Solved: Frankendrift problems on Mac (see "candidate release" below))

Denk · November 25, 2025, 12:16pm

EDIT: This post also links to the new candidate release 29th of November 2025

I just noticed that the Adrift 5 game in Ectocomp 2025 “Things That Go Bump in the Night” is the least rated game even though it is written in English. So I just want to remind everybody that they can play Adrift 5 games on Mac, Linux and Windows using the interpreter Frankendrift which can be downloaded from GitHub: Releases · awlck/frankendrift · GitHub

Angstsmurf · November 25, 2025, 2:29pm

Does anybody else have problems running Things That Go Bump in the Night on a Mac?

Frankendrift exits with an abort() on the first move, i.e. the first command after entering “C”. Frankendrift 0.7.0+p1 on macOS Sequoia (AArch64/M1).

Other Adrift 5 games seem to work fine.

Crash report:

gist.github.com

https://gist.github.com/angstsmurf/0883aa6043e9067c661809b540a25ab7

CrashReport.txt

-------------------------------------
Translated Report (Full Report Below)
-------------------------------------

Process:               FrankenDrift.Runner.Mac [2595]
Path:                  /Applications/FrankenDrift.Runner.Mac.app/Contents/MacOS/FrankenDrift.Runner.Mac
Identifier:            de.diepixelecke.frankendrift
Version:               0.6.999 (???)
Code Type:             ARM-64 (Native)
Parent Process:        launchd [1]

This file has been truncated. show original

Denk · November 25, 2025, 5:25pm

Thanks for reporting - I hope @ArdiMaster can use this to fix the problem. I am not sure if Rovarsson’s Windows problem is related? ( Rovarsson’s thread ). However, I had no problems on Windows.

Would be good to know if other Mac users have problems?

Angstsmurf · November 26, 2025, 3:09am

For what it is worth, I randomly got it to start a couple of times. Much of the text seems to be black on black, though.

ArdiMaster · November 26, 2025, 9:09am

Thanks for the ping, but I’m afraid I can’t repro this crash nor the text color issue… (Tested on macOS 26 Tahoe, Windows 11, and Fedora 43.)

Unfortunately, the macOS crash report can’t show the .NET managed stack^[1], so all I can gather from this trace is that some exception occurred in the .NET code.

I’ve put up a new intermediate macOS build of FrankenDrift on my website that has some better uncaught exception handling: https://diepixelecke.de/if/frankendrift/frankendrift-v0.8.0-indev-debug-macarm64.dmg (It should pop up a message box with a stack trace, and also deposit a file called “fdcrash.txt” in your home directory.)

There’s some code in FrankenDrift’s UI framework that should cause the .NET exception information to appear under the “Application Specific Information” header, but that doesn’t seem to be working anymore in current versions of macOS. ↩︎

Denk · November 27, 2025, 3:18pm

Though this could in theory be the case, it could also simply appear to be so because the first picture may or may not be displayed when the game starts and then you have to click on the window and hit a key, e.g. spacebar, before you get the first text which says “A Note For The Player:” - so initially, the text window has no text and the start picture is displayed in another window (not important though). So you still have to hit a key to get the first text.

The initial picture looks like this and has some “text” in it, though not very important (v2):

Angstsmurf · November 27, 2025, 11:08pm

Thanks! With the new version, I get this:

An unhandled exception occurred within FrankenDrift: System.NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object.

at FrankenDrift.Runner.AdriftOutput.AppendHtml(String src) in /Users/adrianwelcker/Documents/Development/dotnet/Adravalon/FrankenDrift.Runner/FrankenDrift.Runner/AdriftOutput.cs:line 283

at FrankenDrift.Runner.MainForm.OutputHTML(String source) in /Users/adrianwelcker/Documents/Development/dotnet/Adravalon/FrankenDrift.Runner/FrankenDrift.Runner/MainForm.cs:line 483

at FrankenDrift.Adrift.RunnerSession.Display(String sText, Boolean bCommit, Boolean bAllowALR, Boolean bRecord) in /Users/adrianwelcker/Documents/Development/dotnet/Adravalon/FrankenDrift.Adrift/clsUserSession.vb:line 319

at FrankenDrift.Adrift.RunnerSession.EvaluateInput(Int32 iMinimumPriority, Boolean bPassingOnly) in /Users/adrianwelcker/Documents/Development/dotnet/Adravalon/FrankenDrift.Adrift/clsUserSession.vb:line 3317

at FrankenDrift.Adrift.RunnerSession.Process(String sCommand) in /Users/adrianwelcker/Documents/Development/dotnet/Adravalon/FrankenDrift.Adrift/clsUserSession.vb:line 494

at FrankenDrift.Runner.MainForm.SubmitCommand(String cmd) in /Users/adrianwelcker/Documents/Development/dotnet/Adravalon/FrankenDrift.Runner/FrankenDrift.Runner/MainForm.cs:line 277

at FrankenDrift.Runner.MainForm.InputOnKeyDown(Object sender, KeyEventArgs e) in /Users/adrianwelcker/Documents/Development/dotnet/Adravalon/FrankenDrift.Runner/FrankenDrift.Runner/MainForm.cs:line 209

at Eto.Forms.Control.OnKeyDown(KeyEventArgs e)

at Eto.Forms.Control.Callback.OnKeyDown(Control widget, KeyEventArgs e)

at Eto.Mac.Forms.MacView`3.OnKeyDown(KeyEventArgs e)

at Eto.Mac.Forms.Controls.MacEventView.KeyDown(Control control, NSEvent theEvent)

at Eto.Mac.Forms.MacFieldEditor.KeyDown(NSEvent theEvent)

Angstsmurf · November 27, 2025, 11:12pm

There is definitely black text printed on a black background. It becomes visible when selected.

EDIT: I realise you did not intend this turn into a bug report thread for Frankendrift. Perhaps this discussion should be moved to a new post?

Denk · November 28, 2025, 11:59pm

I guess it is okay as this thread was mainly intended for non-windows users and the problems on Mac seem to be significant. So I guess the bug reports are relevant to most Frankendrift users. When the bugs are fixed I could make a new thread announcing it but with two days left of EctoComp it seems unrealistic.

ArdiMaster · November 29, 2025, 11:45am

Ah yes, fonts and text colors, some of my least favorite code to write (well, just after map-drawing code shudders).

Anyways, here is a prerelease version with some fixes for these issues, hopefully:

Angstsmurf · November 29, 2025, 2:32pm

Great work! That seems to fix all the problems I had with Things That Go Bump in the Night.