Author Topic: Freezing?  (Read 1815 times)

bmontana33

  • Newbie
  • *
  • Posts: 47
    • View Profile
Freezing?
« on: January 11, 2012, 02:56:33 PM »
Now that I have my layout screens corrected, when I run a tournament it transitions from pre-tourney to round 1 screen ok, but when the countdown reaches the end of round one, the screen starts to transition to the round 2 screen (even rounds), however it freezes halfway through transition and I'm stuck looking at half of my odd round and half of my even round screen. So I can't see the round 2 countdown or blind levels or any info in regards to round 2, but I do hear "new blind level" the sound event I created to go off at the begining of each round.

If I try to jump to round 3 the same thing happens. My normal first thought would be the computer running the program doesn't have enough power to handle the screen transitions and different pictures, but I find that hard to believe since my computer has lots and lots of power.

Any suggestions/thoughts?

jodybingo

  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 667
    • View Profile
    • Personal Web Site
Re: Freezing?
« Reply #1 on: January 11, 2012, 03:34:16 PM »
Corey, I have this same problem. It doesn't happen every round and it doesn't stay halfway through its transition. I have used several different layouts with fewer cells, more cells layouts with and without Flash animations and it still freezes halfway through on occasion. I wasn't able to reproduce this on my laptop so I thought it might be the machine and so I disabled all transitions. I keep a close eye on the forums and when I didn't see anybody else posting this it was kind of a confirmation it was just my machine.

Corey Cooper

  • Administrator
  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 6216
    • View Profile
Re: Freezing?
« Reply #2 on: January 11, 2012, 03:50:12 PM »
My first thought is that this is the same or similar bug postulated in this topic: http://www.thetournamentdirector.net/forums/index.php?topic=3240.0

Also, I noticed earlier this week, if the clock is paused or unpaused during a screen transition, I see this behavior about 50% of the time.  I did a bit of debugging and I have yet to determine why it is happening.  There appears to be no error condition, the transition just stops.  I'm still looking into it.

bmontana33

  • Newbie
  • *
  • Posts: 47
    • View Profile
Re: Freezing?
« Reply #3 on: January 11, 2012, 04:13:47 PM »
At least I know its not necessarily something I'm doing wrong. A handfull of times I made it to the transition from round 1 to round 2 before it freezes, but the past few times I've tried it, it has frozen between the pre-tourney screen and round 1. I haven't actually used this program for a real tournament yet...I just finished building my own raised rail poker table and am having my first tournament in a couple of weeks on it and was hoping to use this program. I guess I might have to try a basic layout without background images and differenet displays for breaks and rounds and see if that works...

I'll keep an eye out for a fix.

bmontana33

  • Newbie
  • *
  • Posts: 47
    • View Profile
Re: Freezing?
« Reply #4 on: January 12, 2012, 09:11:23 AM »
Thanks Jody for the suggestion of disabling all screen transitions. After re-creating the entire layout and the screen still freezing between transitions, I just disabled all transitions and the tournaments I've ran thus far have not froze...yeah!!!

Corey Cooper

  • Administrator
  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 6216
    • View Profile
Re: Freezing?
« Reply #5 on: January 12, 2012, 03:44:10 PM »
To keep you guys up-to-date, my preliminary investigation is showing that playing a sound while a screen is transitioning can cause the transition to abruptly end.  In technical-speak: "timeouts" scheduled to occur sometimes fail to occur after an audio file is played.  At this time, it looks like an IE issue (as opposed to a TD issue).  This usually sucks because instead of fixing my code, I'll have to find a way around the IE issue or we'll just have to live with it.  Let's hope I'm wrong (I frequently am).

Here's how I came to this conclusion, if you want to try it yourself:

1) Disable all transitions except for one, like "Push right" (an easy one to tell when it begins and ends)
2) Set the transition time to 3 seconds
3) Set your Screen Sets to simply rotate between 2 or 3 screens every 6 seconds
4) Go to the Events tab, and Omit all events
5) Open the "Clock" sound (double-click it)
6) During the 3 seconds of a screen transition, press the "Play" button to play the sound.  It doesn't occur every time, so you may have to push it a few times.  Eventually, you'll see the screen transition stop.

Corey Cooper

  • Administrator
  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 6216
    • View Profile
Re: Freezing?
« Reply #6 on: January 13, 2012, 12:37:48 PM »
Got it, I believe.  Looks like our old friend "Call was rejected by callee" has reared its ugly head again.  I am hypothesizing that there is a brief window of time when Windows Media Player initiates playing a sound where the main TD window is essentially "tied up" and cannot receive calls from external code windows (in this case, the invisible window that controls the clock and a few other things).  Transitions occur in steps that are "chained" together, with each step performing work and then scheduling the next step in the process.  When one of those steps happens to occur at that same time the sound is initiated, the call is rejected and, unfortunately, the error simply absorbed (the TD code never sees it).  As a result, the transition "chain" is broken (the next step isn't scheduled), and the transition never completes.

I've changed the way this is called so that the code can check for this specific error, and if it occurs, just schedule the next step of the chain.  Looks like it is working. 

Unfortunately this is code that cannot be published in a patch.  I was waiting to finish the user manual before releasing the next version, but I think I'll have to accelerate that.  I'm going to try to get this out over the weekend.