engine and exported games more 1:1

[ikarus]

countless times, I've built a bunch of my game, seeing it run perfect in the editor then exporting it to see that all the stuff I just made broke in the exported version! I've just spent hours making an emitter that just creates actors when a global is true but sets the global to off when the actorCount reaches a limit imposed by the level. Thought it'd be pretty simple. It works perfectly crisp clean inside the editor, exported, it just shoots out actors non-stop! Editor, perfect. Exported never ending! Even after several restarts of the editor it's the same and runs right.
After I saw it working right in the editor I moved on and created many other things, now I'm not sure if there's something wrong with the emitter code or anything else I added after. *sigh* Off to my awesome bug hunt... Wonder if programmers get more heart disease than others lol

[ikarus]

Little update. By the way I love this engine, just wanted to say that. I very few things could I have almost finished a demo of my game in a matter of weeks! But I have to say this is a huge issue for me. I fixed the above thing, tip for others. If a global is to be primarily used by one actor, don't let another set the variable at the start of the game, make the actor that uses it set it at the beginning. I had a coach actor that basically managed my game. Every draw cycle it checks some numbers and calls things based on those number, that's all it does and it's just wire region. Had it set a global to something at the beginning of the game, I guess it never stopped setting it, even though it was only in to the create actor event??? which doesn't make sense cause it shouldn't fire more then once anyways??? But all I did was move the setting of the global to the actor create event that mostly used that variable and bam, it works. Which again is weird cause it shouldn't matter cause both should only happen once... right???

Now though I have another issue to fix, what would make the main actor, who's set to be created at startup, to suddenly be created twice in an exported game but only once in the editor??????????? SO MANY QUESTIONS!

[Game A Gogo]

Oh boy! Seems you ran into a quick-sand of odd-bugs-in-GE!
There are three kinds of odd bugs in GE. The first type is: Doesn't work in editor, works exported and the second type, the one you're affected by...

Finding problems of those sorts are pretty tricky, sometimes impossible.
Personally, my way of fixing this is to do something completely different...

Like have the view actor create the player actor and have player actor not get created at start-up? Even adding a timer to let the GE engine load up (Some actors will get created before the GE Splash screen, Frustrating!)

These fix are more speculations than accurate information... As long as you don't encounter the third kind of odd-bugs-in-GE; doesn't work in editor and when exported!
There should be a way to fix it!

Why do bugs like this happen? Because the order things gets initialized varies from the exported version than the editor game test.
When you're in the editor, some variables are already initialized, as so for actors created at start-up. What's more? When you create actors in game and don't destroy them before going out of game, these actors will become visible in the editor and will keep on moving the direction they were last moving (With xvelocity and yvelocity) and I believe that causes garbage in the .ged file when you save, as for me it were those kind of games that were most likely to mess up.

Goodluck in your bug-hunt!

[ikarus]

I did what you suggested and did it completely different, now it's created at as the startgame button is hit and destroyed when you exit to the main menu. By the way another problem emerged after lol, suddenly some text dissapeared from the main menu and appeared thereafter in the main level ??? Don't know how that could of ever happened. Also the mouse started appearing throughout all the game when it should only appear when there is a menu. Decided to fix the mouse thing first. I deleted all references to the mouse and rewrote it all. Fixed it and.... suddenly the text is fixed too??? Even though none of the text had anything remotely to do with the mouse and they don't even come close to touching each other lol.
Oh, all a learning experience in bug hunting I guess. Still I'd like a way for the next ge to have the games play more alike in both, that'd save a lot of headache cause now the game mode is really useless for me as the ultimate call is how it runs exported.

[Game A Gogo]

The text actor not appearing... Oh I got hit by that nasty bug too when making a window system except I couldn't fix it.
As you progress in programming, you'll learn to avoid these kind of bugs because you will control everything you want your game to do. But until that day, there are unexposed bug-holes that you play around with. Like with activation regions and what-not. Though this is from my experience and GE really spilled a lot of bugs on me during it!