more people adopt CoronaCards for WP8.

Thanks!

[Joshua_Quick]

That black text problem was only an issue back when it was in beta.  If you look at the bottom of that forum thread, notice that those 2 developers (@spacewolf and @hgbrian) confirmed that the issue was fixed.  I re-tested it again last week and confirmed that it still works.  No other Corona developer is having this issue since then.  And I can’t reproduce it with the project you sent me.  I gave it a solid shot and even when out of my way to acquire the exact same Nokia device model that you were testing with, but I still can’t reproduce the issue you are seeing.  I even super hammered it by pressing the Home and Back button to put your app into suspend/resume mod several times, but all of the images still re-loaded fine.  I also pressed the power button several time as well, testing suspend/resume via the WP8 lock screen, but it still worked fine.  And I also display a Google interstitial ad several time as well from your app’s homescreen, testing suspend/resume between AdMob and your app… and all images still re-loaded fine.

So, at this point, I don’t know how I can help you further.  It’s *not* looking like a bug on our end.  And no one else is running into this issue.  (The forum threads you are reference are back in the beta days and are no longer an issue.)

Perhaps the issue is more with your development environment then?  Since I can build and run your app without any issues on my Win8 Pro machine, that’s the only other thing I can think of.

You might also want to try to installing some other Corona developers WP8 apps on your phone to see how well they work on your device.  For example, @spacewolf’s app did have this issue in the beginning, but we fixed it back in October 2014.  The name of his app is “Unscramble Anagram”.

   http://www.windowsphone.com/en-us/store/app/unscramble-anagram/e53489ab-c108-4480-b2b1-42d5c774db22

[dislam]

HI Joshua,

Oh I totally appreciate how much you helped, and thankful that you did try to attempt to reproduce the issue, especially considering your schedule.  I’m just thinking, from a code point of view, if there was something else that may have been missed that could affect a small percentage of users like myself.  I mean it’s not just my device but the emulator as well that is affected.

My dev environment involves my licensed version of VMWare 7 running Windows 8.1 Pro 64-bit on a MacBook Pro (OS X Yosemite as the host system).  I had to enable Hypervisor optimization from VMWare to get the emulator to work, but I think that made the Windows OS run a bit laggy as well.  I’m wondering if my setup affects the builds as well.

In the meantime, I made a workaround which seems to be working so far.  What I did is, whenever the main menu scene is loaded, I wait half a second before the graphical content (background, title, menu buttons etc.) are displayed on the screen.  I tested this for about half an hour and it seemed to be fine.   So, if I enter the game and then press the Back button (or press the red home button) to return to the main menu, it will delay just a bit before showing the menu content.

I will definitely try and provide feedback if necessary for the other WP8 app when I have some time available.

Thanks again

[Joshua_Quick]

Hmm… I can think of one other possible issue.

When you download our WP8 CoronaCards daily build zip file, Windows may not fully unzip all of its content unless you tell Windows to “Unblock” it.  You would do this by:

1. Right click on the zip file.

2. Select “Properties” from the popup menu.

3. Select the “General” tab in the Properties window.

4. Click on the “Unblock” button in the bottom right corner.

5. Click on the “OK” button.

Afterwards, you can unzip the file just fine.  This is something that Windows does with all downloaded zip files from the Internet, which is Microsoft’s effort into trying to protect PC users from viruses and the like.

Now, I don’t recall this being an issue with our *.vsix Visual Studio extension, but I do remember Windows refusing to display our *.chm help file’s contents unless you “unblock” the zip file first.

[dislam]

I have just tried your advice.  I unblocked the latest daily build (2599) before unzipping it.  Then I went into Visual Studio Express 2013, uninstalled the two Corona-based extensions and then double-clicked on the new public build VSIX file to install it.   Then I opened my new app project and and assigned the new Corona build 2599 to its extensions.

Then I built the app, but this time I removed the 0.5-second delay before the main menu is shown.   However, after playing two games and returning to the main menu, the black background glitch came back.  So I had to put my delay back.

The menu glitch no longer happened after the delay was added.  However, in two different instances (after playing two games, returning back to main menu, going to the New Game menu, then back to the main menu, then back to the New Game menu), the app would raise an ‘out of memory’ exception in Visual Studio before the full-screen ad was shown.  It would then shut down the app.   If I disconnect the phone from the computer, and then run the app again with the same procedure, it would simply shut down the app.

[dislam]

Just tried Unscramble Anagram.  Couldn’t get the glitch to appear on that game, although I only tried it for 10 minutes.  (Nice game!)

[dislam]

Just an update - my game was released a week ago, and since then it has had 47 downloads. There have been, however, 3 crash reports, so it does seem that the problems are still present, unless it’s a totally different type of crash I am not aware of.

Anyways if anyone wants to try/test it, here it is linked below. This is one of my early apps so it’s a “guinea pig” project to test WP8. It’s not refined like my later work where I have an actual artist

http://www.windowsphone.com/en-us/store/app/snakes-and-ladders-ultimate/e6cfe5ed-8b95-4606-82e8-ff21c575260e