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[Jon]

Crushing Cannon is a Stencyl-made game in which you break targets by aiming the cannon. The catch is that there are all sorts of traps and obstacles to hinder that. Can you beat all 44 levels?




Crushing Cannon was entirely done by one of our testers for an internal game jam.

Play It Now

[Dro]

addictive game. But I can't play through 5th level

it freezes like that



I still can hear the sounds of gameplay.

[Retro-Rob]

Cool game... what's this Stencyl thing though?!?   First time I'm hearing about it.   Looks really cool and I signed up for the beta.    How long did it take you to build this game?   How is it working in Stencyl?

[Jon]

addictive game. But I can't play through 5th level

it freezes like that



I still can hear the sounds of gameplay.

I'll have the author re-publish the game. We discovered some issues with scene transitions that would lead to this scenario, and it may stem back to a bug or something with FlxFade that I'm going to talk to Adam about.

@Retro-Rob - The author built the first version of the game in just a few days for an internal Game Jam and then worked on it further over the course of a few weeks (but not constantly during that time) to expand upon it. I'll point him to this topic and let him chime in about his experiences.

[Mike]

Thanks for playing all!

Cool game... what's this Stencyl thing though?!?   First time I'm hearing about it.   Looks really cool and I signed up for the beta.    How long did it take you to build this game?   How is it working in Stencyl?

As Jon stated, it only took about a day or so to create the basic engine for the game.  The majority of my time was spent designing and testing levels.  Stencyl's snippet system alongside actor customization cut out a lot of the tedious work I'd have to do with pure programming.  It only takes a minute to setup levels for designing, which I like .  

It also helped that Stencyl uses a physics engine .

[Dro]

1.0.1 still freezes.

the game is fun. but I can't play it

[darthlupi]

Impressive development time for this.  I do wish the cannon balls were a bit more elastic, though I probably missed something.

Very nice smooth frame rate.  I love the potential that Stencyl provides.  You did a good job utilizing it!

[Jon]

1.0.1 still freezes.

the game is fun. but I can't play it

Thanks for the follow up. Mike is looking into it now.

Is it still freezing at the same place (right after the 5th level), or is it freezing at a different time now?

[darthlupi]

It seems like the freeze is occurring because the pause function is not "letting go".  Do you use the pause functionality built into Flixel for room transitions?

Here is the basics of the console output when the game "locked" on me:

Finished Leaving...
Leaving Current Scene.
Start Fade In
Entering Scene 4
Loading Scene: 4
0
0
Entering...0.88889
0
0
0
0
Entering...0.777778000000001

Just a hunch.

Oh, by the way, I played a bit more a realized that I have a hard time following directions and didn't see that I could switch ball types.  My BAD.

Cool stuff...

[Jon]

I'm not using the pause functionality.

One funny thing I notice is that if I trip off a runtime error, where it pops up the dialog with Dismiss All / Continue and then click Dismiss All, the result is exactly the same as the freeze, even with the pause function not escaping.

Is there perhaps some error happening in the background that is not being reported?

(Edit: I hacked Pause out of Flixel and still run into this, albeit without the pause screen. Hmm...)

[Jon]

I noticed something funny if you bring up the console (`).

If you look at the frame's timing breakdown, the "Flash" field becomes negative when it freezes, and all of the other fields (save for the total field) remain steady.

What does it mean for the Flash field to go negative?

(For example, it says '-3ms flash')

[Jon]

Hey guys, I finally hunted down the problem.

The problem is that referencing a property from an undefined variable or a null variable (basically a NullPointerException) in the browser plugin will silently throw an error, and as you know, when an error happens, it skips the entire rest of the script from executing and starts from square one.

So what was happening was that it was continually bumping into errors caused by the authors, and this sent the game loop back to the start, continually, causing the freeze. This was also why we were not able to reproduce this in the toolset, which uses the standalone Flash player that does not behave in this manner.

It is a little bit strange and coincidental that all of the errors happened during scene transitions, and perhaps there are more problems in those junctures, but at least I can work around this, so that the code will always run.

[Dro]

level "broken?" is broken, isn't it?

[Mike]

Sorry for the late reply, but these errors all seem to be tied to the same bug.  Can't figure out what is causing it.

[Jon]

After days of heavy duty debugging, we tracked down the problem (it was in Box2D) and fixed it. We'll publish a fixed version of this soon.