Dev Log #13 | Bug hunt

Update 0.3 will release this week. But before that, I am going to give a little glimpse of an annoying bug I've been hunting for the past two weeks.

Two weeks ago update 0.2.1 went public and with it a strange problem occured. I got a comment on F95 from someone who was saying he couldn't see any of the animations. Now, I was intrigued. That wasn't good. I put in all the effort and he couldn't even see them? A big problem.

But I'll be honest. I didn't believe it at first. No one had ever mentioned that bug and I never experienced it while testing. But then another comment came in, reporting the same issue.

So I took it more serious and looked at my script. What was going wrong? I noticed that animations could be missed easily when skipping through the dialogue. So I changed that and wrote it as an answer in the forum. But then someone else came along and said he wasn't skipping, but regularly clicking. Now that was weird. I put in a block that makes it impossible to click past the first seconds of an animation. But I decided to just increase the length of that block. 

But new voices came in. They said that they didn't click or skip past it, they never even saw it. Now I had an idea. Surely it was an android problem. That was only my second android port and I still suck at it. But no. I asked and the user said he plays on a PC. But he also mentioned that the lewd animations were no problem.

Now I knew that I am using different code to display these. So I decided to implement that code for all of the animations. A bit of manual work but nothing major. I thought things were saved. But then I got a comment on Patreon. Adolerak Sandau pointed out that the issue was connected to the transition skip option under preferences. A new lead.

I checked it out and yes. Now I had the same issue. The animations never even showed up. But not only them. All pauses I had put in the script didn't work. And that's when I realized. Transition skipping erased all pauses I used. That was the reason for the skipped animations. Now I was close. I knew the bug, I only had to resolve it. But how? I tried a few things out and luckily found an answer.

There are basically two types of pauses in Ren'Py. And I simply used the wrong one. The simple "pause" function was always skipped, but "renpy.pause" which gives a little more control isn't skipped. I am not good enough with Ren'Py or Python to explain why that was happening, but now the bug is resolved and I hope everyone can enjoy all the future scenes without worrying.