Input Hangs

[Blackstream]

When playing shoujo attack, things will be going along fine and dandy, when suddenly the keyboard and mouse stop responding for about 5 seconds or so. Unfortunately while this happens the game keeps moving. So I watch my carefully set up... um... setup disintegrate while I frantically hit the p button to no avail:p

This doesn't happen too often, but occasionally it does. Not sure why, but fortunately most times I'm already paused so I just wait till it comes back.

Btw, I'm using Windows XP with 256 mb RAM.

[Blue Lemma]

Whenever you start or restart a level, there's a load time. Could that be it?

[Blackstream]

No, it happens in the middle of the level. Like last time in the last level of goddess, I had just made my tunnel on the ground for my shoujo and was having one shoujo paint herself out (and have the next one blast it so that the others didn't follow). I got out and onto the hill right next to my tunnel and started painting my way up to the big cloud. The input stopped right then and she walked off her painted bridge and onward to oblivion (as opposed to me telling her to keep painting if the input hadn't hung).

Usually the input stops during pauses, but occasionaly not. It can't be a loading hang because the game goes on normally while the input is frozen. Very weird. I wonder if it's possible that another program took keyboard and mouse priority even though your game was in the forground. If so I'm not sure you could fix something like that in allegro. It's not a big bug, I just end up having to restart the level. but ah well.

[Blue Lemma]

I'd suggest closing out any other major programs you have running before you play. It probably won't hurt. Are you sure something isn't eating up your RAM, causing things to swap in and out of memory? (long shot)

[Blackstream]

That did occur to me as I do only have 256 mb of ram, though I don't think I had any major programs running in the background. Even so, if the game was busy swapping, shouldn't the whole game have froze? I'll try that though. Next time I play I'll close everything and see what happens. Also, if there is a freeze I'll pop up the task manager and see how much available ram I have.