An unexpected full day of work on Flatspace IIk. I was determined to track down the orphan mine bug and have worked all day on it, finally solving it. One crucial trace was to save out each shot and sprite pointer when a game is saved, then document each sprite when loaded. Oddly, one of the loaded sprites was later disregarded as an orphan; my first clue.
It turned out that the problem was entirely with save and load. When saving any game with shots in the air, re-loading that save would only load one shot, but re-load all sprites as though they were shots, leaving a mass of ghost-shots which appeared to be valid, making the error less obvious. It was caused because the linked list of shots is uniquely added to at the start rather than the end (shots have a 'bank' to speed things up and avoid real-time memory reservation).
This has probably been a bug in Flatspace II since version 1.00, and old and huge games may have hundreds of thousands of distant shots filling up the game universe. Saves made from v1.11 onwards will finally fix this and work correctly, though older saves can't easily be fixed as there's no simple way to see if a sprite is valid or not, ghosts will persist forever (until death and a new game, that is). It won't be a problem from v1.11 onwards.
I'll release the update in a few days or weeks, after more testing. Now I must get back to music videos. My computer fan is making annoying clatters, perhaps because the room rarely gets above 18 degrees in the current cold snap. I can but hope that it will enter a calmer phase, as it is wont to do.
