Hellish hellish hellish day. The worst nightmare in programming is a spontaneous, unexplained and untrackable bug magically appearing from nowhere, and this has afflicted Gunstorm II. About 25% of the time, the game starts 'frozen' with a white screen, locked about 6 loops in. I couldn't explain it and flagged off lines to track down what might be causing it. In the end, I flagged everything off and it still happened, about 25% of the time.
Then the same thing appeared in Gunstorm, and in my basic Skeleton, the root of all of my games! I'm at a loss and have spend all day, endless hours running and re-running things, trying to find it, trying to stop it. Part of me thought that it was nothing to do with me, but a security trap (recalling the random 'black screen' bugs in Taskforce, which were caused by Windows Defender).
But this doesn't feel like that. It seems that part of the program does run, when frozen, the menus still sound and the exit key works, but at very slowly, 2 seconds per loop. The screen won't update though so I can't tell if sprites are moving or other things are happening.
Utterly dispiriting. If I can't fix it then all of my 2024 plans for game remastered are cancelled. This idiotic bug is so fundamental that I'd expect it to be in all of my games: Future Snooker and Pool, Taskforce, Flatspace, yet I can't remember experiencing it. Very odd. Very frustrating.
Hellish.
