Hey. I just bought Weather Control by Aries on itch.io, and ever time I try to use the “Embers” effect, it crashes my project, and floods the screen with error messages that I can’t understand. Apparently this has happened to another person when I was searching for fixes, but the other person didn’t say whether they figured out what was going on, only that something in the plugins coding is broken. I’m really angry because it was 17$ and I feel like I completely wasted my money. What do I do?
Also I can’t figure out how to remove the effects once when they’re active. The others work, just not the Embers one. Which is extremely frustrated as I needed it for a scene I’m working on.
Does anyone know what the fix is?
Update: I found the creator’s Twitter, but they hadn’t been active since 2019. No recent replies to anything, no recent posts. Looks completely abandoned. If I were to post the plug-in here (Is that possible?) would someone be willing to look over the broken Embers coding and fix it?
Their only contact seems to be on Twitter, and they’re probably a pretty big RPGMaker creator and the plug-in might be considered “too-old” for them to fix. I guess I’m scared they’ll either ignore me, or tell me to just switch to RPGmaker MZ and buy that one VisuStella plugin instead…
I’ll see if I can re-download Twitter and ask, but I don’t know what to do if they ignore or refuse. I just want the plugin to work properly. I wish they didn’t sell something broken.
IMO if you message them, that puts pressure on them to fix their product. Right now, people are writing complaints about their buggy work and that will affect their sales down the line
Unfortunately I think I’m the only one who has left a bad review due to the crashing. But I’ll try to contact. I was going to earlier, but got distracted by some really amazing but unrelated news.
Oh that’s okay! I can wait! Thanks so much for offering! I’m not home right now, but I’ll try to attach the plugin here if I can figure it out. If not, I do have discord so maybe I can send it through there? (I’d feel bad if you had to buy it just to help me fix it. So I’d rather just send it to you.)
Aries003_WeatherControl102.zip (35.2 KB) Oh dang! Turns out I can upload the whole thing! Here you go! Should have the plugin, and image assets as well! It’s specifically the “Embers” effect that’s broken. I hope you can figure out what’s wrong with the code!
I’m sorry it’s happening to you too! You’re the second person I’ve seen with this issue. I hope Gensun will know how to fix it. I tried to get itch.io to issue me a refund and I haven’t heard back yet. So if I can’t get my money back, I’d at least like the plug-in to finally work properly. :’)
first is the actual error text. start a playtest. hit f8 to open the console. the top red line is the real failure and the line under it that names a file plus a number is where it happened. that one line is worth more than the whole crash screen. paste it in here and someone can point straight at the fault instead of guessing.
second is a hunch you can check in about a minute. embers is the kind of effect that usually leans on a shipped image rather than on the weather built into the engine. note that the zip was described as having image assets in it as well. if the plugin expects an ember graphic in something like img/pictures and that file never got copied across or the name differs by even one capital letter then the load fails and the first frame that tries to draw it throws. that would explain why every other effect behaves and only this one dies.
so open the plugin parameters and write down the exact file name the ember effect asks for. then go look in your project img folders and match it letter for letter including capitals. its worth doing even if you think you copied everything because a deployed game is case sensitive on plenty of systems where your own machine is not and thats the annoying part.
if instead that console line points at the plugin js file and a line number then its a code fault and not a missing asset. thats useful to know too because it tells whoever looks at the code exactly where to start.
Sorry I have no idea how to do any of that… I’m not good at coding or anything. I’m almost illiterate when it comes to understanding this stuff.
If I send you the plugin will you know how to fix it? It does come with PNGs and stuff.
Edit: Sorry I misread your reply. I’m completely exhausted. I’ll try to do that F8 thing, and paste whatever it says here but I don’t understand anything else. I’m sorry.
You don’t need to understand any of it. A picture of the red text is enough for someone else to read it for you.
Press F8 while the game is running. A panel opens on the side. Take a screenshot of that panel and drag the image straight into a reply box here. That is the whole job. No typing and no understanding needed.
Also worth saying because you keep apologising. SC_Nikki up the thread hit the same failure on the same effect. Two people on two different machines breaking identically points at the plugin and not at anything you did. You didn’t install it wrong.
That narrows it down a little too. If the ember graphic is just missing from the download every buyer gets then every buyer would crash on that one effect while all the others kept working. That matches what the pair of you are seeing. The red text settles it either way because a missing file error names the file it went looking for.
If that is what it turns out to be then the fix is one PNG in the right folder and it costs nothing.
Here’s what comes up when the game crashes, and here’s the error message I get from f8. I don’t understand any of it. These pop-ups/crashes happen every time I try to use the Embers effect. And I’m not sure what “UpdateChildren” is or what that and a Chrome extension has to do with the crash???
Sorry I keep apologizing by the way. It’s a force out habit. It’s not just happening to SC_Nikki and I either, it happened to another person on the RPGMaker Forums a few years ago, but nobody answered that person, when they brought up the crashing, and I have no idea if that person ever found a fix. I’m really surprised nobody aside from me ever tried to notify the seller. It’s just a shame the person who made it disappeared from the internet. An ember effect was perfect for something I needed visually in my game…
Do you know what these weird error messages might be talking about?
everything listed under it is just the engine calling that function in turn. the failure itself happens inside the weather plugin on line 946.
now for the part you asked about. those chrome extension lines are not the cause. they are not some browser addon interfering with your game either. those are just the core files of the engine. that strange looking address is simply where they get loaded from while a playtest runs. you can ignore every single line that mentions rpg_core or rpg_scenes or updateChildren. they are the messenger and not the message. the only line pointing at real code is the top one.
what the error means in plain words is pretty simple. cannot read property 0 of undefined means the plugin asked for the first item in a list and that list was not there at all. the dimmer routine went looking for the settings that belong to the Embers effect. it found nothing. then it tried to read the first value out of that nothing and the game stopped on the spot.
that fits everything you described. every other effect has its settings so they all run fine. Embers has none so it fails every single time. it fails on any machine that tries to run it. you didn’t install anything wrong. SC_Nikki hit the same wall. so did the person in that old forum thread who never got an answer.
here is the one small thing that will finish this off.
open your project folder then js then plugins. open Aries003_WeatherControl.js in Notepad. press Ctrl and G together to jump to a line number and go to line 946. copy that line plus the five lines above it and paste the lot in a reply here.
those lines will show which list is missing and what name it is filed under. in plugins built this way it is usually a table of dimmer values holding one entry per weather type. the Embers entry is either absent altogether or spelled differently from the name the effect hands it. if that’s what it turns out to be then the repair is one short line added to the plugin and you get to keep the effect.
I figured out the bug. The above is a super simple plugin that should fix the issue.
The cause was really simple: The plugin forgot to input the embers screen tone color into memory. Basically what ‘Cannot read property 0 of undefined’ means is it’s trying to read data from a list that doesn’t exist. The fix is essentially changing just one line.
Aries.P003_WCT.HeatTone = eval(Aries.P003_WCT.Param["Embers Screen Tone Color"]);
You could run this as a script as well and it also fixes the bug. This code creates that exact list that was missing and reads from the plugin parameters.
