I spent a good amount of time tonight working on getting a new release of HYPE ready. I quickly smashed through the bugs reported up on GitHub and even managed to track down a nasty series of three bugs that were all hiding behind one another (I fixed bug A, which exposed bug B, which, when fixed, exposed bug C!).

The clencher though was when I discovered that a null object error that would only crop up when I would save a file out from my test SWF – and even then, it wasn’t consistent. I was able to fix the bug, but I haven’t been able to nail down exactly what was happening. As best I can tell, opening a FileReference dialog interupts the normal process of the garbage collector and it appears that the bug was causing my code to be dependant on the rapid cycling of the garbage collector to hide it’s mess and prevent it from throwing runtime errors.

And after all of this I just discovered a particular edge case that breaks the RLE compressor I wrote for my TGA (Targa) image exporter. Ugh. Gonna have to deal with that one in the morning.