I Was in Town 2 Going to Town 3 Leveling up. When I Warp To Town 1 ( Kishkan ) i Went to the Cave to try and Help out Player (IWP) The Cave at First was Okey But After a Few Mins It Turned Black I left and came back In to see if that was the Problem but it was not.. it left When i Told SuperBike About it.. It's All Weird.. But He told me to Report. So i Might as WEll Do that.. :) If it Happens Again il Will Report it To see if theres anything we can do.

You haven't provided enough information in this bug report. There is no set of steps to reproduce the issue, no link to the games that show it, not even screenshots of the issue in action.

Lummox, what information do you want? Also I will remember to take screenshots next time....it doesn't take long before each occurence...so just tell me what you want & I will get the information for you...

As I've mentioned on many occasions, we normally require steps to reproduce the bug so we can confirm it in action and confirm a fix. If the bug is intermittent, there may still be steps that at least cause it to happen more often. Without any such info, the only thing I can do is join a game and blindly stumble around, hoping to see the problem crop up. My chances of seeing a bug are significantly diminished without at least some guidance, so I almost never do this.

Superbike32 wrote:

---If there were a build that could tell what information was being sent & how the client's should've handled that data(what action should've been taken such as what it displays because of it, etc...) that might be able to show where the problem lies & what's received too...either due to data transmission problems(packet loss or whatever) or in-correct data being sent to the clients...

Any such data would be significant in quantity, surpassingly difficult to interpret, and probably useless without actually being in the debugger to see what's going on when it happens. Heck, at this point I don't even have a good description of the problem, which makes choosing the right debug info quite impossible. But since the easiest way to spot a problem and understand why it's happening is to be able to examine the data in real time in a debugger, this is why I'm a stickler for those numbered steps--or something close enough to let me reproduce it myself. If I can reproduce the issue in the debugger, there's an excellent chance I can understand the cause of the problem and fix it. If not, there is a very poor chance.

Or possibly something like icon corruption, etc... thats my only explanation on the possible problem occuring...

Inasmuch as you have yet to provide so much as a screenshot, I have no way to tell if that can be ruled out or not.

As far as I can tell though...the more of the game you have explored the more likely it is to happen(like the more icons that have been loaded up into memory or the like)

This also means that a debugging session undertaken without a strict and extensive testing regimen is unlikely to trigger the issue. In other words, logging in and wandering aimlessly is not going to do the trick. Remember that I'm usually unfamiliar with the games that come up in these reports, and certainly not a regular player, so I'm not gonna be wandering around for half an hour doing normal player things.

If it takes half an hour of play to cause a bug to occur, I'm willing to put in that half hour only if I'm guaranteed a bug and I'm running in the debugger where I can catch the bug in action. (And if I need to trigger on a certain point, it's common that I'll need to make several runs through. Often I'll see in the first run what's wrong, and I'll try to catch where it goes wrong in the second run.)

Also possibly after a few minutes of time(give) if this is associated to the 5 minute garbage collection of icons update....it maybe garbage collecting the icon & just not realizing it had needed it & doesn't reload it...

With the way our garbage collection and icon loading works, I suspect this is not the cause of the bug. But I can't guarantee that either, since again I don't even have a solid description of the bug to work with. Again, screenshots would be a big help.

I now have a screenshot, and it seems a lot more dissappeared this time, I just started playing again after leaving it just on & was chatting for a while....

All the chat & such covered by purple & the taskbar icons/time is intentional, chat for players privacy & the taskbar/time just because what i'm running & when it happened don't matter...

BTW I have not changed my graphics card & or driver recently + others are having problems too...

This is the first time though this area has bugged(but im usually not at this area...)

Heres the link...

http://superbike32.freehostia.com/BYOND/Bug_Reports/ Graphics_Problem/

EDIT:More information...now the NPC's dissappeared to until I got closer to one off-screen then they all appeared again...maybe it's unloading it for whatever reason(recent update) but once i got close the whole file was reloaded, making them re-appear? that's my best guess at this point due to this occurence...

Is there a problem with it not showing or something? I will upload to another format in a few seconds if you want...

I have it set to tif cause it's lossless & I do a lot of work with graphics which need to look perfect, so I use tif for regular images or svg to produce crisp, clean images....

.tif is not a web-friendly format. When uploading to the web, you must always use .gif, .jpg, or .png. No other formats are widely supported, and .tif in particular is barely even used anymore.

OK Lummox, I will do that, and as a note...all the icons that dissappear are related, their all in the same icon file(s) that dissappear at once...no icons in an area from the same file as one that has dissappeared is left rendered when the problem occurs, leading me to believe that it's a problem with the file loading into memory...or unloading but not re-loading either quick enough or doesn't call to load it at all, either after being unloaded or at all, under certain circumstances.

Anyways...I know .tif isn't the best for the web but I make my websites compatible at the moment for only Internet Explorer because I don't have as far a reach as BYOND & only need it to work at a few select computers...

I will show .gif's in the future when dealing with this issue though....

Anyways heres the link to how it should look...

http://superbike32.freehostia.com/BYOND/Bug_Reports/ Graphics_Problem/Pictures/No_Bug.jpg

Oh and as a side note there would likely be more black if it weren't changed how I did it...the trees where grass is partially showing(not a full tile) has grass placed under it & that grass is still visible fully even though the icon(also a turf actually) above it is no longer shown.

Only the full tiles of trees where no grass is visible below it & no grass was placed at that location is completely black...as for the water icon why it shows no grass is because any grass from that bordering water is part of the water icon itself, not the grass icon & nothing was placed under it so it makes sense why it turned black(as if you placed nothing there at all on the map)