Flassari.is

I had a really simple project set up that had two scenes, “Init” which I use to connect to server, and “Main”, where all my synced objects using networkViews are.
When the player had connected to the server I’d change to “Main” where I wanted all the objects already on the server to automatically show up.
However every time I ran the project I got these three errors:

ms_IDToPointer->find (obj->GetInstanceID ()) == ms_IDToPointer->end ()

View ID AllocatedID: 1 not found during lookup. Strange behaviour may occur

Received state update for view id' AllocatedID: 1' but the NetworkView doesn't exist

What was happening was that the server was sending us the objects before we had a chance to load “Main”, which was weird because I was using “Network.isMessageQueueRunning = false;” before connecting to the server and turning it back on when “Main” was loaded.

Fortunately this has a simple fix, apparently you have to set isMessageQueueRunning AFTER calling Network.Connect(..). I moved it to “void OnConnectedToServer()” and everything worked fine.

Init.unity

void Start()
{
	// Don't set isMessageQueueRunning here
	Network.Connect(hostData);
}

void OnConnectedToServer()
{
	Network.isMessageQueueRunning = false;
	Application.LoadLevel("Main");
}

Main.unity

void Start()
{
	Network.isMessageQueueRunning = true;
}

I just completed hunting down a Stack underflow error. It was a little tedious since the error is not thrown when I compiled for debug player, only release.
The source of it? A trace statement in a try block. For some reason the compiler doesn’t like that at all.

The solution seemed to be to remove all traces from try-catch blocks, which worked, but I wasn’t satisfied.

After binary searching trough the svn commits, I found what triggered the above error, an empty for-each loop.
Removing that loop made all traces work again normally inside try-catch blocks, which is what I prefer.

for each (var fruit:String in fruits) {
   // Empty loop, a BIG NO NO!
}

So to prevent your swf from corrupting, do not have empty for-each loops in your project! Remove them completely or fill them with some code.

I would have thought you could throw an error whenever you pleased like it, however the Flex compiler has some other ideas.

If you have a throw statement before the super() in the constructor, Flex will complain with the following error code:
1201: A super statement cannot occur after a this, super, return, or throw statement.

There is a workaround though, just wrap the throw statement in an anonymous function:

(function():void {
	throw new Error("Yay for workarounds!");
})();

It’s taken me a while to figure this one out. I have a flash game on facebook that uses Stage3D, so window mode has to be set to “direct” which means that any time facebook wants to overlay some elements on the page they appear under the game on many browsers.

Facebook has a solution for you, on FB.init you can set your own callback function via the hideFlashCallback parameter. In this callback you can move the flash object out of view by, for example, setting the top to be -10000px whenever a Facebook dialog is opened and then putting it back when the dialog is closed.

I had functions registered with external interface to pause and resume the game that would get called via javascript in the hideFlashCallback callback.

This was working well enough but for some reason on Internet Explorer I couldn’t call the resume() function just after showing the flash object, instead I got an “Object Expected” error.

Internet Explorer does not support calling external interface methods for flash objects if they are not visible. Since it could be a race condition (DOM might not render the flash object before the function was called) I added a 100ms delay to the call to resume(), only for IE. This seemed to work fine.

But once we got close to production this error re-appeared, but only when Facebook’s purchase dialog had been shown. Weird! No amount of delay made the external interface calls work again. If I showed the purchase dialog once and closed it, it would be no longer possible to call any external interface functions for the flash object until a page refresh. This was not acceptable.

After a lot of debugging, I noticed that even though we have registered for the hideFlashCallback function, facebook STILL sets the visibility of the flash object to “hidden” after 200ms.

As can be seen in Facebook’s documentation: “The custom action must complete within 200ms or the Flash object will be hidden automatically regardless.”

Apparently the fact that we’re changing the visibility of the flash object along with whatever facebook does differently during the purchase dialog (overlay a white div over the whole page) breaks all external interface functionality.

This has a simple fix though, create a higher priority CSS rule that makes the flash object always visible:

It doesn’t need to be hidden since we are moving it out of view ourselves anyways.

So I have this Starling project and wanted to take a screenshot of the Stage3D currently in use.
I was trying to use the Context3D.drawToBitmapData() function and kept getting this error:
“Error #3692: All buffers need to be cleared every frame before drawing.”

Googling around yielded no results, so after figuring out the problem I’m posting the solution here for anyone else having this problem.

The solution is short: you have to call drawToBitmapData() BEFORE the Context3D.present() call.

In my case with Starling I had to add the functionality in the Starling.render() function, between the call to mStage.render() and the call to mContext.present().

A simple error that causes a lot of headache that has a simple solution that is hard to find on the internet.
Don’t you just love these problems?

If you are calling mxmlc via ANT you’ve probably seen this error and had to resort to solutions like setting the ANT_OPTS or Java arguments for the SDK on every single computer that uses that build script.

The solution is actually much simpler than that, mxmlc allows you to set this in the ANT target itself. Just add the parameters fork=”true” to make it run on it’s own Java thread, and then set maxmemory to something like “1024m”.

It would have been nice if adobe had this in the documentation, but no such luck.

Since the official release of Flash Player 10.1 is out, now might be a good time to start implementing the global error handler.

When this is written, flash builder 4 doesn’t have a native way that lets you use it, so we have to do a little mix. (Update: The update is out.)
The global error handler works by adding an event to the uncaughtErrorEvents property of the loaderInfo of the application.
There are currently two methods of getting it to work.

Method 1 – The backwards compatible one:

Here the code doesn’t crash in flash player 9/10, but the error handling will only work in 10.1.

if(loaderInfo.hasOwnProperty("uncaughtErrorEvents")){
	IEventDispatcher(loaderInfo["uncaughtErrorEvents"]) .addEventListener("uncaughtError", uncaughtErrorHandler);
}

private function uncaughtErrorHandler(e:Event):void {
	trace("Global error:", e);
}

Method 2 – The type safe one:

Get the Flex 4.1 SDK if you haven’t already and choose that one as your project’s SDK.

Now you can use the new global error handling like it was meant to be used:

import flash.events.UncaughtErrorEvent;

loaderInfo.uncaughtErrorEvents.addEventListener( UncaughtErrorEvent.UNCAUGHT_ERROR, uncaughtErrorHandler);

private function uncaughtErrorHandler( e:UncaughtErrorEvent):void {
	trace("Global error:", e);
}