Ashley's Recent Forum Activity

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    The dialog does, in fact, still take a long time to appear with the "Don't show unique icons" option set in preferences.

    This contradicts the original report:

    Setting "Icon Mode=Don't show unique icons" removes the lag completely.

    So my first assumption would be a separate issue to the one originally reported here. Since I've not seen this specific behavior mentioned before and it differs to the one reported here, it should have its own thread to follow up on, with full steps to reproduce etc.

    [quote:l5zzvxxg]If I'm reading this correctly, the "third party" you're referring to is Microsoft. In which case, reality is that they're the first party.

    This is nonsense. By conventional terminology, we are the first party, you are the second party, and everyone else is third party.

    [quote:l5zzvxxg]You mentioned upon the release of C3 that Scirra would be fixing any bugs that appear in C2 - this is a bug, regardless of whose fault it is.

    Third party issues are not our responsibility to fix. Despite this we occasionally go above and beyond the call of duty and fix them anyway, where it's feasible. I know users don't care whose fault an issue is, but you should not insist we fix problems that are not directly our responsibility and may not have any feasible resolution - that's strike one of three:

    [quote:l5zzvxxg]Don't troll the developers

    ...

    Demanding a resolution when none is practical. Some issues will have no good resolution, such as an issue caused by a specific graphics driver version on a particular OS and hardware combination. It is not feasible to investigate such issues, particularly if the evidence suggests the problem is not in our code. It is also unreasonable to demand an explanation of the inner workings of these other pieces of software we've had no part in developing.

  • The main problem is browser popup blockers block all popups by default, unless you click a button or perform some other kind of input event. So basically we can't automatically open a popup window, you have to click the button to give permission to open the popup anyway.

  • If you didn't change the IDs in the Xbox Live plugin properties to an app you actually own, it won't work. It also looks like you missed all the steps in "Setting up Visual Studio" in the tutorial.

  • The most important thing to do is ask them to open developer tools (F12) and reload the page, and see if any errors appear in the console.

  • Paste should be allowed by the browser if you have copied something previously. What did the error message say exactly?

  • Ah, so it's only specific themes? That's what I was missing. I can reproduce now and should be fixed in the next build. This is pretty unusual, I'd say 95% of the time that would have been a graphics driver crash

  • Nepeo is the developer who made the IAP plugin, best to tag them instead.

  • I'm not sure there's much we can do - it affects all software system-wide, and seems to have slowed down some key parts of Windows. The best we can do is simply bypass those parts, and we've done that for the key event sheet dialogs when you set the icon mode to "Don't show unique icons". Also some users are questioning whether it's actually do to with the meltdown/spectre patches. It might not be, but I don't know of any other patches that have had headline-grabbing performance regressions lately. I guess it could be a dodgy graphics driver update or something else that coincides with it.

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    Well, it at least means it's not due to a Construct 2 update, and nobody else noticed it until late 2017, so again it points towards some kind of Windows Update.

  • What is the exact error message you get? It's hard to help without more information. Tagging Nepeo

  • These are all fixed now. (I helped fix a few myself.) Thanks, we'll be shipping it as an incomplete translation in the next release.

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    How come the same Windows API that creates icons works fast after reboot and becomes extremely slow an hour later after C2 application was launched a hundred times?

    I've no idea. Maybe it's a memory leak in Windows or something. It could be antivirus or Windows Defender or some other tool on the system interfering.

    [quote:3nrgmglq]So here is an uneducated speculation - maybe all these icons from every C2 session are cached or indexed or something like that, and this cache/index never gets reset?

    AFAIK that's impossible. The operating system forcibly removes all the processes' memory when the app is closed. There is no way to keep any behind, so there is no way a cache could be left behind either.

    As for the meltdown/spectre patches, AFAIK there are actually a number of patches going out, including microcode updates for CPUs. (I'm not sure if those can even be uninstalled!) It may be that it's a different patch that is responsible, but it's pretty rare that any OS update has any noticable negative performance impact, and it seems everyone suddenly started noticing a slowdown around the time the whole meltdown/spectre thing was being reported, so it does seem to line up pretty well.

    Anyway, even if it's a different patch, and we eventually figure out which one it is exactly... there still might not be anything we can do. We could rearchitect the whole icon engine to asynchronously create icons in the background or something, but that is a massive amount of work, likely comes with a slew of nasty cache invalidation or race condition bugs, and we simply don't have the resources for it. Meanwhile you can just use "Don't show unique icons" which appears to entirely bypass the issue. So, sorry folks, not sure we're going to be able to do anything on this one.

    For the record, this is categorically an issue with Windows. Unless the dialog still takes a long time to appear with "Don't show unique icons", then any delay is entirely in Windows, and there is no question about whether it's in C2. I also can't resist pointing out the great irony that people accuse us of depending on third parties too much with HTML5, but you can't get away from third parties on native either!

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Ashley

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