[RESOLVED] Application showing different behavoir when installed versus running in Visual Studio

[EntityX]

I have a situation with an application of mine where I noticed I get a different result when the application is installed in comparison to it running in Visual Studio. If the application is installed a certain aberration pops up in this computer graphics application at a certain point in one of the screens but if I run the same group of settings or you could say the same "screen" running the application from Visual Studio I don't see the aberration ever happen. I tried deleting the bin and obj folders and then rebuilding before creating an installation and it doesn't change anything and whether I use InstallShield or create an installation using ClickOnce I still see the same issue. I have Enable application framework unchecked but found it makes no difference checked or unchecked.

The below screenshots show the difference between an installed application with the aberration at top and the same application running the same screen at the same frame of the screen running in Visaul Studio. I have the screen running with blanking every frame because it makes the aberration more obvious to see though the image is not very interesting.

Maybe someone could suggest changing some compile option or project property that would fix things. If not it's not too serious. The aberration pops up somewhere between the 6 and 7 thousandth frame when the application is installed.

[ForumAccount]

I honestly don't know what I'm looking at. Where is the aberration?

[kaliman79912]

I think its that pair of gray lines going accross the star

[kaliman79912]

It is plotting a point that should be off the screen from the top into a left border point. This is certainly odd. Why dont you try to stop the program when the coordinates of drawing the gray line reach this point (or the point before) and look at the values of your coordinates. You should try to write a log to see if any values are different.

[EntityX]

ForumAccount if you notice the difference at the very center of the image. Question is why would the same code give a different result running in an installed application versus from Visual Studio? If I did a log and found the difference, what then? I would just confirm that it's running differently in the two different situations which I already know that it is. I was just trying changing Option Infer from Off to On and also checked remove integer overflow checks in Advanced Compile Options. I tested separately for those changes but I still get the same result.

[kaliman79912]

It will only be specullation as this is obvioulsy a bug. But if you can determine the exact conditons where the problem appears you may be able to do something in your code to prevent it even if it is not showing up in debug... wait, have you changed that? the realease/debug setting?

[dbasnett]

TimerInt is different.

[Lord Orwell]

you aren't running 2010 beta are you? I had some confusing bugs show up in that one in code that ran fine in 2008.

[EntityX]

Problem solved. I tracked down the exact point where the image started to get out of alignment. It was related to the setting CDE3 which was set to 52.11. The 52 means that every 52 frames of the image a certain adjustment is made to how the drawing points move. The .11 selects what group of changes occur.

This line of code

AngleMoving = Math.Atan(SlopeOfMovingPoint) + OneD * a

I changed to

AngleMoving = Math.Atan(SlopeOfMovingPoint) + OneD * (a + 0.05)

a is generated the line before this way using a function I created called SelectValue

a = SelectValue(i, 10) + 15

i here is the number of the drawing point where in this case there are 240 because LL = 240 and it starts with point 1 not 0. What I found in the past is that when I get aberrant behavoir and I trace it to when I change the direction of some drawing point often I can fix things by adjusting that angle just a small fraction of 1 degree. In this case I adjusted the angle by 0.05 of one degree. Where you see OneD above that represent one degree so if the variable "a" was 5 the drawing point would change direction by 5 degrees but now it would be 5.05 degrees because of the adjustment I just made to my code. There might be someone else out there that does something similar so I thought I would explain this for anyone that might be interested.

I still don't know why I had a problem with the installed application and not when running from Visual Studio but I made a fix that left things more or less the same when running from Visual Studio and fixed things when running from the installed application.

In answer to dbasnett's post TimeInt is short for Timer Interval. So when it's high like 995 that means things happen real slow. I slowed things down so I could stop things at the exact same frame as before(IC = 10476 or frame 10476). In answer to Lord Orwell I'm not using a beta. I'm using Visual Studio 2010 Pro and I think I have done recent updates for it.

[EntityX]

Here's a screenshot of the same screen run from the application installed using the latest code change. So can you see anything different? Every 52 IC or 52 frames CDE3 makes a change but only once every 8 changes is the code I posted in the above post used. So that 0.05 degree difference in shift wouldn't happen very many times by IC 10476 but I can see a very slight difference. Not easy to spot. It you look at one of the very smallest triangles near top center you can spot a difference.