Preview tab crash hangs editor tab

One of the great things about having the standalone Construct 2 was if you did something stupid in your events that would cause a game crash during preview the construct 2 editor was happily unaware and you could carry on and fix the issue

However, when previewing and editing in the same browser a preview game crash in one tab always causes the C3 editor tab to also freeze / hang requiring a browser restart and loss of any unsaved changes.

It is like the two, editor and preview, are two way linked. ( other tabs are perfectly responsive unaffected by the game crash)

This pretty much mandates a save before every preview especially when making tricky game breaking changes.

Scirra

Ashley Is there any way to fully separate the preview and the editor into two separate boxed off "threads" (sorry I dont know the tech lingo) but hopefully you get me. So that if preview crashes or goes into an infinite loop or something then editor tab remains accessible and working? Or is there a way to mitigate this ?

See this issue: https://github.com/Scirra/Construct-3-bugs/issues/476

In short it's difficult to work around since at the moment we can't guarantee the popup window will get its own thread. However we're working on getting the C3 runtime to run in its own Web Worker, which explicitly gives it its own thread so it can never freeze the editor; hopefully this will serve as a fix in the long term.

See this issue: https://github.com/Scirra/Construct-3-bugs/issues/476

In short it's difficult to work around since at the moment we can't guarantee the popup window will get its own thread. However we're working on getting the C3 runtime to run in its own Web Worker, which explicitly gives it its own thread so it can never freeze the editor; hopefully this will serve as a fix in the long term.

This is good news, It cant come soon enough.

Im getting preview window crash almost every session now were im loosing up to 30 min work. Which may not seem a lot but it is a lot for me and very often I cant remember what I have changed which wastes even more time when I go back.

Im not 100% sure that is it my game at fault as I will have previewed my game 10-20 times before it happens. The message is that there is not enough memory to open the page when it cashes. Ive cleared browser data cache etc and there is nothing running except construct 3 and spotify. But it will still happen after an hour.

For me right now this is the most massive issue working with C3. And pretty much a showstopper.

If there is any workaround you could implement with the current run-time to close the preview window / tab before a it might crash due to memory or cache issues that would be awesome.

Im looking on the net and it seems there can be multiple reasons for this error including things as random as a corrupt chrome user profile. So just FYI im not saying its C3 but that C3, as a tool, needs to be as rock solid as C2 was in this respect.

Anyway I not going to quit just yet. But roll on the C3 run-time ASAP if there are no workarounds for now.

Again , tonight, preview crash/quit "Run out of memory"

so thus crashes the editor and I lose work ;(

dev tools always shows disconnected in this instance so no help there.

chrome cache cleared yesterday showing 260 mb today (assume that is mostly my game assets) and PC showing ~3 GB free to use during preview (though didnt see at crash) & SSD has ~80 GB free. object count constant in game and will run fine 29 out of 30 previews

So no memory issues as far as I can see

kind of on the verge of quitting and getting on with some badly needed DIY ........

Guys I figured it out !

If you continually preview without closing the preview window. (cancel this, see update below) (im using pop up but I think it also happens with tab)

Chrome or C3 uses more and more and more system memory.

Until at around 500MB available memory left the preview window crashes the editor crashes and you get the message above.

Right, update,

Ive tried both tab preview and pop up preview. I get the same results for both.

Also, I was wrong, closing the preview window each time has no effect. The memory issue occurs no matter if you close or not.

Basically the browser uses more and more memory on every preview and never lets it go.

Can anyone else test this on reasonably big projects ? Im sure it would have come up before if it wasn't just me. Just pull up task manager performance and keep an eye on memory after each preview.

ASHLEY. hi, I will do some more test on another PC at work tomorrow to verify but do you have any idea? A C3 thing ? a chrome thing ? my game thing ?

everything is vanilla, no add ons , no chrome extensions etc,

fwiw

free memory charted during previews

5.7 gb = nothing running bar spotify and whatever background services

start chrome with c3 = 5.2 gb

open my project = 4.9 gb

first preview = 3.5 gb

2 = 3.2 gb

3 = 2.8

4 = 2.4

5 = 2.6

6 = 2.4

7 = 2.2

8 = 2.1

9 = 1.8

10 = 1.8

11 = 1.4

12 = 1.8

13 = 1.4

14 = 1.4

15 = 1.1

16 = 1.0 gb

17 = briefly hits 560 mb then "awe snap"

I've not seen any other issues like this, but if you can reproduce it, it'd be great if you could file an issue with repro steps and we'll look in to it. If it depends on a large project you should just be able to stuff a new project with dummy content so you don't have to share the original project.

Also, have you tried Firefox/Edge/Safari? If they're not affected that would point to the issue being in Chrome. We might be able to then file an issue with Google about that. They already fixed some memory issues that we reported before, so they seem to be fairly amenable to such reports. If other browsers are affected, I guess there might be something in our code we need to look at!

Haven't had any time to test properly.

But I did preview Kiwi Story about 30 times in chrome on my surface pro 4 which displayed the exact same memory issue leading to crash but in much smaller increments.

So it is not specific to my game.

The issue is not replicating in EDGE with my project though!

so looks like I can go ahead with development using EDGE, although it takes ages like (2 minute vs 10 seconds (actually it hangs for ages at 100%) to save (download) in EDGE for some reason and the layout view is very sluggish. Also every time I preview in edge it leaves an entry in the volume mixer (see below) ? could this be related to the memory issue?

My project is big not because there is any great content, but mainly because it is essentially still my first game and has a lot of legacy test textures and full length music files which I will sift through in coming days as I begin to get first pass placement art in.

anyway I will test Firefox and try to narrow it down, but it looks like it might be a chrome issue then..

If anyone reading has a reasonably large project I would really appreciate if you could do a test by previewing your project about 20 times (just keep clicking preview as soon as it loads) in chrome and monitoring the memory usage in task manager and report here.

or if you could test kiwi story (select a later level layout and preview layout rather than project so you go straight into the game, once it is in game just press preview again. on systems with lots of memory you might not notice it but with 8 GB it should become obvious after a while (about 30 previews) that your free system memory is going down.)

Multiple volume entries in EDGE ......?

Well ...

didnt need too spend much time with either Firefox or EDGE to rule them out as viable browsers for using C3 editor

EDGE is laggy as fk in every department of the C3 editor except scrolling, . Even trying to resize one of the tool bars was a chore and forget about selecting any text you'll wait 20 seconds for it to highlight.

Firefox although, the latest update looks and feels really good and is almost as performant as Chrome with the C3 editor, it got hung up on Preview enough times that it still gets a "No Go" again (for C3) for now. (Once it gets hung up on preview you have to restart it again before it will preview properly.

Hmm. Back to chrome then to try and figure out this memory issue.

Ashley

right have raised a bug as have been able to repo (on my system with other project files see bug )

i have no idea what it is I have spend hours adding and removing different things from different files. I have a feeling is related to how events are being stored, as experiments with only large art and sound files did not produce repro.

https://github.com/Scirra/Construct-3-bugs/issues/1338

again, ive only been able to test on my surface pro at the moment, should be able to test on a desktop this weekend but if anyone fancies testing the file linked on github issue tracker at the above link to confirm it is not just my system.

this issue is pretty much stalling my game dev at the moment so really hope you can figure it out.

Right so....

For anyone affected, which should pretty much be everyone using construct 3 as far as I can see!

or maybe no-one noticed coz recently everyone is arguing and trolling on this forum instead of making games and asking game making questions.....

This is a thing and Ashley has found that is is a chrome bug and that it is fixed the next version of chrome.

https://www.google.co.uk/chrome/browser/canary.html

gets off high horse and goes back to making geme ....

I know this is an old post. But I am getting regular crashes when I preview. It is enough to stop me using the platform in the long run, so if anyone knows of a good way to stop it happening I would appreciate it (I am using chrome, updated to latest version). I'm not even asking it to do anything too complicated, and have created a really simple game to test if it is file specific. Doesn't appear to be...

Thanks,

elferrito

Where to report bug and suggestions :

construct.net/en/forum/construct-3/general-discussion-7/report-bugs-amp-post-128538

elferrito - it's unclear from your post if those issues are actually related to this thread. This thread is about previews freezing, and since it's old, it's out of date: we have now implemented a worker mode which solves the problem. Tick 'Use worker' in project properties in the advanced section. If you really are having the same problem, that should fix it. Otherwise it's different.

Thanks Both!