@216 i also play in chrome, i havent seen any of the things you're describing, when did you last update chrome?

Opened game/comments in Edge... the difference shocked me. Idk if something is wrong with chrome or with win10 (still not updated to win11), but since april comment boxes/ text formating dissapeared for me. Also game is resizing (growing up) untill reach white-backgrond width - in Edge stay in indended size. Buttons scores/comments below game that should be only for mobile are visible (in chrome). Anyone else can see similar chrome issues?

What is the qualification behind the TOP 3 Towers? For my current run it shows Flawed and Flawless Amethyst, but looking at my board, I think I've picked those gems maybe 3 total times, versus the components for the Jade tower, which I've picked 100s of times.

@216 that's a good point, i got the one of them very early on due to sheer random luck, i think about level 25? it's not my usual pick for dps to be honest, i usually go for unupgraded bloodstones since they can attack every target in their range and do decent dps. you're right though, i am missing a lot of pink dps. i'll be getting some more of those this run, thanks for the help

@Strych9ines: Only 1 Egyptian Gold? Due to pink type damage its one of best dps gem. Other color modifiers are NOT implemented (yet?) but pink vs amethyst weakness x1.75 works.

Wow, path 0.9.12 added BOSSES! The 250 boss is very hard - on my GOless run( had save at 240, not much time to prepare) it leaked with 47% hp. If i had a GO, more EGs (instead ABSs - flamestrikes are useless vs boss) and little better maze it could be possible to kill. I want few more tries, but little nerf to minimum speed might be needed. Didn't test lvl 500 boss yet, but is flying? - simply impossible then

I got to level 250 for the first time ever despite playing for over 13 years, how on earth do people beat the bosses in this game? is it a case of tanking money? this is my current setup so far and i managed to tank the boss by buying lives, but in the long run that's going to get expensive since i'm also buying 2 lives every four rounds against the flying enemies. is there anything i can improve in future runs? i know some of you hit like, level 700 often. I want to be able to minmax my runs, but i'm still kind of a noob despite how long i've played because i've never even talked to another person that plays this game, let alone looked up any guides. https://ibb.co/ycdzM92M

Level 761... 1billion gold... this is the no tourmalines run. It's very slow also.

Do it, if you want. If you don't, its ok. The game is good enough as it is. 1. Add special towers upgrades to the "Special Gems Recipe". I my head, you could achieve this by making a "gold.png" image, and adding gold as part of the recipe. 2. On the game: display the current version being used on the canvas (I mean, its on the source code anyways, so why not display it). I think this one wasn't intended as you never though people would play the game for days, weeks or months without closing the tab. I'd suggest making a 'description input' at the end of each run, so we can post comments; but the save/load feature is temporary right?

@carlhr Any changes to the site as well, what did you have in mind?

oh my god, i've been playing this game since 2013 and when it switched to web player i started playing using internet archive to play the old version. i just came back to the web version for the first time in about 5 years and it's absolutely incredible how many updates there have been. this is amazing. great work, thank you for keeping my favourite game going.

@Peter, about the "I'm open to game design changes [...]", is this only related to the game on canvas, or to the site as well?

Peter, my run crashed at level 601 or so, as I said. I don't think it can be claimed that the "performance issues have been resolved". I spent a lot of time along with 216 detailing the bugs, not to mention all the comments over the years about the game's design and balance issues, not to mention helping new players figure out how to play the game. It's interesting to me that you literally never reply to any of my comments or messages. I have no idea why.

@216 I'm open to game design changes now that performance issues have been resolved. I would suggest we think / debate what exactly would make the late game more fun and better.

Other chaos idea: subtly change the dimensions of the board. Add half a gem of width to a random side at start of game.

I saw the image for scgmeister's near perfect paraiba layout- and I'm now trying a run with ZERO paraibas. Got my GO at level 162. Only had a few mistakes. WGW: I've always imagined a "repick in place" button that re-rolls your stones in the last 5 chosen spots, this would lessen the clicks by a factor of 5 when looking for specific stones. An even crazier idea would be a drop down list where you select the stone you are searching for and the game would show the repick-in-place happen rapid-fire, while you watch your gold deplete, hoping your chosen gem appears before you run out of cash.

Surely its doable - the matter is amount of jades. The 1301 run (which is still impressive for me!) had only 30 milion gold left, so not enough for repicks without combine exploit - several more jades would be needed. Breaking lvl 1300 might be impossible now. ------- The solution that could satisfy ppl that like filling the board and those which prefer faster, but challenging games would be another (harder) difficulty, where getting to 300-400 is nearly impossible. Then on "endless" suvival mode would be "secret" (visible on lvl 400+) upgrade that cost hmm... 8-digit amount of gold and icrease PAq chance somehow. Peter might not like that idea, though

@216, I wasn't registered until after I started the run and realized that registration was required. The hope was that registering even after the run started would still magically work if the tab with the actual run "inherited" the registration info, but that must not be the case, as there is no high score for the run. It occurs to me that with this new system, the high score text will probably just be whatever your registered name is, which would prevent making it anything more specific. That would be unfortunate if so. re: whether I had enough gold to repick for only paraibas, well, there are two high scores already from TTJ and scgmeister over level 1200, which requires a careful layout and building almost entirely paraibas, so it seems doable. I haven't checked your math, but remember gold earnings keep going up as the game progresses, while repicking only goes up by 25 gold per repick. The problem is the tedium even if the RNG can be brute forced. Who wants to do that for 1,000 levels, right?

@WGW: You had to register during that run - so it would be saved to your account, even if crash. About repicks: to fill board with paraibas need about 2500 repicks, costing 78 milion gold(lvl 1300 may require even 2800+ repicks, so over 100m gold). I'm not sure if that 21 milion gold (at 600, so maybe over 100m at 1200) was safe enough to say "limitles" repicks

Well, the question of whether I'd have been able to log a high score ended up moot, because the game crashed around level 600 or so (can't remember exactly). I'd just picked the gem for the round, and before the enemies appeared, the tab displayed all white. Nothing to click on. Refreshing lost the whole game. I don't have anything else to report; I wasn't expecting the crash and wasn't keeping an eye on anything like memory use. But the last I checked it was at around 400MB. On whether it should be possible to fill out the entire board, I'm with you, scgmeister. . . in *principle*. But. . . now that the combine special bug has been fixed, playing for maximum levels/turns is 10 times more tedious than it already was because you have to repick for perfect aquamarines over and over again. Not just repicking for any decent perfect gem, but specifically for aquamarines. I'm not arguing to resurrect the combine special bug (it was unintended and confusing). But I had 21 million gold at the point of the crash, and repicks were only costing around 12,000. Functionally speaking, repicks are essentially limitless at that point anyway. Having to repick and repick mindlessly, sometimes for 10-15 minutes at a time, changes the "build nothing but paraibas" phase of the game from something you zone out and tend to periodically while doing other things, to an exercise in periodic index finger fatigue and ocasionally cursing the RNG for wasting your time. I kind of feel like I was spared 600 more levels of this by the crash!

I seem to recall I had to disable my adblock on this site before the popup for submitting scores would show up. @216, personally I actually like the ability to have those longer games after everything is stabilized, as that is the more relaxing part of the game for me, and it's hugely satisfying to be able to completely fill in the board, so long as the waves themselves don't take too long to finish. That's kind of why I proposed a potential solution to balance or give people who want to make a longer maze a better chance to able to compete score wise with those who like a more drawn out, longer run for the purpose of completely filling in the the game with gems. Then again, why not have multiple versions of the game, one which would stay the same (classic) then a different version that offers other challenges that would require us to completely change our strategy if we want to get a high score.

If i remeber well registering didn't reset run (even no refresh page was needed)

Am I not going to be able to log a high score for this run??? I didn't know there's now a requirement to register. I'm at level 578 and really not seeing much point in continuing the run for another few days if I can't log the high score score. . . The only note on the game page is "Register & Login for saving and high scores", and I don't think I'm the only one who would have missed it. If you've been playing the game for over 15 years, you don't tend to read the text on the game page anymore. *Major* bummer. I'll leave the tab open for now in case someone can answer whether this run is as pointless as I now expect!

@Peter: I have a solid run going at this point, at level 523. Assuming I don't mess something up, this should get to around level 1256. Hope I don't hit a crash. I don't know what you mean by "telemetry", though. I noticed that I wasn't prompted for high score text at level 500. https://imgur.com/a/zHwKJFG

Stunlocking single enemy by 10+ EEs is not problem (and no worth). Being not able to lose game (not intentionally) after some point is.

In my opinion, the problem with stun resistance (the ability to resist being affected by new sources of stun), in this game, is that if there are too many towers that apply stun, even if you resist stun now, it can be applied right after, thus, causing permanent stun with a less probability chance. But with many towers, stun chance can become very high for a single enemy. See the following example: "You have a dwarf, surrounded by 10 EEs. It can resist against 8 at the same time. But if it fails to resist to 2 (one now, and one right after 2s), there is now permanent stun for that poor dwarf." Here's my idea to counter 'permanent stun', and implement 'stun resistance': - Enemies can take 2s of stun without resisting it, based on EE duration. - From 3s onwards, at the start of each second with stun, enemies have 5% chance to break from stun. This is their 'stun resistance', its the enemy struggling to be free. Perhaps at each 100th wave, it gains +1%? - When they shake the stun off, they gain a 1-second-window of stun immunity, to prevent being deadlocked forever on that spot. They move, then they can be stunned again. Flying enemies should receive -5% resist stun chance (they cannot shake off the effect < level 100; they have 1% chance on level 100; 2% chance on level 200; and so on... to break stun, and once they do, oh boy...).

I really don't like an idea of playing untill end of space (mostly becasue single run takes absurd amount of time). Preventing leaks should be still main objective - If we keep wawes of 10 enemies, some form of stun resistance is nesserary, but not enough : with absurd amount of jades even if someone would start to leak all 10 flyers every flying wawe, running out of gold may last... hundreds of lvls.------ Anyway, i mentioned already several times that stun resist + extra penatly for leaks is a way to balance lvls 200+

I actually did have an idea that could make the game more interesting, or fun. Have a button that allows us to advance the level without selecting the gem, but at the cost of increasing the stun resistance by 1% each time it gets pressed. Then if someone manages to reach 1201, increase damage resistance by 1% up until level 1300 when the enemies become invincible. If done right, it could be interesting if a larger maze that focuses on higher damage can be competitive against mazes that focuses on maximizing space late game. Either that or add the option of destroying a gem, but again at the cost of increasing stun resistance. Anyway, I do have another run going that could get me a high score, but not sue how quickly I'll be able to progress due to other things I'm focusing on.

I can't. I have a life, this is the further I've ever went so far: https://imgur.com/a/pCurAAa

I believe I am very very close to tracking down the crash issue, please if someone can run one more long game level 500+ that might produce the necessary telemetry to identify the annoying memory issue. It appears to be related to how Phaser handles text. Also, I am open to suggestions on how to make the game more fun for these high levels. I never thought players would get to level 100+...

Yes, that's something I realized after entering on the +200 levels for the first time: there's a limited amount of spaces, thus a maximum level you can reach, but that's also a lie! There's no forfeit button, so you lose in an even worse way at the point. If you make a very long maze for the ground units, you have less space to place gems on the map. Each time you get "lucky" by placing a special tower in one go, you're in fact decreasing your max level by 3 or 4 points. That's also the reason why veteran players like paraibas, you turn 4 tiles in 1, allowing much further game content in terms of levels and score. Some towers are necessary though. I doubt you can go that far without LAJ for example.

Sadly, for the first time, I have run out of room! I never even realized that once you are out of room, the run is over. Is there no way to let the game run its course from here and save my score? I'd like to at least have it recorded, even though I think this maze could have gone at least another few-hundred levels! (And yes, I know I got distracted in the top left and accidentally placed a LAJ so that I essentially made the middle part of my maze useless - sad!) https://imgur.com/a/9VnIIBh

Welp, I finally ran out of room at level 1241, and watching my gold in late game slowly deplete when I had to reduce the length of the maze in order to increase space was a bit nerve wracking as to whether I could keep repicking for more paraibas, or switch to making a few more EEs. https://imgur.com/a/CVMqVNR Other than that, it seems that so long as I refresh the page when I notice the memory footprint start to get high again, I no longer had any issues with crashing. One other thing. I'll admit I used a speed addon to speed up the game, and noticed that if I tried using the addon to speed up too much, the game itself will automatically slow down to maintain the accuracy of the game (aka 4x automatically slowed down to 2x) By the end of this run I was using the addon to speed the game by 2x, while had the game itself running successfully at 4x, coming out to be 8x speed total, without having any issues. Early in the game, I tried having the addon run the game at 5x speed, and that was when the game itself wouldn't let me go above 2x speed for accuracy reasons, and I think even then it may have caused an early game crash, However the game seems to run just fine at 8x speed (2x for addon, 4x in game) so long as you occasionally reload the page if you notice the memory leak start to get bad.

To be more specific do this to replicate and confirm. First: when you select a gem, downgrade that gem before the wave ends. Second, reload the web page and load the game back up. If my hunch is correct, that gem you just downgraded will no longer be downgraded.

Ok this glitch happened to me twice now. First time I wasn't sure but the second time confirmed my suspicions. Upon reloading my game in order to reduce the memory footprint back down under 100MB, the gem I selected and downgraded to the one I wanted before reloading the game reverted back to the original gem when I loaded the in progress game back up. Since I'm no longer able to downgrade that gem back to the one I wanted, I'm stuck building something I didn't want to build during late game. As for the game itself I'm on right now, looks like I should be able to get past level 1200 (though it won't be by much if I did my math right), but that will be assuming I have enough money saved up to be able to absorb the inevitable ground leaks that will happen the more I'm forced to shorten my maze to give myself more space.

@carlhr I decided to add a simple account system, you can optionally register now for high score / saves.

Weird, because if you open both of your runs on the high scores tab, you can see the same action summary message for both '531' and '603' runs: "High-management run with 5799 logged actions across 10 action types. Most common action was remove (2892 times). Logged telemetry reached level 602 by time 153681." This means that the game knows you've been on level 602.

I had a game crash at 531 (around 900MB of memory), reloaded the game successfully bringing my version to 0.9.5, causing my level to skip to 532 after a wave went by without picking any gems, the memory footprint reduced to 81MB, and upon refreshing the high score page, I realize it just gave me 2 high scores on which will stay at 531 when the game crashed, and a second high score which is showing where my current level is at.

Maybe that's why: https://imgur.com/a/jcj0sYF This option was enabled by default, it google chat says that it prevents fingerprint tracking.

Hmm weird.

@carlHR The saving is based off your Browser's Fingerprint which can change if you switch browsers or computers. I can add an account system but then players will have to login to create an session.

I can see a cookie, possibly yours was deleted? Loading 0.9.4 save to 0.9.5 worked, just lost 1 gem pick.

"I added saving specifically to try to find the root cause of this very strange crash", you say that but you did made an update against save scumming lol Anyways, I have a problem with this. I do recall that I stopped playing yesterday to resume it later, and today the game didn't shown the dialog to continue from my previous run. Is it related to the session id (which changes over time)? Or my ip address (I also use vpn, so also changes)? Or, perhaps, because the game has been updated? I don't see any cookies on this site, so I have no idea what factor you use to identify which run is from.

I do have a run going right now which is up to about level 300 right now and I think has the potential to reach level 1200 depending on the stability of the game on my pc, though it may take me awhile to get that far so we'll see.

If someone can test to see if they can get passed the 700ish level crashes using the Save/Reload, please let me know.

Sorry for the bugs with saving, I added saving specifically to try to find the root cause of this very strange crash. My best guess is the Phaser (https://phaser.io/) version back in 0.6.2 was more stable than the latest 4.1 but that's a guess right now.

Or create a 'Save' button that when pressed, it creates the file on the server, and it forces a page refresh preventing you from opening multiple tabs with duplicated data. Once you load a game, the file disappears from the server, forcing the game data to stay on the canvas. -------------- The only trouble with this approach is that you must remember to save your run, otherwise you'll lose data.

I guess I forgot one minor detail where you could have 2 tabs open and since they share the same seed you could use one tab to fish for a gem that looks good, and if you get a good gem, you could go to the other tab and and effectively place that specific gem at the location of where you want now that you know when it will drop. In that sense, I suppose save scumming can be somewhat broken.

hmm, opened game in other tab and got different gems - somehow one game got 1 more gold proc - could it change seed?

As for what I've seen when it comes to save scumming is, it is still somewhat limited in what you can fish for in a given level. You will always get the same gems for each repick regardless of tab as the seed is going to be the same on both tabs. As a result, the usefulness for save scumming is going to be somewhat limited, meaning if you're wanting to fish for a specific gem, but you don't get it after several repicks, refreshing the page won't give you any better results. It's basically not that different than when I used to start 10 new games in separate windows as a way to save time for finding a run that gives me good luck. Personally, I fine with some level of save scumming if it means we don't lose everything in the event of a crash. Personally, I think the only reasonable way to prevent all save scumming would be to make everything server side in a way where if you make a change in the game in one tab/window, it would automatically make that same change in the other window if you happen to have more than one tab open that points to the same game save. Or if you were to refresh the page and load the game, you would come back to the exact same (workable) state as what you had when you left the game.

I have a run going which is up to level 131. Seeing a new version get released, I opened the game in a new tab to see what would happen, and a new wave started at the same level as I was originally at, effectively causing the game to skip a level in the new tab without me picking any gems. After a bit mor testing, it seems to only let you skip a level that way once. After that, the load game seems to go back one level earlier to start a wave, bringing the game back to the same state it was before refreshing the page, meaning you can still open the game in multiple windows, let the wave go, and still effectively save scum albeit with a little bit of extra waiting.

@JonathanA Yes, tested at lvl 2 to be sure

Out of curiosity, if you click "upgrade chances" after you place the first gem, are the next ones affected by the upgrade?

That's.. another exploit... You can open new tabs and play different runs from a shared starting level, from different tabs at the same time.

Also, a reminder for the future: you may need some 'backwards compatibility' with your game files, otherwise we may close the browser, open it again only to find out that the game won't reload because a new version has been released.

Save exploit found: repicking changes seed for stun RNG - is possible to close game while flying wawe (bad stun RNG) and repick more than before to try again

@scgmeister, I had the exact same thought, wondering if the game speed boost isn't possibly causing the issue. I really don't think this is a RAM leak issue-- your game should never have crashed with only 880MB of RAM in use, if RAM use was the issue. After all, you used to be able to get to much higher levels, right? And the RAM leak was far worse before this year. I got to level 781 (and could have kept going for 300 more levels), and the game was only using 250MB of RAM. Anyhow, I had planned on testing whether the game speed boost could be related (I was already reducing to 1x speed before every level ended in my last run, but that was for the wrong version of the game!) If I get a good run going, I'll check in. Getting a great opal feels more important to surviving now than it used to, at least to me.

Hmm, I'm not sure if this would do much to help with the crashes, but with the speed option, I'm wondering if keeping the game speed normal, or even slowed down slightly during gem selection, then having the game speed back up to the preferred speed after about a second or so when a wave starts?

I'm well aware ai can have a tendency to hallucinate potential fixes to issues based on sites it looks up and how I frame a question/conversation, but every once in awhile it can still successfully point to a solution we may not have thought of. (hense my suggestion on looking into how gems with an aura overlap as I don't think anyone mentioned that yet). That said, it doesn't change the fact that my recent run using 0.9.3 had a higher memory footprint than it did on 0.9.2, and it also crashed before I was even able to reach level 500 to record my score as you can see on my recent screenshot at the time of the crash.

You know that Gemini is using our comments to pinpoint the cause of errors right? If everyone writes that the bug happens because there's a giant pink elephant on the screen, that's what the AI will start telling about this bug.

This time the game crashed at level 419 or something right after selecting a gem, which is worse than the previous version, the game's memory was at 866MB which, again is higher than what it was the last time I played. I also had the performance monitor open an running during the time of the crash. which did give me an error. It stated the debugging connection was closed. reason: render process gone. Here's a screenshot of the maze when I mouse over the crashed tab: https://imgur.com/a/B77lKrH

@carl, according to the crashes I've had, the page just goes white but doesn't display any dialogue box (error) letting us know what's going on. The tab basically just freezes to white (game canvas disappears) to where I can't even use the keyboard shortcut to tab away from the game, much less any other keyborard/mouse inputs. Hmm, I decided to post the issue into google AI to see what it says, and it mentioned something about overlapping auras possibly contributing toward memory issues. google AI also states with near certainty that this issue is not caused by an infinite loop.

Well, I ended my test run early at level 781, having learned nothing useful and not even managing to get a current high score logged, all because, somehow, maddeningly, Firefox was loading the prior version of the game, 0.9.2, not current version 0.9.3. Which means that I'm not actually testing the current game. And also that my high score was relegated to the "Historic high scores" tab, which frankly sucks considering I've been playing this run all day. But more important than not getting to log an actual current high score for a solid run, this means I can't even comment on whether the current version of the game still crashes. It might not-- at level 781 it was still only using 250MB or so of RAM, with no slowdown or glitched enemy movement at all. But this was also v 0.9.2 I'm playing, which did crash for people. @216 has a current high score in v 0.9.3 at level 267, but that's long, long before the game would have crashed if it's still prone to crashing. So I've learned nothing, and can share nothing useful, and didn't even get a high score out of it. This game. . . I'll probably try another run tomorrow. But for those who might experience the same issue, I guess make sure you're playing the current version of the game, or the same thing could happen to you! (The only way I know of to do this is to check the javascript code directly and do a text search for the version number "0.9.2" or "0.9.3".)

Okay. To everyone here that had experienced this bug or crash. What happens exactly? 1. Does the browser simply closes instantly with no warnings or hints? 2. Or does the following steps happen in this order a) The page goes white / grayed b) (Optional) A dialog may show up, saying "Page not responding. Close/Wait" c) After a while (it can be less than a second, or more), the page just closes. ---------------------- If its option 1: memory leak. If its option 2: infinite loop, which is basically starves UI.

@216: I think you're right that the crashes are not related to any memory leak at this point. I'm currently at level 605, and the game is still only using about 250MB of RAM. I got the great opal around level 120, and I went from leaking a minimum of 4 enemies every air level (and sometimes as many as 8) with just a perfect opal, to leaking NOTHING. That's terribly unbalanced, as far as I'm concerned, for a tower with pretty low odds on getting to build it. It's nice being able to play "normally" for a change, since there's no reason to play for maximizing turns by building nothing but paraibas if the game is going to crash somewhere around level 700. Flooded the map with Egyptian Golds, Ancient Bloodstones, and Enchanted Emeralds. Was able to actually build attack towers in the middle of the maze. Screenshot at level 605 (since I don't know when the game is going to crash): https://imgur.com/a/3jvqDAt And as @G said, running this at 4x speed practically makes it a different game. It actually affects what gems I pick and how often I repick when I don't have to wait 8 to 10 minutes between turns! I've been spoiled now. I will report back on when the game crashes.

CarlHR: I've tasted 4x speed. I can never go back.

Well then, in the worst case, rollback to 0.6.2 lol

About crashes: I dont think that memory leak is a direct reason. i tested in 2021 that nova/flamestrikes cause minor leak, resulting few GB in super high lvls ... but ppl in 0.6.2 were reaching 1200+ without that kind of crash (game simply was using more RAM)

Builing many EGs (1276 DPS) in the midddle is the right thing, also need multiple stun zones around.----- Other high (single-target) DPS towers: GAq (1870), GA (1534), ABS (760 + 500 per flamestrike active), uber stone(21k :)... but definitelly no paraiba (642 + 50). note: in flash version EE had decent DPS too due to x1.5 modifier for green vs amethyst. -----Exluding obvious uber stone, the highest dps gem is ... ABS if very long stunned target ( ~2.5 average flamestrike), Great Aqua otherwise. (calculation were for 4 armor, all buff towers: GO, BO, SYS and x1.75 amethyst modifier) ------- I dont get reson to play now with as few as 3 EGs (or ABSs) in high lvls, it must be really slow even at x4

Been waiting for the game to stabilize before diving in headfirst again, but I'm curious at what point my browser will crash due to whatever is causing the crashes everyone is getting. I suspect that, as with the memory leak in the initial javascript version of GTD, it will depend a lot on your PC specs. I'll report back if I can get a decent run going-- not getting a great opal early on feels (so far, to me) like even more of a handicap now than it used to be, so I may not be able to sustain a good enough run to play till a crash. And I don't think I have the dedication to keep trying run after run to get a good one going, knowing that it will crash. @JonathanA: I'm intrigued by whatever puzzle game you've developed there! As for high damage towers, unless something has changed recently, the most powerful towers are Egyptian Gold, Bloodstone, and Paraiba, with great amethysts and great aquamarines also being strong. None of the other great gems were worth building, at least in the old versions of the game. Maybe the great sapphire, because it covers such a huge area of the map, but it's otherwise not a strong attack tower. Great opals are of course the single most important tower in the whole game, but not for attack power, for their cooldown buff (50% vs 35% for a perfect opal.)

@JonathanA Lately I have been going for 3 Egyptian Gold, 3 Ancient Blood Stone, 1-4 Mystic Black Opal, 1 Great Opal, 1 Rose Quartz Crystal, 10-20 Lucky Asian Jade, and 50+ Enchanted Emeralds, with the rest being Paraibas. Currently the game is bugged and will crash before you can get to the 1000s though, so it's not as important to maximize Paraibas right now.

https://imgur.com/screenshot-DapA1eZ I made four stun zones (so far but i usually quit the game around this level...) to stun lock and i'm about to put all future EEs at the bottom as anti leak. I know yall have already figured out this game approaching level 1000, i'm just trying to understand the game from a lower level perspective. I put the gold in the middle as a nuke but i wonder which is the highest damage tower. i saw from a recent screenshot of scgmeister however i believe that really EE is the only important thing which makes sense, just fill the map with it, and eventually pariba to not run out of space. perhaps EE is too powerful, and could nerf air to make other towers more useful. Leaking at least 5 air every level. (but plenty of jade mitigates that problem of course.) Btw you can see in the screenshot i'm playing a puzzle game between the waves, that i made myself, let me know if anyone is interested xD I might make it available for download at some point. happy sunny sunday from ecuador!

hi friends - hope everyone is having a great sunday wherever you are in the world.

Just had another game crash to white on me. This time it was right after I started a new level when it crashed to white. The memory footprint was at around 850MB, at level 587, and I was focusing on paraibas late game. Refreshing the page allowed me to see the game again for a fraction of a second before having to start over from the beginning. In the end, while the new updates did help bring down the memory slightly, it is still unstable late game. I also confirmed that I am able to reach higher levels when I do not build paraibas. Hmm, I'm almost wondering if these crashes are somehow related to the fix that originally caused the game to slow down organically as the memory increased until the enemies eventually started vibrating in place.

It finally crashed to white level 735 at almost 1.2g of memory (v0.9.0) Interesting my game lasted longer this time around for me without focusing on paraibas late game. Now to see if 0.9.2 improves the stability (depending on if I can get another good run).

I don't know how useful this info is anymore as the game I'm running is version 0.9.0, but instead of focusing on paraibas, I'm filling the board with jades and the occasional emerald for now which minimizes on how much I have to repick each level. I'm also saving any perfect aquamarines that drop for filling in the final parts of the maze on the chance the game still doesn't crash by then. So far I'm at level 628, memory has been around 1GB for the past 40 levels now, and still no crash. Anyway, this is still an older version of the game, but it's interesting that I'm lasting a lot longer this time around since I'm not focused on fishing constantly for paraibas. https://imgur.com/a/uoAVOVl

I forfeited at level 136. By using ff dev options, the snapshot I got was around 17-18 MB, so nothing unusual so far.

@CarlHR I was told it might be the Phaser.Text for the Level, Gold, Lives and Time. I have switched them over to Bitmaps, please test to let me know.

If its a memory leak, the main obvious reason are JS closures. There must be some variable somewhere on your code that gets created over and over, and it holds some allocated memory, and that variable is never set to null. So, the garbage collector never releases memory afterwards. Coincidentally, I did made a question on stackoverflow years ago about this: https://stackoverflow.com/q/74007560/14956120 That's why programming in JS is weird haha. I hope it helps. Finding this type of bug is hard, even more given that the browser crashes and you can't catch any feedback.

@216 @scgmeister @carlhr thanks that means upgrading to Phaser 4.1 didn't solve the issue. I'll keep exploring what is causing the crashes.

0.9.0, freeze at 730 mid lvl (not responding, couldn't open console), waited few min and page went white(but only game tab this time). Like previous times chrome magically ate much (~15 GB) of DISK space, instantly restored after closing tab

Just had another crash to white, and here is the most recent screenshot before it happened including the memory footprint https://imgur.com/a/xCwJ5lC. Keep in mind this crash happened using the 1.8.10 version of the game. Hopefully the new version fixes these crashes.

I'm even more impressed for the fact that there are no ads, no DLCs, nor even account subscriptions, even when this guy owns this .com url address for years.

Awesome work - I've been intermittently addicted to this website for MANY YEARS! Super impressed that you came back to work on it again.

@hutchins @G I have migrated to the new game framework Phaser 4.1, I'm hoping that might solve some of the crash issues because I cannot find the root cause.

Crashed in Edge on a gaming laptop. 675. Admittedly I was doing like 10 other things in another browser... https://youtu.be/gnGUyr8G5IY

Another crash in chrome on mac, this time at level 735. Like the other times, the tab was using roughly 1GB of memory.

@Peter: Good idea i think - the most active part of game is around 20-100 (and new players won't even know about that lag).----- @CarlHR: this lag exist since 2 days only and is very small - around 0.1s, so on faster PC it might be invisible. I can see it already at lvl ~20, when main maze is build. Btw the maximum possible gems + rock on map is 341, so also i dont get that amount of sprites

I never noticed this sort of lag. But.. maybe that's because I never go on runs past level +100. When I reach that point and I haven't lost, I simply close the page (so I do not submit the score). I don't have the time to do it irl lol. So, maybe its something on the late game levels if I'm not aware? Or my PC runs too fast? Haha I also don't get the phrase "At late game this drops the rendered sprite count from several thousand to a few hundred", as we're talking about rocks. The map is of 520x520 pixels (anyone can download those textures using the correct url from assets), and check that a rock has 26x26 pixels size. So, the map supports a maximum a grid of 20x20 rocks on the screen. That is just 400 rocks, which, some of them, will be gems and towers. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't see it as something that causes too much lag.

@216 Its because of this change: Batched all "rock" sprites from past rounds into a single render layer instead of one sprite per rock. At late game this drops the rendered sprite count from several thousand to a few hundred and is aimed directly at the white-screen crashes Chrome players have been hitting in survival runs past level 500. I could batch the rocks only at say level 200+?

Noticed very short lag each time removing rocks in 0.8.10 - rather minor issue, but can be little annonying. --- In JS version only pink damage(most important though) is affected by weakness. Are all original(flash) modifiers for color/weakness planned to be restored?

Sorry fixed the rock placement issue, should be fixed now in 0.8.10.

Yes, being not able to remove rock while placing gems is actually very serious issue! (making well-placed GO is best example). Btw old, rather minor bug: armor reduction aura sometiems are not applied constantly(despite being in range), making armor changing fast( between 5 and 11 or 13/19 if no EG), Observed mostly near uraniums, possibly also happened outside burn aura - not sure though

@Peter, during the build phase, when you need to place gems on the map, you cannot click over the rocks to select them, in order to remove them with R. You can only select and remove rocks, during the wave, or after you place all gems somewhere else. Anyone can test it at level 2. Just click on the 'Place Gems' button, and attempt to select a rock afterwards, a prompt showing "Cannot build there" will be shown for a few seconds. I assume that at late games, there'll be no space left to build anymore if this bug persists.

A new version has been released which should reduce the memory usage at high levels.

Crashed on level 709 when I placed the fifth gem. Chrome on mac.

crashed at 766 didn't have network/console opened. was playing on chrome in mac OS. whole page went white

crashed around 775 to white frame. I'm glad that it's doing the auto-saving of scores though!

And the game just crashed to a blank white page at level 590 while repicking gems. Like the others, I'm playing on chrome, and I also tend to have a lot of tabs open which might be why it's happening on earlier levels than on others. No lag though that I could tell.

Looks like, I've got another good run going despite the lack of a great opal. I'm now up to level 324, and we'll see how long it takes this time around without the game crashing. https://imgur.com/a/8pdJUny