Palette troubles.

Hello, it's me: Steven, again.

Anywho, I just encountered an issue. I don't know if it's with my
code, though. The game has been running fine for the past few weeks,
but all of the sudden something went screwy. I haven't been doing
anything different, I just sit there and watch the sprites animate.

My game is in 8-bit, paletted mode. For some reason, out of the blue,
all of the colors on the screen change. It's like my palette suddenly
got replaced, but I don't see how that can happen. I only even deal
with my palette interface once, and that's at before the game even
starts; The main game loop never even touches the palette. The game
will run fine for a minute or so, but then, blow! Colors go screwey.
It only happens if I run my game after I run a LaMothe demo. I don't
know if this has anything to do with it, but this is the only time
I've encountered this problem.

Anybody have any ideas what could be wrong?

Thanks a lot. You're all very nice people.

"Steven" <windecks@hotmail.com> wrote in message
>
> Anywho, I just encountered an issue. I don't know if it's with my
> code, though. The game has been running fine for the past few weeks,
> but all of the sudden something went screwy. I haven't been doing
> anything different, I just sit there and watch the sprites animate.
>
It could be that you're corrupting the area of memory occupied by the
palette. It could be that you're somehow telling the system to use a
different palette.

We can't debug over Usenet. For a difficult bug, the strategy you should use
is this.

1) Comment out huge chunks of your code you that you've got effectively a
"hello world" app that also uses a palette (correctly).

2) Comment in the rest of the code. Now the error should reappear.

3) Comment out the code again and comment in a few blocks you think should
be OK. Keep on doing this until the error reappears.

4) Try to isolate the error to as small an area of code as you can. The bug
should then be obvious.

Any new programs installed recently, run any unsafe EXEs that might have
installed some spyware??

Running anything in the background that might be doing some tricks??

Its possible that a previous program is setting DirectX/Display
mode/attributes that your program
doesn't do a complete initialization of all the modes YOU use. Look at
LaMothe or samples on the
DirectX sdk (or OpenGL ???) to see what initializations they do .

Steven wrote:

> Hello, it's me: Steven, again.
>
> Anywho, I just encountered an issue. I don't know if it's with my
> code, though. The game has been running fine for the past few weeks,
> but all of the sudden something went screwy. I haven't been doing
> anything different, I just sit there and watch the sprites animate.
>
> My game is in 8-bit, paletted mode. For some reason, out of the blue,
> all of the colors on the screen change. It's like my palette suddenly
> got replaced, but I don't see how that can happen. I only even deal
> with my palette interface once, and that's at before the game even
> starts; The main game loop never even touches the palette. The game
> will run fine for a minute or so, but then, blow! Colors go screwey.
> It only happens if I run my game after I run a LaMothe demo. I don't
> know if this has anything to do with it, but this is the only time
> I've encountered this problem.
>
> Anybody have any ideas what could be wrong?
>
> Thanks a lot. You're all very nice people.

Maybe the LaMothe demo caused a resource leak? Did you get this from his
website or from one of his books? Try Malcom's debugging tip, this should
help. Another alternative is to send a MessageBox(); output after
initializing the palette, after initializing your DirectDraw Surface, etc.
The only thing that gets me is that these problems occur during the game
loop.
Steven <windecks@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:ce9a7d65.0307111437.d8e1521@posting.google.co m...
> Hello, it's me: Steven, again.
>
> Anywho, I just encountered an issue. I don't know if it's with my
> code, though. The game has been running fine for the past few weeks,
> but all of the sudden something went screwy. I haven't been doing
> anything different, I just sit there and watch the sprites animate.
>
> My game is in 8-bit, paletted mode. For some reason, out of the blue,
> all of the colors on the screen change. It's like my palette suddenly
> got replaced, but I don't see how that can happen. I only even deal
> with my palette interface once, and that's at before the game even
> starts; The main game loop never even touches the palette. The game
> will run fine for a minute or so, but then, blow! Colors go screwey.
> It only happens if I run my game after I run a LaMothe demo. I don't
> know if this has anything to do with it, but this is the only time
> I've encountered this problem.
>
> Anybody have any ideas what could be wrong?
>
> Thanks a lot. You're all very nice people.