Need help to verify font display

Hello,

I'm releasing Beat Ball 2 and I've had a couple of reports saying that the text in the main menu is not displayed.

I would really appreciate if any of you could download the game and see if anyone experience the same problem so I can elimiate that bug - I can't replicate it on my own machine unfortunately.

Here's the download link: http://www.imphenzia.com/games/files/bb2/BeatBall2.zip

I am using FONText for this project but I haven't had any reply from the author yet. I suspect it may have something to do with the amount graphics card memory the people reporting the problem have. It's probably not the fact the the font is grabbed from a 512x512 bitmap (and sectioned up into surface sprites) because I sent a "Hello World" with FONText to one of the guys experiencing the problem using the same size bitmap and that worked fine.

So, in short - can you see and use the main menu in Beat Ball 2?

(It's an installer, but the uninstaller works and removes any trace of the game)

Thanks for your help!
Stefan

"Imphenzia"... wow, there's a name I haven't seen around here in a long time! <g> Glad to see that you're still making games as well as great music, Stefan.

The menu text looks fine here (Windows XP Pro SP2, 128 meg ATI Radeon 9600 Pro, DirectX 9.0c). The game plays fine as well (never saw a breakout-type game where you could save in the middle of a level - nice).


You might consider sending them a custom version with TotalVidMem() and AvailVidMem() reporting on their systems when the menu is displayed. And did they report what resolution they're playing at (since the menu is also affected)? I tried 640, 1024, and 1600, at 16 and 32 bit, but (unfortunately for testing purposes) my card was happy with them all.

Works fine here, on a low/average pc.

Thanks for those kind words :) So much has happened the past couple of years (marriage, relocating between countries, buying a house (that needs a lot of work), motox accidents, you name it! But I'm happy to be back in the Blitz-world now and I decided to keep quiet about Beat Ball 2 during development not to raise false expectations and deadlines that I would keep breaking.

I am also still developing CTCC which is the next game to be released now.

Anyhow, thanks for testing and reporting back so far. That's a good idea with the memorydebugging so I will send them a custom version with debugging for that purpose.

I'd still appreciate if others could keep testing it and report back the results :)

Stefan

Works well here too.

Just had both of the ones experiencing the problem test it with my debugging on and both of them had over 50MB video memory free, so that can't be it (on a 64MB video cards that they both had)

Unfortunately I'm not sure the author of FONText is available any longer. Has anyone else got experience with these sort of things?

One thing I see in common on their machines (and not on mine) is that when the graphics mode is set the Total Video Memory _increases_ (not just the available memory). In my log TotVidMem is always the same.

Another update:

I managed to get my hands on a laptop that experience this problem and I've narrowed it down to the HideEntity and ShowEntity functions that I carry out on the Camera objects (I use two cameras, one for the 3D world and one for the HUD... maybe some graphics cards don't support this :s

Sounds like you've been quite busy. :) I agree about keeping quiet on projects - better to release a finished game with only a few weeks' hype than to have way too much hype and no/late game.



That's Beaker, isn't it? He's still active here ( http://www.blitzbasic.com/Community/userposts.php?user=7 ) and still has FONText listed in his sig. As of two months ago, he mentioned it being nice seeing some competition for FONText ( http://www.blitzbasic.com/Community/posts.php?topic=55742#620699 ), so it seems that he hasn't abandoned it.



I wonder if that might indicate that they're using on-board video memory, allocating system RAM rather than a card with dedicated memory (I don't know). Do you know the make/model of their cards (and if they're using laptops)? From what I've seen, on-board video and laptops crop up with video problems (both in Blitz3D and otherwise) more often than desktops with dedicated cards. But congratulations on obtaining a notebook with the problem - at least now you have something to test on. :)

As for Hide/Show Entity messing up, could you work around that with zero EntityAlpha? And if it's a multi-camera problem, perhaps you could just move the single camera away and have it do both tasks (that'd slow things down, but it might work as a "slow but reliable" option).

Yeah, Beaker's still about. You can catch him on IRC, frequently. He's probably not receieved or lost your email. :)

P.S. "Juicy Fonts" isn't really in competition with FONText. My effort is for 2D only. :/

Thanks for your help guys :)

I managed to fix the bug in the end! Not the way I wanted to fix it really - but it works. I consolidated the cameras into the same one - I wonder if there is a problem hiding and showing cameras on some graphics cards? I couldn't find any post in the forum describing this problem so maybe it's something in the way I handle the cameras =)

Nice to see that the Blitz forum is still the same way as when I left a couple of years ago (friendly and helpful).

I am looking forward to frequent visits with my continued development.

Thank you once again!