Quick answer: Crashes during loading come from problems handling assets and data, a failed or missing asset load, out-of-memory from loading too much, corrupt data, or loading-code errors. They happen at transitions, save loads, or startup.
Crashes during loading, at a loading screen, level transition, or when loading a save, are common because loading involves a lot of asset and data handling that can go wrong. Here's what causes crashes during loading.
What Goes Wrong During Loading
Loading is a busy phase, reading files, decompressing assets, allocating memory, parsing data, and any of those can fail. The common causes of loading crashes:
- Failed or missing asset loads, an asset that isn't found, is the wrong format, or fails to load
- Out-of-memory, loading too much at once, exceeding available memory during the load
- Corrupt data or saves, loading data that's damaged or in an unexpected format
- Errors in loading code, bugs in how the game reads, parses, or sets up loaded data
- Incompatible data, loading data from a different version that can't be parsed
- Memory spikes, loading a large level causing a surge that crashes lower-memory devices
Because loading handles so much data and memory at once, it's a common place for crashes, especially the out-of-memory kind on constrained devices.
Why Loading Crashes Vary by Device
Loading crashes are often device-specific, especially out-of-memory ones, which hit lower-memory devices when a level load exceeds their RAM, and corrupt-save crashes, which depend on the player's data. So a loading crash may hit some players and not you.
Bugnet captures crashes tagged by device, with the stack trace showing where in loading it failed, so loading crashes surface with the context to diagnose them. The device pattern and the point in loading where it crashes are the key clues.
Finding the Cause
The stack trace from a loading crash usually points at what was loading when it failed, an asset, a save, a level, which identifies the cause. Out-of-memory loading crashes show up on lower-memory devices; corrupt-data crashes correlate with specific saves. Capturing the crash with context reveals which.
Bugnet captures the stack trace and device context for loading crashes, so you can see what failed to load and on what hardware. So crashes during loading come from failed asset loads, out-of-memory, corrupt data, and loading-code bugs, and the captured trace and device context point at which is causing yours.
Crashes during loading come from failed asset loads, out-of-memory, corrupt data/saves, and loading-code bugs. The stack trace points at what failed to load; the device context shows which hardware is affected.