Stutter bug

[Toybox]

I have a very curious bug now, or rather have had the bug for some time.

Sometimes, every now and again, the game freezes the time of a heartbeat. Just enough to lose a Jack if it comes just when you should make a delicate jump!

Also, something which might be related: at the end of the music loops, there is just a heartbeat of a pause until the track gets played again. This was not always the case, the loops used to fit perfectly.

Anyone else getting those?

[aquaMat]

Never had anything like that, Toybox !

Sounds as if your computer would grant the program not enough RAM or something.... :-?

What kind of MAC are you using ?

[aquaMat]

As for your second question / problem:

In the meantime I have checked a few of the music files in a waveform editor and at least I can tell you that there is no silence at the end (or the beginning) of the tracks, so they should loop quite seamlessly.

I can't remember if they used to (do so), though.... it's too long ago that I played with

Music ON

, as I said elsewhere.

Is there a connection between the music problem you describe and the

stutter effect

.....I mean, does the music

gap

occur simultaneously with the stutter, or does it always occur ?

[Toybox]

- I use an ibook G4 which is 3 years old now.

- The music definitely used to loop seamlessly. Now, I can't tell you if it has always a gap, as I often play without, and the rest of the time I might not notice. I will play, listen and let you know.

I don't think the stutter and the gap occur necessarily together... Well, stuttering happened in the 4 tubes where there was no music for example. Will have a look at the converse.

It just seems related, because it's sort of the same phenomenon occurring once with the game and once with the music (like putting on slightly too large shoes).

[aquaMat]

Is it possible that you have changed the screen resolution sometime in the recent past, and it started to happen after that (without you really realising) ?
'Cause I suspect the graphic card of the iBook G4 might have something to do with it !!? So let's say you play full-screen and used to play at a smaller resolution, which worked fine and then you changed it to a higher res and the occasional stutter occurs....?!
(That wouldn't explain the music issue, though).

Normally, a G4 should be powerful enough for MM.....however I remember one other user reporting problems with a G4 in the past....but I can't remember the details.

Also I'm not sure whether the game runs completely in RAM or not. If not, maybe your hard disk is a bit too fragmented....and when you saved the latest mansion (T.F.T) maybe it got saved in fragments resulting in those stutters ?! (But that's really only a wild theory... I have no idea if this could be the reason,.... considering how small one mansion is, I would guess the game loads it completely into RAM.)

[Toybox]

Thanks for your answers aquaMat 8-)

I played a mansion to see, and the music mis-loops every time, although some more than others (I think 2 and 3 are the most severely affected, while 4 hardly). And the stutter didn't happen at all this time.

It is quite possibly some problem of fragmentation or something (whatever that is - I never really understood). I find that the computer generally is slower and needs more 'thinking' (whatever it does doing crr...crr...), so that could be it. (Any idea how to fix that btw?)

And I'm quite sure I didn't change the resolution deliberately. As to by mistake, I couldn't say (heck, it seems I even asked some programmes to be launched upon starting the ibook without realising :)

[rose]

Toybox wrote: Thanks for your answers aquaMat  8-)

It is quite possibly some problem of fragmentation or something (whatever that is - I never really understood). I find that the computer generally is slower and needs more 'thinking' (whatever it does doing crr...crr...), so that could be it. (Any idea how to fix that btw?)

And I'm quite sure I didn't change the resolution deliberately. As to by mistake, I couldn't say (heck, it seems I even asked some programmes to be launched upon starting the ibook without realising  :)

Have you saved a lot on the hard disk?? The puter does need free space too! for virtual memory

[Toybox]

I still have a little over 31 GB available :-?

(Although it would be a good idea, independently, to clean up a little bit the pooter.)

[aquaMat]

Toybox, if you ahould want to test if it really is a question of RAM (allocated to MM) you can use an utility program (inside the folder

Programme >> Dienstprogramme

(in the German Mac OS) ) called

Aktivitäts-Anzeige

(in German). Unfortunately I don't know the English name of that utility / program !

However, with that utility it is possible to check how much RAM a current software needs and/or uses at the moment.

So you should have MM running and, parallel to that, open

Aktivitäts-Anzeige

and check under

% CPU

.

Should you really find out that MM doesn't have enough RAM allocated (which I doubt), you can put it higher up in the list (under

% CPU

).

See

MAC Help

(>RAM) for a detailed procedure.

[VernJensen]

Two things:

A) The brief pause at the end of a piece of music has always been there. It's due to the MP3 format. It doesn't happen with AIFF format music, but then AIFF takes up a lot more space, so we went with MP3 and tried to set up the music loops such that the gap would be as least noticeable as possible.

B) As for game stutters, one likely culprit is Mail. If Mail checks for new email automatically, and is running in the background, this could easily cause the problem. So could other background processes, like someone logging into your Mac via a local network, or any other background program that does something intensive. So quit other apps before launching Midnight Mansion and see if that helps. If so, you might be able to narrow it down to which program in time, if you're curious which background app is doing it.