Soren Hannibal

We know how frustrating it is to lose your creations. The bug was complex to solve, but we have a fix ready in 1.1 that we think fixes all corruption issues.

Yeah, agree.

@FrankK, so I don't think you have lost the worlds. In 1.0.5, we moved worlds to a different location to follow Android best practices. But you can hopefully access the old files by going to Settings->profile->File Storage Location, and set to “application”. Hopefully that works, but at least you can still run the game.

@Matthew Greer, the error you see is not neon-related, because Neon is an ARM only. And with the Neon issue, it crashes in a second. What you see is possibly a timeout - I believe Android shuts down any app that is unresponsive for more than 10 seconds. If so, it could be because our code just takes too long before it gets going - it's hard to know. Some things that may help is to try to restart your device, to try starting 2/3 times in a row, or disabling wifi.

Can you explain what you see? which device? which android version? which build?

We just released 1.0.6, and we think this should fix it. Please give it a try and post back what you see. We're not going to resolve the bug until we hear that the problem has gone away, because I don't want us to jinx it 🙂

We have reproduced one problem, which we think is causing this. It's not an easy thing to fix, but we are working on it. I will post an update when I think we have a fix ready to go out

Thank you for answering all the questions. We’ve been discussing this bug intensely here and have found two holes in our process that we need to fix thanks to your feedback.
1. When we released the game, we had only one known save bug (found by our testers) which was when iCloud was extremely close to full (but not completely full). Other than that we didn’t have any unresolved save game bugs. Because iCloud warns users repeatedly on iOS when it gets close to full, we didn’t expect anybody would hit this case. In hindsight, we should have investigated this bug further at the time but we ended up deferring it as we were waiting on an API to detect free space left.
The issue you all list here seem to be triggered under different conditions, but it is possible that the root cause is the same.

2. For some reason this Jira bug report fell through the cracks and we’re trying to figure out why that happened and how to avoid it in the future. Having the game corrupt worlds is obviously a high priority and one we want to get fixed ASAP.

We also discovered that the festive mashup world doesn't save properly on Apple TV, and we have a fix for this ready in 1.0.6, but that is a separate problem. The "kids respawn with nothing" issue is also strange, and sounds unrelated, but I'll make sure we file this.

As for fixing this one: We don't know the root cause yet, but our Apple TV lead has a plan to trap this. The fact that 2 of the corruptions are when the game shut down indicates that some cloud updates may possibly put it in a bad state, but it is then possibly restored to a good state in the next cloud update. Since quitting out of a level flushes all changes, it probably puts it in a good state there. That's at least the theory we are going to chase after.

We'll also see if we can find a good way to extract levels from iCloud, and if so, if anyone would be willing to upload the corrupted level to us - we may be able to discover something by looking at the files.

Hey all, we are sorry we have not managed to fix this issue yet. We have no consistent way to reproduce the issue in our office, so there has been some attempted fixes. And iCloud implementation is very large, and makes the Apple TV save code quite different from all our other platforms, so there are lots of places this bug can be hiding.

Eric, trust me, I understand the frustration - many of us have kids, and know exactly what you are talking about. When we investigate bugs, world corruption bugs are by default considered the most severe.

I'm going to ask a large number of questions, in order to see if we find a pattern - It would help if you answer all of them, with numbers

1. Are you, or have you ever been out of icloud space when playing? Or really close to out of space? We have heard of an issue if iCloud is completely full, but I don't think that's what most people would hit here.
2. Any errors messages show up on the TV at all?
3. How many saves do you have on the Apple TV in total when you see this - just a single save, or lots?
4. Does the game ever shut down in some unexpected way while playing a level? (pulling the power cable counts as unexpected shutdown, but manually switching to another app is not "unexpected"
5. What kind of internet connection do you have? Are you always-on, or do you sign in/out regularly?
6. do you sign in to multiple icloud accounts on your apple TV? If so, do you do this while you run the game
7. Do you quit out of the level before switching apps (We believe we properly support app switching, but maybe there is a pattern)
8. Do you turn off your apple TV while it's in-game?
9. Is your internet connection generally stable or do you sometimes have connection issues? How do they get resolved?
10. Is it when using the mash-up worlds (Festive?) or on worlds built from scratch
11. do you play with any texture packs enabled?
12. do your settings file ever get corrupted/removed, or is it only the levels?
13. do you play on Realms? If so, any problems there?
14. Tom mentioned that all saves corrupt sooner or later - does it happen on all saves simultaneously, then? or is it one-by-one?
15. Any other tips you can come up with for consistently reproducing the issue? We may be staring ourselves blind at the problem, and may be overlooking something completely obvious.

@chris lowe, thanks for reporting to Google. If a google store option for uploading non-neon binaries existed, I imagine we could upload an older build, but I can't guarantee it - I'm not really involved with the submission process and don't know what issues we can get into by uploading a second build.

We're still investigating, and have not given up. In fact, our non-neon device is currently in shipping to another dev to investigate further. However, it's a tough issue, and I can't say for sure if it will get fixed. It's one of those things that sound like it should be easy to flip a switch somewhere, but it just isn't 😞

@Leandro: I don't know the answer to that question - I'm only part of the programming team, this seems like a community question.

MediaTek MT6750 uses the Cortex A53 ARM architecture, which always supports NEON. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ARM_microarchitectures
Almost all Cortex-A architectures have NEON support, and the only exceptions are A5 and A9, where NEON is optional.

Hey Chris, thank you for the suggestion. Unfortunately, there's no way for us to segment the non-Neon devices from other android devices in the stores, so if we did a rollback it would affect every Android player. And I don't know of any way to make older builds optionally available. I'll keep thinking about this problem, maybe an idea will pop up.

Ok, so we reproduced the issue on the Motorola Xoom, and I have investigated this thoroughly for the last 2 days. Unfortunately I have some bad news. The problem is caused by the fact that a small number of chipsets used for Android devices (like the Nvidia Tegra 2) does not include the Neon extension. About 6 months ago we made a number of major architectural changes that means we rely on Neon for a number of things – including making the game run faster, to compensate for the performance cost of all the added features.

While we will investigate further if we can fix this, it’s a very large task to take on, and it’s would risk destabilizing the game for everyone else. I think it would take at least 3 months from now to have a verified, fully tested fix. I’m not sure if it is even possible for us to fix it at all, but I will be trying.

We got the Moto Xoom, still waiting on the charger to arrive 😞

@j parker and @chris lowe: yeah, the eternal black screen is what I think we may have fixed. The crash is the one I'm not sure about.
@Peter: logcat output may help.

@chris lowe, thank you for trying- we actually think you may have to launch the app and then wait for a long time, up to an hour. We started using a function that took a really long time on Android 4.x, but apparently only on some devices. We have a large pool of different android devices that we circle through, but none were affected. We have ordered a Motorola Xoom to add to this pool now, though, as that seem to be the most common offender.
@j parker: We don't have that device, but I think we have that one fixed in next release. As Tomas said, "crash on startup" can be many different things. Sometimes multiple compounding errors are affecting the machines, so it's hard to say for sure who's issues are fixed by each version 😞

Thomas, that note was in response to Sean's comment - he mentioned an issue with the exit dialog, and I just said I think that part is unrelated

Thank you for that detailed report. Sean, your occasional crash on startup could easily be something different than the consistent crash. If it crashes on launch but a subsequent launch succeeds, it could easily be timing related. Maybe the device is busy doing other things, and it slows down the launch enough for the OS to think the app failed to launch. It would make sense why that happens on slower devices.
The exit dialog bug is a different issue.

I'm trying to summarize which devices/OS versions we still have problems with, after we did the 16.1 memory fixes (we lowered memory usage, and some 512mb devices started working again).

There have been recent reports about the following devices:
1. Dell Venue 7 3740, Intel Atom z3460 dual-core processor (x86), 512mb ram, Android OS version 4.4.4. Maybe 16.1 fixed this one?
2. Android Alcatel tablet model T10, 1gb, vivante gc800 gpu, Android version 4.0.4
3. Motorola Xoom, tegra 2, 1gb ram, Android 4.4.4
4. Motorola Xoom, tegra 2, 1gb ram, Android 4.0.3
5. Sony Tablet, tegra 2, 1gb ram, Android version 4.0.3

There are many older reports, but I don't know if the issue still occur. Are there other devices that also suffer from this, as of 16.1 or newer? Please also specify if you are offline or online when playing (I don't think we require online connections, but it may still affect stability for some devices).

We haven't been able to repro on our own devices, so maybe they have something else in common? The only common factor is that it is Android 4.x.x versions. We will keep looking for this, though.