[Solved] Bizarre bug. Screen is going black in the middle of dialogue.

[slithery eyed wombat]

code:

Code: Select all

    c1 "Excellent!"

    show c1 armso with dissolve

    "You grab it out of her hands."

    c1 "Now we just wait."

    c1 "Since I made it, it will obviously work flawlessly!"

Between lines 3 and 4, the screen goes black. The background and both characters on screen disappear but the dialogue box remains.

I'm completely flummoxed.

I know I'm not providing a lot of detail here, but honestly this is all I've got. There's absolutely no reason for the anything other than the text in a dialogue box to change between those lines. All I can think is that this is come kind of pretty nasty bug within Ren'Py itself. I'd love to be proven wrong, of course.

The one thing someone in the discord had me try that resulted in some change in behavior was editing one of my characters images. I drew a red squiggly line (just to change it) on one of the poses and that resulted in the black "screen" appearing a few lines earlier in the code.

However, replacing all of that characters images with the uncompressed originals didn't change anything, so I'm not convinced.

The behavior looks similar to what would happen if, at that line, I wrote ` scene black `, all the characters vanish and the background turns black. Of course, I'm not calling that there, it's happening in between two lines of dialogue. However, if I try and put the characters pack in the scene, Renpy apparently can no longer find the image because it just draws the placeholder character image (the default renpy one that has the image name in the middle). However this is only the case with *some* characters, others appear with no problems. Something really strange is going on here.

[slithery eyed wombat]

I've made sure everything is up to date. I even downloaded the latest Renpy SDK (I was running 7.1.3) but that didn't fix anything.

[slithery eyed wombat]

Working more on this problem: I use git as my VCS, so decided to roll back my game to the first commit that included the troubled section of dialogue. However, after play testing it, I found that the problem didn't appear. Everything worked as expected. I guess this means the problem isn't something inherent in those lines of dialogue, but a deeper issue with renpy itself?

[isobellesophia]

So you used 7.1.3, 7.2.0 has many bug fixes including the during dialogue in game. I guess that is clearly a bug which is nothing problem on the code you just showed.

(Just to make sure that the new version of the Ren'py is installed. So bugs or glitches cannot be appeared anymore.)

Alot of people mentioned about bugs in Ren'Py.

[slithery eyed wombat]

Right, I originally used 7.1.3, but after trying lots of other things I did download 7.2.1 and ran my code on it. The problem still exists.

[slithery eyed wombat]

Ok, found the problem (thanks PyTom).

Turns out I had a side effect in one of my screens.

Code: Select all

screen city_map:
    
    $ renpy.show("black")
    
    imagemap:
        ....

Turns out this is a big no-no. After removing the renpy.show() call, the problem went away!