Partially stops working--only first 3 scenes continue to work

[Dracowyrm]

I have experienced this multiple times, including unloading all sound files, reloading them and trying again.

I have 4 main "scenes": Ambient, Action, Foreboding, and 1920s. I start RPG-Ambience, and wait until all sound files have loaded to all the scenes (this takes a little while, as some of the scenes have more than 40 files in them).

At first, all four scenes play, and I can switch between them. Then the last one ("Foreboding") simply goes silent, and nothing I do can make it play again. At that point, any other scenes I have loaded below Foreboding go silent as well.

I really love RPG-Ambience, and want to use it! I hope there is a solution to this problem. Do I simply have too many files in my "scenes", and they are overloading the app?

Please advise--I understand you are very busy this year, but would appreciate any help.

Mark

[JakobKallin]

I will look into this. To begin with, please share your adventure with rpg.ambience@gmail.com. To do this, open the normal Google Drive web interface, then right-click the adventure file (it should have a .ambience extension) and select Share. Also do this for all the media files in the adventure. If all of the files are in the same folder, you can simply share the folder itself. Also note that the .ambience file as well as the media files can be located anywhere in your Google Drive, so feel free to move them if that makes it easier.

If you do not want to or cannot share the adventure, contact me at rpg.ambience@gmail.com and we can work something out.

Also let me know which operating system and browser you are using. If your browser is very old (two years or more), please make a note of that as well.

[Dracowyrm]

Jakob, thank you.

I have figured out that if I reduce the number of media files, I can get all the scenes to work. I had about 40 files in my first scene and 20-30 in each scene thereafter (shuffling), and after 3-4 scenes, all the rest just wouldn't work. But when I reduced the number of music files in the early scenes, then refreshed the page, all of the scenes worked once the media files had loaded.

Does this make any sense to you?

I will share the adventure from Google Drive. Do you really need all the media files shared as well? There are probably 100 of them.

I am on Windows 7 and using the latest version of Chrome.

Thanks for your help, and for RPG-Ambience, which is a great tool.

Mark

On Tuesday, July 22, 2014, Jakob Kallin notifications@github.com wrote:

I will look into this. To begin with, please share your adventure with rpg.ambience@gmail.com javascript:_e(%7B%7D,'cvml','rpg.ambience@gmail.com');. To do this, open the normal Google Drive web interface https://drive.google.com/, then right-click the adventure file (it should have a .ambience extension) and select Share. Also do this for all the media files in the adventure. If all of the files are in the same folder, you can simply share the folder itself. Also note that the .ambience file can be located anywhere in your Google Drive, so feel free to move it if necessary.

If you do not want to or cannot share the adventure, contact me at rpg.ambience@gmail.com javascript:_e(%7B%7D,'cvml','rpg.ambience@gmail.com'); and we can work something out.

Also let me know which operating system and browser you are using. If your browser is very old (two years or more), please make a note of that as well.

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub https://github.com/JakobKallin/RPG-Ambience/issues/60#issuecomment-49763386 .

[JakobKallin]

I created my own adventure with a large number of media files and noticed similar issues as you, although not as serious. While having access to all of the media files in your adventure would make debugging easier, you can start by looking for some errors on your own:

1. Open RPG Ambience and select the original adventure, with all of the media files in it.
2. Press F12 to open the developer tools, then select the Console tab.
3. While the media files are loading, look for any errors in the console. (Their text should be red.)
4. When the media files have loaded, keep the developer tools open and play scenes until they stop working. Look for errors in the same way as before.

For any errors you find, please copy the error message and include it in a message in this thread. If you see multiple errors of the same kind, you only need to include one of them, so I can identify the general nature of the error.

If an error message includes the ID of a file in your Google Drive, you may want to anonymize it by replacing or leaving out characters. (You can basically replace any long string of random characters with ... or similar.)

I have an idea of what might be causing this, but I'll look at any error messages that you find before looking closer at it.

[Dracowyrm]

Great, thank you--I'll do this as soon as I can. Probably get it to you tomorrow.

Mark

On Wed, Jul 23, 2014 at 2:15 PM, Jakob Kallin notifications@github.com wrote:

I created my own adventure with a large number of media files and noticed similar issues as you, although not as serious. While having access to all of the media files in your adventure would make debugging easier, you can start by looking for some errors on your own:

1. Open RPG Ambience and select the original adventure, with all of the media files in it.
2. Press F12 to open the developer tools, then select the Console tab.
3. While the media files are loading, look for any errors in the console. (Their text should be red.)
4. When the media files have loaded, keep the developer tools open and play scenes until they stop working. Look for errors in the same way as before.

For any errors you find, please copy the error message and include it in a message in this thread. If you see multiple errors of the same kind, you only need to include one of them, so I can identify the general nature of the error.

If an error message includes the ID of a file in your Google Drive, you may want to anonymize it by replacing or leaving out characters. (You can basically replace any long string of random characters with ... or similar.)

I have an idea of what might be causing this, but I'll look at any error messages that you find before looking closer at it.

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub https://github.com/JakobKallin/RPG-Ambience/issues/60#issuecomment-49936726 .

[Dracowyrm]

Hi, Jakob,

Attached is the error log as a Word doc. None of the scenes after "1920s Jazz" are working. I added back the media files I had removed to test my theory that it was too many media files that caused the problem--it seems to be true.

The console only caught one error: "Uncaught TypeError: Cannot read property 'onUpdated' of undefined background.js:11"

Thanks again for your help with this. As I'm hoping to use RPG-Ambience for background sound throughout play, it would really help to be able to load enough music to last for a whole playing session without repeats.

Mark

On Wed, Jul 23, 2014 at 2:15 PM, Jakob Kallin notifications@github.com wrote:

I created my own adventure with a large number of media files and noticed similar issues as you, although not as serious. While having access to all of the media files in your adventure would make debugging easier, you can start by looking for some errors on your own:

1. Open RPG Ambience and select the original adventure, with all of the media files in it.
2. Press F12 to open the developer tools, then select the Console tab.
3. While the media files are loading, look for any errors in the console. (Their text should be red.)
4. When the media files have loaded, keep the developer tools open and play scenes until they stop working. Look for errors in the same way as before.

For any errors you find, please copy the error message and include it in a message in this thread. If you see multiple errors of the same kind, you only need to include one of them, so I can identify the general nature of the error.

If an error message includes the ID of a file in your Google Drive, you may want to anonymize it by replacing or leaving out characters. (You can basically replace any long string of random characters with ... or similar.)

I have an idea of what might be causing this, but I'll look at any error messages that you find before looking closer at it.

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub https://github.com/JakobKallin/RPG-Ambience/issues/60#issuecomment-49936726 .

[JakobKallin]

It seems that GitHub removes attachments in email replies. Please send the log to me directly at rpg.ambience@gmail.com.

[JakobKallin]

The error message in your log seems to originate from Chrome itself, or from a Chrome extension, rather than from RPG Ambience. It also doesn't match the errors that I saw when recreating a similar setup myself.

Here's my current guess from a technical perspective: due to how RPG Ambience loads its media files into the application as blob URLs (which is in turn due to the lack of caching in the Google Drive API), it's quite possible that the problems are caused by some form of overloading. As blob URLs are a recent technology, I don't know enough about their implementation to make a more qualified guess.

At this point, there are three things we can do:

1. Try to disable all Chrome extensions and see if that fixes the problem. (Unlikely, but possible.)
2. Open the Task Manager while the adventure is running and see if memory or disk usage is exceptionally high for Chrome. (This won't fix anything, but it may indicate that we are in fact dealing with overloading.)
3. Share all the media files in your adventure and let me debug it. (More tedious, but more likely to yield results, as I wasn't able to reproduce your setup on my own.)

Let me know if you want to try out any or all of these.

[Dracowyrm]

Hi, Jakob,

Thanks for continuing to work on this. I will share all my media files--probably on Monday, as the weekend is very full. I tried #1 and #2 and didn't see any improvement or anything interesting in the memory or disk requirements while loading.

Also, you had asked on the GitHub site for suggestions to improve the tool--my suggestions are both to allow crossfading, which you mentioned, and to make it possible to migrate a scene from one adventure to another, so you can use it again.

Thanks again!

On Sat, Jul 26, 2014 at 2:45 AM, Jakob Kallin notifications@github.com wrote:

The error message in your log seems to originate from Chrome itself, or from a Chrome extension, rather than from RPG Ambience. It also doesn't match the errors that I saw when recreating a similar setup myself.

Here's my current guess from a technical perspective: due to how RPG Ambience loads its media files into the application as blob URLs (which is in turn due to the lack of caching in the Google Drive API), it's quite possible that the problems are caused by some form of overloading. As blob URLs are a recent technology, I don't know enough about their implementation to make a more qualified guess.

At this point, there are three things we can do:

1. Try to disable all Chrome extensions and see if that fixes the problem. (Unlikely, but possible.)
2. Open the Task Manager while the adventure is running and see if memory or disk usage is exceptionally high for Chrome. (This won't fix anything, but it may indicate that we are in fact dealing with overloading.)
3. Share all the media files in your adventure and let me debug it. (More tedious, but more likely to yield results, as I wasn't able to reproduce your setup on my own.)

Let me know if you want to try out any or all of these.

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub https://github.com/JakobKallin/RPG-Ambience/issues/60#issuecomment-50229710 .

[JakobKallin]

Crossfading is in fact supported, although it's not explicitly labeled as such in the user interface. When you start a scene with a fade duration set (under the "Other" tab), it will automatically crossfade from the currently playing scene. (It does not work for mixins, but that's a more obscure feature that you may not even have used.)

As for copying scenes between adventures, I've opened an issue for it but do not have a plan for when or how to implement it.

[Dracowyrm]

Good to know--thank you.

On Sat, Jul 26, 2014 at 12:58 PM, Jakob Kallin notifications@github.com wrote:

Crossfading is in fact supported https://github.com/JakobKallin/RPG-Ambience/issues/38, although it's not explicitly labeled as such in the user interface. When you start a scene with a fade duration set (under the "Other" tab), it will automatically crossfade from the currently playing scene. (It does not work for mixins https://github.com/JakobKallin/RPG-Ambience/issues/55, but that's a more obscure feature that you may not even have used.)

As for copying scenes between adventures, I've opened an issue for it https://github.com/JakobKallin/RPG-Ambience/issues/61 but do not have a plan for when or how to implement it.

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub https://github.com/JakobKallin/RPG-Ambience/issues/60#issuecomment-50246810 .

[JakobKallin]

If you can, also provide a list of steps that seem to reliably cause the errors.

[Dracowyrm]

Hi, Jakob,

The only factor that seems to cause the error is if there are too many sound files loaded into one of the scenes. I haven't been able to determine exactly how many is "too many", but I fixed the problem by dumping sound files until everything worked.

I started sharing sound files with you, but I need to do this about 150 times, and it's going to take awhile.

Thanks for your attention to this issue.

Mark

On Sunday, July 27, 2014, Jakob Kallin notifications@github.com wrote:

If you can, also provide a list of steps that seem to reliably cause the errors.

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub https://github.com/JakobKallin/RPG-Ambience/issues/60#issuecomment-50260413 .

[JakobKallin]

Note that you can share the folders containing the files rather than the files individually.

[Dracowyrm]

How? When I right click on the folders, no "Google Drive" option is in the menu, if I use the Windows "Sharing" menu item, it does not accept an email address as a location--it's looking for a network name.

Mark

On Tuesday, July 29, 2014, Jakob Kallin notifications@github.com wrote:

Note that you can share the folders containing the files rather than the files individually.

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub https://github.com/JakobKallin/RPG-Ambience/issues/60#issuecomment-50572641 .

[Dracowyrm]

Never mind--I figured it out, thanks.

Mark

On Wednesday, July 30, 2014, Mark Green sonomamark@comcast.net wrote:

How? When I right click on the folders, no "Google Drive" option is in the menu, if I use the Windows "Sharing" menu item, it does not accept an email address as a location--it's looking for a network name.

Mark

On Tuesday, July 29, 2014, Jakob Kallin <notifications@github.com javascript:_e(%7B%7D,'cvml','notifications@github.com');> wrote:

Note that you can share the folders containing the files rather than the files individually.

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub https://github.com/JakobKallin/RPG-Ambience/issues/60#issuecomment-50572641 .

[Dracowyrm]

Note that the current configuration of my adventures works properly. But I used to have many more sound files in the "1920s Jazz" and "Cosmos Club" adventures, and that caused the later adventures no longer to work.

On Wednesday, July 30, 2014, Mark Green sonomamark@comcast.net wrote:

Never mind--I figured it out, thanks.

Mark

On Wednesday, July 30, 2014, Mark Green <sonomamark@comcast.net javascript:_e(%7B%7D,'cvml','sonomamark@comcast.net');> wrote:

How? When I right click on the folders, no "Google Drive" option is in the menu, if I use the Windows "Sharing" menu item, it does not accept an email address as a location--it's looking for a network name.

Mark

On Tuesday, July 29, 2014, Jakob Kallin notifications@github.com wrote:

Note that you can share the folders containing the files rather than the files individually.

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub https://github.com/JakobKallin/RPG-Ambience/issues/60#issuecomment-50572641 .

[JakobKallin]

Could you double-check which files/folders you have shared and that they are not copies of the files used in the adventure? Right now, I'm only seeing three files shared in the Google Drive interface ("01 Track 1.mp3" and the two subsequent tracks), and the other ones aren't loading in RPG Ambience.

[Dracowyrm]

I shared the entire folder in which all the media files reside. Shouldn't that give you access to them?

Mark

On Wednesday, July 30, 2014, Jakob Kallin notifications@github.com wrote:

Could you double-check which files/folders you have shared and that they are not copies of the files used in the adventure? Right now, I'm only seeing three files shared in the Google Drive interface ("01 Track 1.mp3" and the two subsequent tracks), and the other ones aren't loading in RPG Ambience.

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub https://github.com/JakobKallin/RPG-Ambience/issues/60#issuecomment-50683382 .

[JakobKallin]

It should, but the Google Drive web interface only lists three files and no folders as being shared, so something is wrong but I have no idea what. Permission errors are usually difficult to debug, since security measures block me from finding out more details of these particular files.

At this point, it will be hard to get further in troubleshooting, but your experiments so far indicate that it is in the end some form of overloading, which seems possible to me given the implementation.

My best suggestion at this point for possibly fixing the problem is to merge collections of sound files into a single, larger file (using an external tool). This would work if the number of files, rather than the total file size, is the problem. It would make the overlap feature much less useful, though.

Another suggestion is to try the same adventure in another browser or possibly on a different operating system.

If you run into this problem with another adventure in the future, consider notifying me in this thread and we could try to share that adventure instead.