Game with video playback keeps crashing in PREVIEW - works fine published

Hi,

I am making a game of sorts as a joke for my co-workers. The game starts up, plays an intro screen - when you click to start, it plays a video. Every 10 seconds (time gets shorter as time goes on) a dialog pops up asking a question which they have to answer.

When I publish this on my webserver, it is running pretty well, however when I try to preview while editing in Construct 3, the preview windows crashes shortly after the video starts playing with "STATUS_ACCESS_VIOLATION" in the browser window.

It does not always crash at the same spot and it does not always crash. (is "crash" even appropriate here?.) But more times than not, it keeps happening.

When I try to preview with Debug on, it will display the Debug screen, but when the video starts, the screen just freezes and I can only hear the audio. You can't interact with the game. I don't see anything out of the ordinary with respect to processor or memory.

I have the video in both Mp4 (about 70mb) and WEBM (about 15mb) available to the game. I have tried removing either file to see if it is an issue with one format or the other, but the problem seems to happen with either.

I almost get the feeling like the video is not loading fast-enough for playback, but I am using a pretty powerful PC and have my files on an SSD - I wouldn't think file access speed would be an issue, especially compared to streaming from a webserver, where I am NOT having these issues.

Does anyone have any suggestions of what I can look for as possible causes?

Thank you!

Don't see how I can edit a post - I wanted to add that I am using Construct 3 in Chrome in Windows 10.

Tab crashes are Chrome bugs and so would need to be reported to Google.

You could try Chrome Canary - it's possible the problem was already fixed and a future Chrome update will be working correctly.

Hi Ashley, thanks for your reply.

Yesterday, I tried running C3 in Edge and in Firefox. More or less, the result was the same.

Wondering if the issue is related to some other actions I have going on in my project, I deleted my elements, layers, and actions one by one until I saw an improvement. I never did. I even tried adding some "on playback events" (stuck, error, not ready to play) to reveal some text showing when an error occurred, but no response - the preview would just crash.

I got down to just a single layer with one video element and had it play the video on start. I then previewed multiple times. Sometimes the video played just fine.. sometimes the video was choppy but didn't crash. Sometimes it would be choppy and crash almost immediately. Sometimes it would just crash a half second after starting before it would play at all.

Again, when I upload to my webserver, the game and video play (mostly) ok. (If my network connection is crappy, I have seen some video errors) but that is it.

Lastly, I started building this game in C2 and only finally upgraded to C3 two weeks ago because of the improved JSON functionality (thanks, btw!). I was not having these preview issues in C2 with the same video files.

It's not the end of the world, but obviously being able to preview successfully / repeatedly is a huge help. I was more or less hoping this might be a known thing with some kind of fix.

(...and I realize it could be something wonky with my video files, but I've edited the video file a few times but the issue stays...)

Thank you, again,

J

As I said, tab crashes are browser bugs. I'm afraid I simply cannot speculate because we aren't responsible for browser development - such issues need to be filed with the browser makers and only they can deal with them.

I get it, thanks.

Out of curiosity, C2 was a "stand-alone" program (not browser-based). Was it using the same underlying technology (was it running inside of a "white-box browser" kinda like a Phonegap app would on mobile) or was it a completely different build running stand-alone? Obviously, not relying on the browser to support the program might make the difference in what I am seeing.

Further, we were able to preview in NW.js. Has that option gone away completely in C3? I don't see any option for that in Settings.

Thank you,

J

Yeah that issue started to happen some time ago, was working fine before. My game now crashes every now and then in the main menu, and it takes Construct with it. I hope just disabling videoplayback prevents the crashes.