TGEA 1.7.0 Beta 2 Bug - Minimise Window on running EXE

#1 Windows XP - all seems to be fine, so looks like Vista issue.

#2 We aren't able to recreate this bug on Vista either...

Anything else you can tell us that would help?

Is your DirectX 9 and video drivers up-to-date? What versions are they?

#3 Actually I recall TGEA crashing on me a few times when I minimized it on XP. But it would only crash if it were minimized right when the window outline appears. I wasn't too worried about it, figured it was a side effect to some code that I was tinkering with so I didn't bother looking into it. Plus, like I said, only happens when I minimize as soon as the window outline appears and it doesn't happen all the time, every once in a great while.

Why would someone minimize the window as soon as the engine starts? Cuz I like to look at code while I'm waiting the 5 seconds or so it takes to load TGEA. No, seriously.

WindowsXP Pro
AMD Athlon 64-bit 3000+
GeForce 6600 256MB VM
1GB RAM
All drivers updated

#4 Windows vista home premium edition
Geforce 7500 LE
Intel Dual Core 2.8
1GB Ram
Running updated drivers.

Must be one of those graphics card related things :)

#5 This happens for me in XP actually. The engine/game isn't always brought to the front and clicking on it in the taskbar sometimes minimizes it, instead of causing it to come to the front.

If it is minimized right before actual window creation, there seems to be an issue with it being minimized and trying to create a window.

I will try to get a stack track

J

#6 I don't believe it's a major issue, but it could crop up when a player loads up the game, but know its going to take a little while, and looks at other things like email, then the game crashes. Potential support issue. It could be down to taking away resources from the EXE that is exclusive, and it just can't handle sharing the stack with any other focused application.

#7 One more thing, the above happens when you are in a game window Not full screen. In XP and Vista when in a full screen game you ALT-TAB out of the game or you click on the Start hotkey on some keyboards by mistake it then minimizes or takes your game out of focus, then when you click into it again it appears to be crashed with an egg timer, but really it seems like swap space on windows is compensating for the change of environment, if you leave it long enough it may kick back in, but in many cases on XP and Vista you have to end the process. Not an issue for a windowed environment tho.

It has to be something down to the priority of when the game is in focus or not.

#8 I haven't encountered this yet and I minimize and max the game will all the time while debugging stuff. This could be a graphics driver releated issue where the graphics driver is not correctly picking the game back up after you bring it back onto the screen.

#9 @Thomas - can you min/max in full game screen without it causing a problem? I noticed this on two machines, one XP and the other Vista, both with different graphics cards and drivers.

#10 I can min/max just fine once the game/engine is loaded, for me and some of our guys its just the initial loading and being minimized that crashes

#11 I can min/max just fine at the main menu and ingame even dureing the mission loading stages. I havent tried to min/max it at the initial loadup of the engine though. Most of the time the window just freezes for afew seconds during that initial startup anyways.

#12 Jeremiah - same here, no problem once loaded. Initial loading up crashes on minimizing the window. It's not something that a gamer would do unless he/she would know how long they have to wait for it to get to the menu screen. They may be surfing the net at the same time.

Thomas - Try the game in full screen, on mission loading, alt tab to another application, and then back again, see if it crashes then. In a window it will not crash.

#13 I could only get it to do once on mission loading out of 5 tries.

That one time produced the following message in the console log. Its worth noteing the application never crashed but that 1 time it did go into a non responding state.

GFXD3D9Device::beginScene - Device needs to be reset, waiting on device...
And that message was there about 300 or so times as thats about how long I let it run before hard closeing the application.