MBG - Certain Levels close MarbleBlast [RESOLVED]

[ChaosUnown]

I am using Mac OS X Snow Leopard, as usual.

I wanted to play some certain levels in MBG, and they show up in the custom levels list just fine, but right after the level finishes loading MBG suddenly quits before the level even begins.

The weird thing though is that I don't think MBG crashed, because out of the numerous times this happened I was never given a crash or error window saying MBG unexpectedly quit.

Any help to get the levels to play would be very much appreciated.

[IsraeliRD]

A lot of possible culprits there and not much to go on right now.

Can you post here a number of custom levels which fail on you (5-10 of them), as well as a console.log of just one of them (like post entire console.log). This will be useful.

[ChaosUnown]

I can list some of the levels that fail, but how do I grab a console.log file again? I seem to have forgotten.

- My house sucks - I'm moving! / CountyTripper
- Slalom 7
- Halloween Town

To name a few. These were obtained from that massive MBG levels/interior .zip file.

[IsraeliRD]

Go to your library

Anyway you don't need console, I know what the problem is. Honestly I had a hunch what it was but you confirmed it for me.

We had a long standing problem where Mac users couldn't run certain levels and we didn't know why. One of THE earliest cases was Pablo's Sublime Plunge (LotM winner?) and continued with a few more of his levels. Funny enough a few more popped as time went on but we didn't know why.

Eventually PF figured out why.

Your problem are the textures.

Mac has a really messed up problem where PNG textures with ALPHA on causes Marble Blast to crash just like yours has. A quick fix would be to convert them to JPG or remove the alpha layer.

My house sucks / Slalom 7 both use logcabin.dif, which is what PF found to be one of those difs that Mac users could never run (Windows can!) and that's how he found that the textures for it (checkerboard2/3.png) contain the alpha layer which causes the crash.
Halloween Town also uses alpha-based textures, namely NULL, ORIGIN, FORCEFIELD, TRIGGER, WHITE (the last two aren't much used) in the gravestone interiors.

I'm not sure if the presence of both JPG and PNG of the same texture will get the JPG to be employed first (hence no crash) but IIRC the next CLA will contain the fixed checkerboard textures. Nonetheless this is not sufficient, obviously.

I would normally direct someone to PF at this point to get updated textures but since you already are having a ton of fun with them, you may as well do the work.

This is the list of all PNGs you need to find (and the ones I have in my CLA [2013 version]). Make JPGs of those and delete the PNGs. Make sure no alpha and you're good.

[IsraeliRD]

Oh and if you can send me and PF a zip of those PNGs as JPGs it's gonna be awesome because we'll add it to our CLA builds.

[Perishingflames]

I already fixed those for CLA but I guess that means nothing since they're just sitting on my computer. Like Matan said a lot of those were texture problems.

This was the final list of textures that caused issues on Mac:
edit: see my updated post

There's literally like 2 more things I have to do with CLA then I'm uploading once and for all. And passing on the buck for someone else in the future.

[ChaosUnown]

Alright, I'll get to converting the textures on PF's List (I assume?) later today, thanks for the help!

[Jeff]

The engine has a function for mac users that allows them to convert pngs to jpgs. I sent the script to chaosunown. (Credits to phil for the code as he wrote it for new mbp update)

Oh and if you can send me and PF a zip of those PNGs as JPGs it's gonna be awesome because we'll add it to our CLA builds.

Now you can do it cuz it exists in mbp

[Perishingflames]

May 24, 2013 7:14:08 GMT IsraeliRD said:

Oh and if you can send me and PF a zip of those PNGs as JPGs it's gonna be awesome because we'll add it to our CLA builds.

Are you maintaining your own build of CLA? I've made tons of changes besides adding the new levels, some documented, some not. I'll send you the completed build when I'm done. PM me.

[IsraeliRD]

I haven't maintained any no. I just got the one you gave me from ages ago and kept it with me. I'll PM you soon.

[ProMarbler]

I went exploring recently and found that logcabin.dif used the files checkerboard2/3.jpg, as opposed to .png, when it caused the crash. The reason for this was because they weren't actually jpgs, they were pngs, when it caused the crash. (Open it up in Preview, then "Get Info" (cmd I).) In addition to that, they also had alpha. Jpgs don't have alpha. The system knows this, throws an error when it reads the alpha data, and tells the game to quit (Presumably because it can't open it. When an OSX app doesn't know how to open something (like Textedit), it will display an error, then exit. Perhaps this error is intercepted by the game, and it also will exit.).

It gives the follow error in the Terminal:
Not a JPEG file: starts with 0x89 0x50
logout
And quits. The end.
...
As for the alpha, well, I loaded up Halloween Town in both MBG and MBP, with interiors, and both played and rendered fine. And it's also a really old computer. So either I failed at getting the correct textures, or you got different ones, or maybe it's just that version of OSX. Also, resaving the checkerboard jpgs as real jpgs (Via Preview!) fixes the evil crash. Also, a swap like this for level images also causes that failure.

In short: logcabin.dif used checkerboard2/3.jpg, which are misnamed pngs with alpha data. The game reads the images, sees alpha data, realizes it isn't a jpeg, and aborts. Removing the alpha data by resaving is as a proper jpg fixes this.

I do think that this fixes logcabin.dif. I do not know whether alpha in PNGs or some other cause is crashing Halloween Town for you.

[Perishingflames]

Exactly. That was what I concluded as well but never documented and forgot. Alpha channels aren't the problem, it was the file format mixup. Oh well, the fixed versions are in CLA right now.

As for Halloween Town, I just looked and it uses finish_line.jpg (136 × 135) and PumpkinFieldSign.jpg (815 × 391), both of which are nonstandard sizes which likely is causing the crashing. I fixed those a while ago for the CLA update, but I am attaching them here if you don't want to wait.

I just went through my CLA folder and all textures I modified to fix weird sizes and the alpha channel "jpgs" are attached. This is mainly important for mac users to fix the crashing issues but anyone can throw these into their interiors folder without issue.

Fixed Textures.zip

VERY VERY IMPORTANT: You have to delete checkerboard2.png and checkerboard3.png from your Interiors folder because the dif stores the texture name without the extension and looks for the .png file before .jpg so if both are in the Interiors folder, it will load the .png versions of the file and continue crashing!!

[ProMarbler]

The nonstandard texture sizes do explain why the walls rendered white, while the level picture clearly shows black walls. Rendering polygons with image dimensions that are not of a power of two is a GPU capability, some respond differently to this than others. Mine didn't render it at all (does the same in Minecraft), while his must've attempted to do so, and lagged itself/crashed. (I think rendering such things requires OpenGL 2.0, which I don't have.)

For the last bit, well, I have both the jpgs and the pngs in the same folder, and it loads the jpg first without a crash. Did experience a lag however, but I assumed that was because of the sheer abuse of interiors in the level.

Also, are those zipped colors for the April Fools level? I remember trying numerous places to get it to work, and that would explain it. ^^

Thanks!

[Perishingflames]

My mistake, you're right, it loads the JPG first so no deleting necessary.

The blankcolors are for April Fools 09 by 123zc1

[dlma]

Levels for me that quit on me are: Sublime plunge, My house sucks, i'm moving, The secret room 2, The secret room 3, Domestic Disturbance, Slalom 7, and If theres more, I'll tell you.

[Perishingflames]

Jul 13, 2013 17:34:14 GMT dlma said:

Levels for me that quit on me are: Sublime plunge, My house sucks, i'm moving, The secret room 2, The secret room 3, Domestic Disturbance, Slalom 7, and If theres more, I'll tell you.

Download the fixed textures pack I posted above. I'm pretty sure all of those used one of the glitchy textures. I just looked up Sublime Plunge and that uses checkerboard2 (fixed version included in the download). Do that then report back if any still don't work.

[ProMarbler]

PF had the link in his post. It is www.mediafire.com/?aphrpsg2uluv742 (or you can click "Fixed Textures.zip" as I said), and you should be able to goto your MarbleBlast game, then Rt-click/Ctrl-click it --> Show package contents, the navigate to Contents/platinum/data/interiors and replace the files in it with those from the package (as well as in _mbp and _mbg just to be safe). Or you can just find and open checkerboard2/3.png with Preview, then Save as --> Format: JPG, making sure the extension doesn't say .png when you save it. Overwrite each file so that the alpha is removed.

Each of those have logcabin.dif , which as PF and I explained above has the bad textures as previously described. You do not need to delete any .PNG's.

And out of all likelihood PF posts on the same minute. Wow.

[Aayrl]

Flagging this thread as 'Resolved', as the above attachment by PerishingFlames fixes the original poster's issue.

Locked.

~Aayrl