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[Sam]

Processor: Intel Core2 Quad CPU Q9300 @ 2.50GHz 2.68GHz
RAM: 4 GB
Display adapters: 2x NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT (though not in SLI-mode)
Windows Vista Business 32-bit w/ Service Pack 2

Every time it crashes at 83% (rendering lights) on:
- Chrome (versions 4.1.249.1045 (42898) & 3.0.195.33)
- Firefox (Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; fi; rv:1.9.1.9) Gecko/20100315 Firefox/3.5.9 (.NET CLR 3.5.30729)).
Edit: Flash version: 10.0.2.54.

Perfect, thank you!

New theory for crashes:  That step involves a shader working on a pretty huge image.  Problem is either the huge image (unlikely, or the crash would happen with many more Flash things), or the shader not being able to juggle huge images around.  Shaders in Flash are documented at handling up to 4000x4000 sized images, and mine aren't that big.  Although, some of my shaders take multiple images as input, so maybe it adds up..?

I've rewritten my world lighting algorithms to use considerably smaller images, and also reduced the total size of world they need to illuminate - it was a bit large for an arena shooter anyway.

So, v0.32.  Same page, might have to refresh a bit.  The initial texture generation will be vastly faster now with the smaller world.

That could fix it in this case, but I'd like to understand the bug better for the good of all humankind.  Hopefully there is a certain maximum size of image that will work on every machine, so then shaders can just be designed to always operate on images smaller than that.  It'd be quite straightforward to chop up any large images into safe sized mouthfuls.  I'll work on a new test for finding that size.  Stay tuned for more chances to crash your browser!

Edit
Here it is!  No fancy graphics this time, just reams of text as it runs a shader on various image sizes up to what should be the maximum allowed size.  If any crash sufferers could try running that and seeing what happens (it should cause you to crash - but it'll be very interesting to see when you crash) that would be extremely useful, thank you.

Now its very unstable , sometimes very fast moving, and mostly flickering and such
after a few minutes , it stabilezes , but the speed differences are very big. (sometimes it hangs slitely then it moves very fast, then i goes normal speed)

Hopefully this version will be better for you.  I suspect these symptoms are due to running low on memory and your OS having to stick some of the data on the hard disk.  Flash doesn't do that intelligently, so sometimes by chance it'll put the "correct" stuff there and you'll get good performance, other times it'll not.  This version uses something like ¹/₆th of the memory it used to so should be better.

[superflat]

I've had consistent 60 fps but have only tested on quad core windows and 8 core Mac boxes...

[Grif]

Dual core 2.7 ghz, 1gb RAM, Win XP SP3, Opera 10.whateverit'sat

Rock-steady 50 FPS with no options (besides lighting) enabled

Dropped about 3 fps average per option enabled

Moderate number of enemies didn't affect framerate in any appreciable way

[Randomasta]

It looked somewhat more beautiful for me without the destroyable rocks.
Now I can get roughly average of 50 fps with lot of enemies and shooting. With all the option on, 44 with no enemies, but dropped to 30 with a hundred of them. Still the same machine, Core2Duo @2.16 GHz, 2G RAM, Win XP, latest firefox+flash.

Also, nice graphics 

[Zhal]

The test crashed after this part:
size: 1500
creating blank image
preparing shader
starting shader completed succesfully

But the actual Flash worked now. On school computer that is. In the morning at home it said something about being site locked. I'll check again when I get home.

Edit: sitelocked was caused by bFilter.
School computer gave solid 50 fps when there was like 6-10 enemies. After that it started to go down.
This home computer gives about 20 fps without enemies.
Processor: AMD Athlon 64 3000+ 1.81 GHz
RAM: 2 GB
Display adapter: GeForce 8800 GTS 320 MB
Windows XP SP3
Chrome 4.1.249.1045 unknown (42898)

That Flash test goes through without problems.

[Sam]

Oh thank goodness, I feel like I properly understand the crash now.  Thank you so very much, Zhal.  Indeed thank you all very much!  This has really helped understand how this kind of technology in Flash can be used in games, which as far as I can tell has seen only very limited use in the kind of widespread gaming that Flash is famed for.

The crash in detail:
It seems that on certain machines in certain configurations (haven't seen a pattern in it yet) the Flash player will crash if it attempts to execute a custom shader on a large image.  The size of the image needed to cause a crash is somewhere between 1028x1028 and 1500x1500 - at least it was for the machine Zhal was using.  Hopefully the bug can be avoided on all machines by keeping image dimensions at or below 1028.  There's plenty more details that are missing, but until I can reproduce the crash locally discovering them would be too agonisingly slow.

I'll do my best to collate all the delicious data in this thread so interested people can make informed decisions about using Flash's fancy custom shaders.

Again, thank you all very much!