Wednesday, January 29, 2014

Gridiron Solitaire on Gamers with Jobs

I am posting a link to a podcast: Gamers With Jobs - Conference Call Episode 381 (released today). I received a couple of shout-outs on this episode from my friend Bill Harris who was on to talk about his just-released-on-steam game Gridiron Solitaire.

I've been helping Bill for the better part of 3 years, teaching him how to code from scratch, helping him with problems, and answering his questions - so getting to see him actually release his brainchild to the public is a very proud moment.

More information can be found at Bill and Eli Productions and on the Steam Gridiron Solitaire Product Page.

Wednesday, January 15, 2014

Gotcha #4 - WPF - Restore Events and Media Elements

Today's article comes courtesy of assisting Bill Harris' (Dubious Quality) work on GridIron Solitaire. The original problem comes from identifying a bug that sound effects were not playing when a system returns from sleep mode if the game had been left open.

Some basic details on the application: GridIron Solitaire uses Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) for its UI framework, it has been developed in VisualBasic 2010, and sound effects are played by using System.Windows.Controls.MediaElement class.

The problem in this case was that sound effects that had been initialized prior to the system enter sleep mode did not continue playing after the system returned to an active state. Sounds initialized after the system returned to an active state continued to play fine. When first presented with this problem it did not seem to be a terribly difficult one to solve, nor an uncommon one to encounter. There are many games released by major studios that have difficulty handling system sleep and restore, and even minimization or alt-tab window switching. The most recent experience I have had with these problems include Civilization V in which I have encountered alt-tab artifacts (game remains visible in the background), as well as restore from minimization (texture corruption) and restore from sleep (fatal crash) problems.

The first line of investigation that we followed was the possibility that the MediaElement was failing to play after a restore, so we constructed a plan to catch the MediaElement.MediaFailed event and reset the MediaElement in that instance. On the positive side this approach solved an unrelated application crash problem caused by a missing media file, but it was soon determined that the MediaFailed event was not being fired when the sounds failed to play after a system restore.

PowerModeChanged Event Solution #1
Further research revealed that a MediaElement's Source property becomes invalidated during the sleep/restore cycle, and that resetting the Source property and restarting the MediaElement. One of the suggestions was to catch the PowerModeChanged Event and check for PowerModes.Suspend and PowerModes.Resume states, any suspend/resume code needed by your application can be performed in this block. The resulting code catches the PowerModeChanged Event, and on Resume resets every MediaElement Source property to its correct value.

Private Sub SystemEvents_PowerModeChanged(ByVal sender As Object, ByVal e As PowerModeChangedEventArgs)
    Select Case e.Mode
        Case PowerModes.Resume
            Reinitialize_Sounds()

        Case PowerModes.StatusChange


        Case PowerModes.Suspend

            BackgroundEffectALoopPlayer.Pause()
            BackgroundEffectBPlayer.Pause()
    End Select
End Sub

Private Sub Reinitialize_Sounds()

    SoundEffectA.Source = Nothing
    SoundEffectA.Source = New Uri("Resources/SoundEffectA.mp3", UriKind.Relative)
    '...etc...
End Sub

The effect of this code seemed to be satisfactory at first. Although it slowed down the time for the application to restore from a suspended state, it wasn't a particular problem as additional processing time required to restore from a suspended state is normally accepted and expected. A minor issue was that ongoing sounds would not restart until the next time the code required them to be played, which was easily resolved by programmatically restarting ongoing sounds within the restore code.

However, it was only observed later - and generally on lower-end systems - that in some cases a few sound effects were not being restarted after restore. An additional confounding factor was that the sound effects that were not returning were not consistent, an apparent random selection of 2 or 3 would not resume and this effect was not reproducible in debug mode.

Application_Activated Event Solution #2
Considering the possibility that the PowerModeChanged Event was not firing correctly, or that there was some other conflict regarding MediaElement objects that was occurring after the PowerModeChanged Event the proposed alternative was to move the restore code into an Application_Activated Event handler. The Application_Activated Event is fired on a different but related and less-specific set of conditions to the PowerModeChanged Event. The theory was that perhaps the systems where the continuing sound failure was being observed were tablet and netbook systems which may be impacting the events being fired.

Once the restore code was transferred and redeployed, the same issues were observed occurring in precisely the same circumstances as the PowerModeChanged Event solution.

Brute-force Solution #3

In an attempt to find any way past the problem, Bill attempted to brute-force the solution by forcing every sound to reload the Source property every time that it was activated. Although the performance of this approach was going to be unacceptable, the lag time for loading a sound every time it is played would be noticeable to the player, as a debugging approach it was reasonable.

The result: slow, but successful. Despite every sound effect suffering from noticeable lag, after a suspend/restore cycle every sound effect returned and played correctly on every test system configuration.

Problem Identification
It was at this point that the cause of the problem was identified. The process that restores an application from a suspended state causes MediaElement sources to be invalidated. The problem with using either the PowerModeChanged Event or the Application_Activated Event for setting the source property, is that the event handlers are operating on a different thread than the application restore process and these threads are entering into a race condition.

In the first two solutions, on slower systems a few of the lighter-weight sound effects were being loaded into their MediaElement objects before the application restore process that invalidates the MediaElement sources was completed. As a result a few of the MediaElement sources were being invalidated after they had already been corrected - causing a few of the sound effects to fail in an inconsistent and unpredictable manner.

On-demand Resource Loading Solution #4
The final solution is to enforce on-demand resource loading and caching whenever a MediaElement is required to play a sound effect, moving the responsibility for checking the existence of a media source from the pre-loader to the code that plays the MediaElement itself.

As a result the PowerModeChanged Event handler is being used to nullify (set to Nothing) all MediaElement sources when a suspend event occurs. Then every time a MediaElement is about to be played the code first rechecks its source to ensure that it is not null, and reloads the source if it does not exist before playing it.

Private Sub SystemEvents_PowerModeChanged(ByVal sender As Object, ByVal e As PowerModeChangedEventArgs)
    Select Case e.Mode
        Case PowerModes.Resume

        Case PowerModes.StatusChange

        Case PowerModes.Suspend

            SoundEffectA.Source = Nothing
            SoundEffectB.Source = Nothing
            '...etc...
    End Select
End Sub

'In sound effect Play code:
If SoundEffectA.Source = Nothing Then
    SoundEffectA.Source = New Uri("Resources/SoundEffectA.mp3", UriKind.Relative)
End If
SoundEffectA.Play()

The final effect is that sound effect failure has been eliminated, and a slight lag occurs the first time each sound effect is played immediately after a system restore, but returns to optimal performance soon after once each sound effect has been re-cached.