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Brita von Bartenwerffer (Brita)
New Solitaire Player
Username: Brita

Post Number: 10
Registered: 1-2003
Posted on Wednesday, February 12, 2003 - 2:44 pm:   

After downloading and installing the new layouts today I started playing circles. I lost the first two with no chance to undo and retry - and when I checked the statistics later on I found that both games had been recorded twice.

Each time I lost with two tiles left, one on top of the other so no reshuffling would help. PGMJ declares the game lost then. I got the statistics window where the game was recorded once. I clicked on "New" and next time I looked at the statistics the game was recorded twice.

This does not happen when winning a game nor when I resign by clicking on Game - New.

Here are the statistics as recorded by PGMJ:
#PGMJ V1
683932138*,L,142,0,16056,2003-02-12 21:10:38,9A144723
683932138*,I,142,0,16056,2003-02-12 21:10:49,F626AD18
2008235683*,L,142,0,3693,2003-02-12 21:17:42,C4B54A80
2008235683*,I,142,0,3693,2003-02-12 21:17:45,C25FA4DE
1969931890*,C,144,3,3694,2003-02-12 21:26:59,AC7AA39E
1668317315*,C,144,6,3728,2003-02-12 21:35:32,D2B0B04A

I know it's a bit hard to reproduce the exact situation but I hope you can tell whether this is a bug in the program or something I did wrong.
Brita von Bartenwerffer (Brita)
New Solitaire Player
Username: Brita

Post Number: 11
Registered: 1-2003
Posted on Wednesday, February 12, 2003 - 2:57 pm:   

Just tried something else with the same result: Got as far being prompted by PGMJ that there are no legal moves left. Could chose between New, Reshuffle, Undo and Resign. I chose resign. The statistics windows plopped up, game was recorded once. I clicked on New, reopened the statistics window and the game was recorded twice. The game I played this time was Fortress.

#PGMJ V1
1544344473*,I,54,0,1607,2003-02-12 21:52:53,D77991CC
1544344473*,I,54,0,1607,2003-02-12 21:52:56,83154926

Seems as if it really is a bug...
Thomas Warfield (Support)
Moderator
Username: Support

Post Number: 127
Registered: 12-2002
Posted on Wednesday, February 12, 2003 - 4:53 pm:   

Yes, that's a bug, the single most known bug in version 1.0. We'll be fixing that in the next version, which is coming soon.
Carol Walske
Unregistered guest
Posted on Friday, February 21, 2003 - 11:11 am:   

I've been playing PGMJ a lot -- I particularly like the Letter H layout.

After playing Long Klondike 50 times or so, now it locks up every time I try to play it and tells me MJ must be shut down. This happened to me on both my home and office PCs (one Win2K, one Win98SE). I've switched to regular MJ Klondike and haven't had any problems yet.

One other thing. MJ seems less stable in general than PGSol. After a while of using MJ, I'll get a warning about Win resources being extremely low or my second mouse will suddenly stop working. Rebooting, of course, solves the problem, for a while anyway.

Any thoughts? Thanks in advance.
Gregg Seelhoff (Seelhoff)
New Solitaire Player
Username: Seelhoff

Post Number: 7
Registered: 1-2003
Posted on Friday, February 21, 2003 - 12:42 pm:   

>After playing Long Klondike 50 times or so, now it locks up every time I try to play it and tells me MJ must be shut down.

Please try turning off the 'Save games automatically' option from the 'Options' menu at the main game list, and then try entering Long Klondike and see if that works. If it does, then turn the option back on from within Long Klondike, play part of a game, and then exit.

If this does not work, it would probably be best to email details of the message so we can try to figure out the problem.

>After a while of using MJ, I'll get a warning about Win resources being extremely low or my second mouse will suddenly stop working.

Second mouse? You definitely seem to have an interesting setup. :-)

Please provide more information about the system that has this problem. We used testing tools to specifically check for problems that would gradually reduce system resources, and there are no known problems of this type. However, there could be an interaction between the game and something in your configuration that results in this issue. (I am not aware of any testing on a system with more than one mouse, so that could have something to do with it.)
Enid W
Unregistered guest
Posted on Wednesday, February 26, 2003 - 2:51 pm:   

I don't seem able to lose any PGMJ layouts. I keep getting a pop up that allows me to reshuffle until I win the game. Although I like to win, it is not very challenging to know I can't lose. I do not have 'Winnable' checked under Options.
Thomas Warfield (Support)
Moderator
Username: Support

Post Number: 199
Registered: 12-2002
Posted on Thursday, February 27, 2003 - 2:06 pm:   

>I keep getting a pop up that allows me to reshuffle until I win the game.

If you reshuffle, then you aren't winning.

You only win a tile matching game if you remove all the tiles without reshuffling. If you do a reshuffle, you can still remove all the tiles (with a perfect score, usually 144), but the game will count as a loss, not a win. A reshuffle is technically cheating, so once you do it you can no longer actually win the game.
Christine Coard
Unregistered guest
Posted on Monday, June 09, 2003 - 4:51 pm:   

Not 100% sure if this is a bug - but I can't work out any combination of things I could have done which would have this effect, without giving me at least some warning!

I'm one of these people who find most games sound effects irritating and had discovered ( in Pretty Good Solitaire that if I turned off the sound in the game menu (as well as turning the speakers off) the graphics were much faster. So, when I first got PGMJ, I tuned off the sound when I first set my options.
This weekend, I'd put a lot of new clip art on the machine, including some sound clips and had been messing about with sounds generally in a few programmes and realised that I had never actually tried to play PGMJ with sound and thought maybe I should at least give it a try. So I clicked sound on, went into MahJongg Klondike, my current favourite, and decided halfway through the game that these sounds were really irritating, so I turned off the sound, using the menu option, while still playing. I then got a message asking if I wanted to resign the current game, and clicked "no". Discovered at the end of the game that my statistics had been completely wiped - not just for this game, but for everything in PGMJ, Solitaire and Tile Matching. In Tile Matching, I had several games that I was in the middle of - ones that I couldn't get out and won't give up on - they've all disappeared, too. It also reset the user to ^ and, when I got back to normal user "Christine" there were still no statistics. (Unlike PGSol, I'm the only user who has ever been set up on my PGMJ)
I'm not too cross about this - when I got PGMJ1.11 and discovered that all those games where I'd gone off in the middle to cook the dinner, do the laundry etc. and the ones where I had used "undo" a lot rather than restarting, had had their times recorded unbeknownst to me, giving me some very strange averages, I had thought about wiping the history then, but thought there wasn't much point. My home computer, which has the games, doesn't have Internet connection, so I wouldn't be uploading them to the website any time soon. But I'm passing this on because I suspect either there is a bug or I did something that should have initiated an error message and didn't.
Thanks
Gregg Seelhoff (Seelhoff)
Master Solitaire Player
Username: Seelhoff

Post Number: 19
Registered: 1-2003
Posted on Wednesday, June 11, 2003 - 12:47 pm:   

>Not 100% sure if this is a bug - but I can't work out any combination of things I could have done which would have this effect, without giving me at least some warning!

This sounds very much like you are logged into your computer as a different user than the one you used when accumulating the statistics. If not, then something else (perhaps the clip art installation) has changed your system in a strange way.

The statistics are stored as .LOG files in a special application directory, based on your (Windows) user and (PGMJ) player names. For example, under Windows 2000, this directory is usually:
C:\Documents and Settings\<user>\Application Data\Goodsol\Pretty Good MahJongg\<player>

If you want to see if the statistics were really lost, try using 'Start->Search->For Files or Folders' and searching for any files named "klondike*.log" (or "*.pgmj" for saved games). If files are found, they should indicate where the statistics are located. You may discover that they are under a different user name (or player name), rather than actually gone.

The fact that the user name was reset to "^" does sound like a problem, and (of course) your statistics would not be found under that name, but they should have been restored when you selected the correct player again.

Other than this, I cannot figure out how this could happen, though I doubt it is actually a bug in Pretty Good MahJongg. From within the program, one would have to clear statistics individually for each game, and there is not even an internal mechanism to clear all of these files at one time.

I would like to get to the bottom of this mystery, so if you can give us any additional information, please do.
Christine Coard (Chrisco)
New Solitaire Player
Username: Chrisco

Post Number: 1
Registered: 6-2003
Posted on Sunday, June 15, 2003 - 2:38 am:   

Sorry to take so long to get back to you - didn't get the chance to check it out sooner. The stats files were indeed in
C:\Documents and Settings\<user>\Application Data\Goodsol\Pretty Good
MahJongg\<player>
There is a folder for "Christine" with all the new stats and one for user "^". There's also five folders with the name of different PGMJ games which appear to be empty (and these do show as other "users" on the pull-down menu). these all show creation times between 12.10 and 12.35 on the day this happened. Times probably reflect me changing user names trying to work out what was going on.
My old stats files are there as well - but as individual text files in the Pretty Good Mahjongg folder - i.e. not in a sub-folder attached to a player name. Weird, yes?
I really don't think I did anything peculiar loading the clip art - I don't have internet at home but I do at work. So I had downloaded a heap of stuff from Microsoft design gallery in XP Clip Organiser format, copied these files from my work hard disk to a CD, uploaded them to my home computer XP Clip organiser and switched the speakers on to test out the sound clips, which I hadn't used before.
PGMJ looked OK when I first went in. Of course, I didn't look at the statistics, but I think I'd have noticed if the user had been reset to "^" before I started playing (don't guarantee this - but it was the first thing I noticed after the empty statistics table!)
If you really want to get to the bottom of this, I'd be curious to know what happens if you do what I did, i.e. start PGMJ with sound off (on the menu), switch it on, then part way through the game (i was in Mahjongg Klondike), switch it off. If you can't replicate the effects I did, it isn't a bug in the program per se, just something weird on my computer (I think!)
Gregg Seelhoff (Seelhoff)
Master Solitaire Player
Username: Seelhoff

Post Number: 22
Registered: 1-2003
Posted on Sunday, June 15, 2003 - 10:18 am:   

>My old stats files are there as well - but as individual text files in the Pretty Good Mahjongg folder - i.e. not in a sub-folder attached to a player name. Weird, yes?

Yes, that is strange, but I think I have an idea about what happened. Somehow I think that a blank player name was selected, probably when you installed the game. Your statistics files are in the wrong place, and they definitely did not move on their own, so you may have played as the blank player when you accumulated your statistics. In the process of changing options, the player name got changed (perhaps as a bug or a side effect), so the statistics appeared to vanish.

In any event, it would be safe to move your old .LOG files into the 'Christine' directory to get the old statistics back, under the desired name. It is also safe to delete all of the extra (erroneous) player names, and even the associated subdirectories if you wish.

>If you really want to get to the bottom of this, I'd be curious to know what happens if you do what I did, i.e. start PGMJ with sound off (on the menu), switch it on, then part way through the game (i was in Mahjongg Klondike), switch it off. If you can't replicate the effects I did, it isn't a bug in the program per se, just something weird on my computer (I think!)

Not surprisingly, when I go through this process, everything works fine for me. There may still be a bug in the program, but I suspect that enabling and disabling the sound has nothing to do with the actual problem. At least you have given us something more to test. :-)

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