Hi - the new download works great, it kept crashing on my Zire 71 but works absolutely fine now.

Let me know if you need any help.

Leila Ferguson

I'm jumping in a bit late to this discussion, but I just tried playing the final version downloadable off your site, and it's frozen on me three times in the last half an hour. I've been reading some of this thread, and I tried things like powering off (except it wouldn't let me), so all I could do was a soft reset. When it froze none of the hardware buttons or anything would work. I'm running on a Tungsten E, and according to Delete I have 21M free memory (though being relatively new to the Palm world I don't know if that's actual free memory, so any advice on where to look would be helpful). Also, I'm running off of a card and not off of main memory. Every time it's frozen I've been in the process of trying to select a villager, and near as I can recall it's always been in front of the research table.

Sounds like the kind of crash that a delete and a full reinstall would help, Eric. Let me know if that helps.

I have an Tungsten C. Running 34 mb memory free before running VS. Statistics showed I had played 116 hours. When the game crashed, I had been running the current unsaved edition about 36 hours. The error on the screen was Fatal Alert Window68k.c, line 92, no shadow window. I had 15 villagers of which 5 were babies. Most villagers were age 35 and below. Of the 5 villagers not nursing, there was 1 female (set to farm and fishing) and 4 males set to construction on the house below the rock. The secret garden puzzle was the last puzzle. I had looked away from the game for 30 seconds and saw a pixelized stripe on the screen from the lagoon to the rock. I then scrolled the screen around and then saw 1 villager at the lagoon with a square pixilized background. I selected the villager with intentions to drag him back to building and the game crashed.

Construction was at 12 percent. There was about 3200 food, and 29,000 tech points. 1st level tech was met for all 6 tech areas.

After the reset, I had 6 dead villagers (age 57 to 116), 5 living villagers at age 59 or older and no secret garden. Food was at 29,493, tech at 14,678. The stats showed the oldest villager at 116.

Thank you for the detailed description! The "No shadow window found" error is one that Arthur has been working on. Your details will be very helpful to him.

We have seen the pixelization before (usually after a death/burial). It doesn't sound like any of your villagers had died yet, though. If you exit the game and launch it again, the problem will be cleared up.

How long had the game been running continuously (without an exit to another app or the Palm launcher)? It sounds like, from your description, that it had been quite awhile. The game is only saved upon exit to another app or to the launcher, so you will lose any event, babies, etc. that occurred after the last save. When you launch Village Sim, the game recalculates everything from the point of the last save, which could be drastically different from your actual game state prior to the crash. We know that villager productivity is lower when the game is off, and when you restarted the game after the soft reset, the game treated the interval between your last save and the current time as if the device had been off the entire time. We're doing detailed tests, and hopefully the on/off balance will be much better when the update is released!

I had probably had the game running since the last save for 24-48 hours. I paused it overnight as it seems everytime I check the game in the morning a Typhoon wiped out my food supply. It had been quite awhile since I had a death. As all of the dead villagers were no longer shown.

A point I forgot to mention is that I am running the game from a 128 mb expansion card. The music is turned off with only the sounds. The game is at low difficulty and set to fast speed.

I may try to move the game to the main memory and drop the music although I don't think memory is a problem. I am running MegaLauncher 5.5 I was able to breed 2 of the remaining 3 females and am hoping for the best. Otherwise, I may restart the game.

That explains a lot about your game state after you recovered from the crash. When you launched Village Sim again, the game probably calculated that you'd been running for all that time on fast speed with whatever skills, etc. that your villagers had at the time of your last save (and no consideration for the times that you had it paused while it was still running). That would probably create a fairly ugly situation!

These types of crashes are definately related to running the game for extended periods, never leaving the app. Definately smells like a memory leak to me, but I've tripple checked the likely suspects. We'll keep working on it.

Yeah!! Got it to work, so excited, persistance pays off.

I also have a Tungsten E and when it "crashes" it freezes; buttons and tapping don't work nor will it shut off. I have to do a hard reset on the device and reboot the palm so to speak. I have had to do this several times since I purchased the program on April 13, 2005.