Game crashes in "Tai Ming"

[Roblox Jesus]

While I was grinding monsters in Tai Ming my game suddenly crashed when I opened the crafting tab, and I was met with the message "The game deaded". I had lost all of the stuff I had been grinding that area including 2 cards and a lot of items. Is there any way I could avoid this in the future?

 

[The G-Meister]

Not that I know of. Most crashes are spontaneous and of new origin - the devs do a fantastic job of dropping patches for critical bugs like that. In terms of keeping your stuff better after crashes through, try exiting through a loading screen every half hour or so. That should force the game to save. Oh and beware, some doorways aren't loading screens, mainly those into small buildings, so watch out for that

However, if you were grinding for a long period of time, the game may have made a backup of your progress. If you navigate to %appdata% > Secrets of Grindea > Backups, and sort the folders by date, find your character and then sort the files by date, I think the files with the prefix "auto" are made at fixed time intervals (don't quote me on that). Regardless, renaming them to "0.cha" and "0.wld" for slot 1 or "1.cha" and "1.wld" for slot two etc. and then copying them into the Characters and Worlds folders, you might find you get the stuff back. I'd suggest uploading them into an empty save slot so you keep your current file if anything does go wrong though. If I went through that too quickly there's a video in the spoiler below.

Did you end up submitting the error report after the crash? That would allow the devs to know what happened.

Hopefully the backups restore your progress - some of those Tai Ming cards took ages for me to grind, I can imagine the pain

 

[Teddy]

Man, that sucks. Sorry about that

I've been planning to add periodical auto-saving when staying in the same area for a long time, but right now the game saves during the loading screen when moving between areas (or on game over, which reloads the current area).

For now, if you want to be safe from crashes removing progress, you can zone in and out of the area to trigger the autosave, or if there's a teleport plate you can just teleport to the same area to reload it.

 

[The G-Meister]

I've been planning to add periodical auto-saving when staying in the same area for a long time

Oh I thought that's what the auto files were. what makes them different from the normal backups then? And for that matter, when are the normal backups taken?

 

[Teddy]

Oh I thought that's what the auto files were. what makes them different from the normal backups then? And for that matter, when are the normal backups taken?

The auto-backups are simply your 5 latest auto saves (that are older than your current save file)! Whenever the game saves, before overwriting your old save, the game moves it and replaces the oldest auto-backup. If a new hour of game time has been passed, the file is also copied into one of the "h"-files, where they are saved permanently.

 

[The G-Meister]

Ahhh alright. So the regular backing up and the "an hour has passed" are not two separate events, the hour passed check is only done after a backup is taken normally. I'll bear that in mind for the future

 

[Roblox Jesus]

Thank you for the help. I got all the items and cards back from grinding again. This time I go into the sacred temple to auto save every so often. I only have the monkey card left

 

[Benignflux]

Can confirm! There is a bug which causes the game to crash due to a array out of bounds exception when accessing the crafting menu. it seems that it started immediately after receiving the crafting recipe for the banana hat

The closest I can come to reliably reproducing it is by repeatedly hitting A (xbox 360 controller) full up right on the left thumbstick.

It's pretty random but it happens consistently when trying to get into the craft screen quickly if I hold the thumbstick just wrong....


Version: 0.710b Steamy Hot Unstable

Error: System.ArgumentOutOfRangeException: Index was out of range. Must be non-negative and less than the size of the collection.
Parameter name: index
at System.ThrowHelper.ThrowArgumentOutOfRangeException(ExceptionArgument argument, ExceptionResource resource)
at System.Collections.Generic.List`1.get_Item(Int32 index)
at SoG.Game1._InGameMenu_Input() in (path)\States\Menus\InGameMenu.cs:line 3751
at SoG.Game1._IngameInput_Handling() in (path)\InputHandling.cs:line 200
at SoG.Game1.Update(GameTime gameTime) in (path)\Game1.cs:line 989 - FullScreen: Yes - NetworkRole: Server - MD5: 5b3f485daa0c4c9fe0067b1cc812844e

 

[Teddy]

Can confirm! There is a bug which causes the game to crash due to a array out of bounds exception when accessing the crafting menu. it seems that it started immediately after receiving the crafting recipe for the banana hat

The closest I can come to reliably reproducing it is by repeatedly hitting A (xbox 360 controller) full up right on the left thumbstick.

This was a pretty interesting one! The error generated by the game was a bit misleading, since the actual error happened on the action before, but your reproduction method provided good hints.

What happens is that the menu movement logic in the crafting section for some reason gets checked after the action button logic. While in category select using a controller, both pressing A and right counts as an action and will take you deeper into the menu.

This means that if you press the action button at the same time as the up button, the game will first confirm that you're allowed to enter the next menu level and then handle the up button, changing the category and thereby the circumstances of the menu. In this case, what happens is that after the game accepts a change to the item list, the game switches to an empty list (probably Facegear or Misc). The game expects at least one element in the item list, and crashes.

Solution: handle category movement logic before the action logic!

If you're confused by my suddenly writing an essay on a bug, don't be afraid. It's something I do randomly for reasons beyond understanding!

 

[The G-Meister]

You do it because every time you write one you get a like from me because that's the sort of stuff I find interesting! It's also really helpful being a novice gamedev!

 

[Jenkolegs]

I'm just good at breaking stuff, already found 4 things in the past hour.