I’ve run into a weird issue. Sometimes, when players try to open my game, the Startup Movie just freezes. This happens randomly, I would say like 2/10 times. When it freezes, nothing works - the players can’t do anything except force-close the game. Restarting usually fixes it, but it’s super annoying obviously.
I have tried many things, but can’t seem to figure it out…
I tried different video formats.
Tried reducing its size.
Checked for any other apps running in the background that might be messing with it.
Sadly, no luck. The problem is still there and it doesn’t seem to follow any pattern.
Anyone had something like this happen with their project’s intro movies as well?
Anything else I should be looking at or trying out?
Hey there @MuskaDev! Welcome back to the community! Are there any patterns between affected users hardware or OS wise? There’s been an issue reported for freezing startup movies for laptop users due to a weird integrated graphics that’s been tough to track.
Unfortunately, I haven’t noticed any clear patterns related to the OS or hardware.
This issue seems to happen on both high to low-end specs, and remember it happening to myself as well once.
I would say the only thing that seems to increase the chance of this issue happening is when user switches to a different window or application while the game is launching - other than that, there aren’t any consistent triggers that I’m aware of atm.
While I’m not sure there’s a connection, it’s worth noting that the game runs through Steam. There might be something happening there, but that’s just speculation.
Hrm, does it crash fully eventually or just remain frozen? Try launching a debug build with the command line arg -d3ddebug and check the log to see if anything GPU wise is being reported right before the freeze.
You could periodically check if with a debug message if the media player loaded up the file and is playing. (perhaps a timer event every .5 seconds or so).
If you get a black screen in place of the movie you could at least see if the player is running & has assigned media.
@SupportiveEntity The game doesn’t crash by itself, it just remains frozen until the person terminates the process forcefully, until then, it stays frozen at the last frame of the movie that managed to be played.
I tried to reproduce the issue within the debug build and the d3ddebug, however, no luck so far. As mentioned, it happened only once on my own PC, so it’s a bit hard to find a way to reproduce it.
I could reach out to the players who encountered the issue, but not sure if their logs will be helpful since they only ran the Shipping build.
Here are the specs of the movie I’m using:
Format: MP4
Size: 7.7 MB
Length: 10 Seconds
Frame rate: 60 FPS
Bitrate: 6500 kbps
The video is located within the movies folder (like the rest of the vids I use within the project) and it’s included in the ‘Startup Movies’ array in the Project Settings.
Both ‘Movies Are Skippable’ and ‘Wait for Movies to Complete’ booleans are set to true. I assume this works in a way that they can be skipped by the player if desired, but will always play out in full in case they don’t, regardless of whether the game has finished loading in the background already.
I really appreciate your time to help me with this issue. Thanks a lot!
It’s likely their logs wouldn’t report the crash anyway if it was just a freeze, but it’s always worth trying! Can you replicate it with the Debug build? I’m thinking this is some form of environmental difference being the lynchpin but hard to say yet. Your movie specs are firmly normal, same with your settings.
