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AppGameKit Classic Chat / A sudden and unexpected problem with AGK v1.076 and Vista...

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=PRoF=
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Posted: 14th Oct 2012 00:19
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I've had AppGameKit for a while now and have been happily using it on my aging Dell workhorse of a laptop.

Until that is, the other day.

I'd redownloaded and installed 1.076 because I'd accidentally made some changes to the examples provided.

Now whenever I compile and run anything it takes an absolute age to load and only runs at about 5fps. (Even the "Hello World" a wizard did it with just a simple Print(Str(ScreenFPS())) added for debugging purposes); although they broadcast and run fine from the android player.

I have tried both the windows installer and the zipped files and both have the same results.

Yesterday I even went as far as reinstalling windows (Vista Premium 32bit SP2) and was surprised to find exactly the same problem occuring.

I am completely flummoxed as to what to do to sort this out, has anyone else out there had this problem? Does anyone have any suggestions as to what to try next...

Thanks in advance

P.S.
Here are some notes and observations about stuff I have discovered the last 20 or so attempts at redownloading and reinstalling various versions of AGK.

The 1.076 Installer doesn't seem to make the file associations for AppGameKit files (So double clicking them doesn't work)

The 1.076 Installer and the zipped files don't at any point ask for the Serial Number. (Although I'd have thought it would simply not compile if it wasn't activated yet)

The 1.065 Legacy installer installs and works/compiles fine.


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Hodgey
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Posted: 14th Oct 2012 00:33 Edited at: 14th Oct 2012 00:35
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What happens if you download the .zip files (not the installer) and run AppGameKit from there?

Edit: I missed this bit:
Quote: "I have tried both the windows installer and the zipped files and both have the same results."


Have you tried a complete uninstall and reinstall of AppGameKit?

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=PRoF=
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Posted: 14th Oct 2012 00:40
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@Hodgey:
Yes, repeatedly. I've also downloaded the files a few times incase it was a corrupt download that was causing it.

The bit I find most surprising is that it does exactly the same thing after wiping the PC and installing a fresh install of Windows.


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Hodgey
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Posted: 14th Oct 2012 00:42
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It's very interesting and it's weird how only the fps appears to be effected. Maybe third party software is interfering like an Anti-Virus.

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Posted: 14th Oct 2012 01:09
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@Hodgey:
I use AVG Free, and have done for ages now. Although it did update itself recently, that was before I noticed any problems.

I did uninstall the antivirus though, to try and the problem persists. I also uninstalled Skype and Digsby, which were the only other software I have installed on the otherwise clean Vista install.


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Hodgey
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Posted: 14th Oct 2012 01:26
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Which graphics card do you use? And if you can remember, did it update it's drivers recently?

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xCept
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Posted: 14th Oct 2012 01:51
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Run the executable, open task manager, right-click on the AppGameKit application you are running (title of app) and select Go To Process. How much CPU and Memory is it using while running? While there, also sort by CPU and then by RAM to see if anything is consuming extraordinary amounts.
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Posted: 14th Oct 2012 02:10 Edited at: 14th Oct 2012 02:15
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@Hodgey:
It's got an ATI Radeon Express gfx card. I was using the MS Drivers for it, but I downloaded and installed the latest ATI drivers for it and now I can compile

However, the display now appears to be corrupted.

In fact weirder and weirder, if I run an executable which I made last month with AppGameKit it runs fine and looks exactly as it should.

When I compile the same source code now, the display is corrupted.

Here is an image showing both versions of the executable running.




@xCept:

Before I changed the drivers, the Hello World app was using 50% of cpu (Possibly 100% of a single core, not sure how AppGameKit deals with dual core cpu's) and about 30mb; Now with the offical ATI drivers it's only using 15% cpu and the same amount of ram.


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Hodgey
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Posted: 14th Oct 2012 02:33
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Quote: "When I compile the same source code now, the display is corrupted."

I've seen this problem before, here.

The common factors are v1076 and ATI cards. ATI cards have been known 'misbehave' with AppGameKit (or vice versa). There have been other reports where particles don't work properly (under certain circumstances) on ATI cards either.

Issue 378
Issue 400

You can report this as an issue as it is possibly connected to other issues and hope TGC can fix it for v108.

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Ancient Lady
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Posted: 14th Oct 2012 04:11
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If you've reinstalled your Windows, did you update the video drivers as well?

Cheers,
Ancient Lady
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Posted: 14th Oct 2012 12:51 Edited at: 14th Oct 2012 13:45
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@Hodgey:
I'm not sure that it's the same problem as the particle issue in the bug posts as before I reinstalled AppGameKit the first time v1.076 was running fine. I will run the examples posted by the people reporting the issues you linked and see what that does.

I might perhaps try installing the v1.08 beta and see what that does as well.

@Ancient Lady:
Yes, I have. Installing the most recent ATI drivers has fixed the initial problem, but now the compiled executables suffer from a corrupt display (As shown in the image in my post prior to this one)


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JimHawkins
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Posted: 14th Oct 2012 18:47
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Why not install Window 7? Vista was a disaster in just about every aspect.

-- Jim DO IT FASTER, EASIER AND BETTER WITH AppGameKit FOR PASCAL
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Posted: 14th Oct 2012 20:09 Edited at: 14th Oct 2012 20:15
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Hmm, Installing 1.082 beta has improved things a little as you can see from the image below



Now I can read the text, but any sprites are blurred somehow. Altho my sprites no longer appear in the correct order on the Android player (Which is still the 1.07 version)

I couldn't run the examples provided in the bug reports as they are tier 2 and I don't have Visual Studio installed right now.


@JimHawkins:
I simply don't have a spare copy of 7; nor am I likely to buy one just to run AppGameKit on my laptop (Which I can't guarentee is going to work anyway?)

My choices are XP (Which isn't ideal as several softwares I need to use on the lappy aren't compatable) or Vista Premium, which is the one which came installed on the lappy.

I completely agree tho, about Windows Vista being a great big steaming bag of poo. SP1 kinda sorted out most of the major problems I had with it.


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Paul Johnston
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Posted: 15th Oct 2012 04:00
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It looks like an image filtering issue, try playing with the following commands before loading any images and see if they make any difference

SetGenerateMipmaps() default should be 0
SetDefaultMinFilter() default should be 1
SetDefaultMagFilter() default should be 1
SetDefaultWrapU() default should be 1
SetDefaultWrapV() default should be 1
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Posted: 15th Oct 2012 11:20 Edited at: 15th Oct 2012 11:21
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@Paul Johnston:
Thanks for the advice I tried messing with the commands you suggested and using



Sorted out the problems with the Sprites being blurred, but not the text in 1.076. There doesn't seem to be a similar pair of commands for the text.

1.082 didn't suffer from blurred text so adding those two lines to the top of the code seemed to fix any display issues I was having with that.

I haven't as yet had chance to test the code changes on a non-affected PC to see if it makes any difference to that, but it doesn't seem to have made any difference to the display when using the Android Player (With 1.076, I don't have the 1.082 player yet)


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Paul Johnston
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Posted: 15th Oct 2012 15:46
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The default text is loaded before the first line of your code, so using LoadImage(1,"ascii.png") and then SetTextDefaultFontImage(1) should use a the new image with the new default settings.
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Posted: 15th Oct 2012 16:18 Edited at: 15th Oct 2012 16:19
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@Paul Johnston:
Thank you, That has indeed sorted the text problem. The adverts are still blurry but at least I can see to continue programming now.

Hopefully all this will be resolved in the next version of AppGameKit? I'll post a bug report about it later on when I get home from work.


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Paul Johnston
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Posted: 15th Oct 2012 16:36
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I can set the default wrap mode to 0 for the default text as it doesn't need wrapping, but I'm interested in what card your using and if SetGenerateMipmaps(1) changes anything with wrap mode 1?
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Posted: 16th Oct 2012 00:32 Edited at: 16th Oct 2012 02:38
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@Paul Johnston:
I have an ATI Xpress 1150 on board GPU.

And yes, if I leave the wrap commands as default value, and change SetGenerateMipmaps to 1 then the display also appears fine (Except the text, which is sorted out by reloading it)

Since both methods solve my problem, which is the preferable one to use?

>Edit<

Just as an addendum, none of the fixes above (SetGenerateMipmaps and re-loaing the text image) fix text from Print() statements, which I use quite a lot for debug. They still appear blurred.


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Paul Johnston
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Posted: 16th Oct 2012 05:12
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SetGenerateMipmaps forces AppGameKit to scale images to power of 2 size on Windows, so I suspect this fixed the image filtering problem, which suggests some ATI cards don't like non-power of 2 images with uv repeat (wrap mode 1).

If you want to uv repeat images (wrap mode 1) then the best fix would be to make your images a power of 2 in width and height. If you do not want to uv repeat (wrap mode 0) then setting the default wrap mode to 0 is the best fix.

Print text will be fixed in the next version and set to wrap mode 0.
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