jagger1973

My zero based image was due to a file transfer failure. Completely unintentional. But this would occur on any image that System..Bitmap couldn't detect as a legit image; thus why I wanted to report the bug. It really could throw the non-technical folks who can't debug things into a tizzy and keep them away from using PinballX. Why would you want to scare folks away from the best front end due to a minor issue....

I can tell you don't really program by that statement. So let me explain..... Within Pinballx's main thread there is a call create a Direct2D.Direct2d.Surface object, this takes a filename (derived from the visual pinball.xml) and some other params.... This trickles down to a call to System.Drawing.Bitmap which throws an exception because the file is not a vaild bitmap. (In my case, it was a corrupted transfer from my file server to my cabinet which left a zero length file.) Now a good way to handle this is to catch the execption and log "File XXXXXX.png is not a valid image file" and you *could* fallback to to the "No table image" or "no wheel image file" and continue as normal. Or spit up a MsgBox. Or log it and exit.... Give the user some semblance of what the problem is. The incorrect way to handle it is not catch the exception and crash out of the program give the user no indication on why the program crashed. You don't have to code in every image combination that could possible be used in order to validate them, you just need to catch a generic exception and handle it gracefully. Anyway, the bug was reported and the author said his piece that it won't be fixed..... Not much I can do about it.

That's just silly.... at least spew a log message with a quick why and what file so the user can identify and correct their issue.

PinballX was crashing frequently and noticed it was scrolling around the same game... Since the log wasn't particularly helpful, I pulled out sysinternals process monitor to figure out what it was doing. I eventually discovered that a wheel (playfield/bg) image that was properly named but had a size of zero bytes was the culprit to the crashing. I re-downloaded the image file and put it and place and PinballX no longer crashed. FYI: This zero sized image file was also causing issues with the GameEditor