Large projects with many costumes have always had trouble loading in Scratch. But until recently, you'd get a message saying the project couldn't load (presumably due to a timeout), and you were given the option to try again (reload). Reloading often worked.

Recently, some change in Scratch has caused these projects (e.g. my own Powerpuff Yourself project, see sample screenshot) to load on the first try, which seems great. The problem is, that some costumes seem to not be loaded. Instead, a placeholder is shown (question mark image).

I propose that this is a bug, and any change to Scratch which causes it, should be reverted.



My browser / operating system: Windows NT 10.0, Chrome 102.0.0.0, No Flash versions detected

To clarify… Obviously, it would be even better to fix the original problem with loading projects with many assets (1000+).
The feasibility of fixing the problem should be evident by the fact that there's no problem loading the same projects in TurboWarp. According to @GarboMuffin “the largest improvement for large projects in TW was intentionally throttling the amount of concurrent asset downloads, which seems to reduce errors in Chrome for some reason” (in comment here).

However, as a stopgap measure, functionality should be reverted as stated in my original post.

I saw the big ? costumes for the first time today in another project.

Interestingly, the project sometimes loaded all costumes fully and correctly and ran,
but sometimes the project replaced some costumes by ?s when loading and these appear when the project runs.


I think it would be nice to get a message if a project loads incompletely warning that some costumes may be replaced by ?s (or other ways they may be loaded incompletely), but it might be ok to let it run after such a warning.

Then Scratchers with slower devices where the project doesn't load fully can at least see some of the project.

Scratch-Minion wrote:

I think it would be nice to get a message if a project loads incompletely warning that some costumes may be replaced by ?s (or other ways they may be loaded incompletely), but it might be ok to let it run after such a warning.

I agree, a warning might be another acceptable stopgap measure for this problem. However, I see no need to show the huge question marks if a costume was not loaded. Why not just replace it with an empty costume?

Yo! It's the guy who created the Scratch Block Quiz!
This sticky might help you understand more about these grey question marks. Even though it's closed…

k0d3rrr wrote:

Yo! It's the guy who created the Scratch Block Quiz!

Yeah, luckily Scratch Block Quiz doesn't have nearly as many costumes to be affected by this bug

k0d3rrr wrote:

This sticky might help you understand more about these grey question marks. Even though it's closed…

Thanks! But, even though the symptom is the same, I don't believe it's related to this problem.

kriblo wrote:

k0d3rrr wrote:

This sticky might help you understand more about these grey question marks. Even though it's closed…

Thanks! But, even though the symptom is the same, I don't believe it's related to this problem.

You're right. Hopefully, the Scratch Team patches this glitch. I have never seen it before.

I think this has something to do with the recent fix they made due to a glitch that occurred a week ago where you couldn't save your projects, regardless of the file size.

If the gray ? boxes appear. It's most likely to reload or run the project in turbowarp. I've had many experiences with this and the only option was reload or turbowarp.

In Firefox the results are slightly different, costumes won't show up at all. My theory is that some assets won't load if you don't have enough ram. The reason I say this is because closing a few tabs and programs fixes the problem.

Can reproduce, although there is something else:

I can workaround this. For some reason, this only happens when I load the project page by clicking the name of the project in my stuff. If I click on “see inside” in my stuff, everything will load properly with no gray question marks. Can anyone replicate this?

Edit: My browser / operating system: MacOS Macintosh X 10.11.6, Chrome 102.0.0.0, No Flash version detected

To summarize a response to the above three posts…

I agree, this is not a problem using TurboWarp, nor when editing a project (either your own, or someone else's), and is sometimes resolved when reloading the project. This, to me, indicates that (1) it's likely not an intrinsic problem with the projects, and (2) not a problem of limited device RAM.

I'm admittedly not an expert, but… Based on @GarboMuffin's experience with TurboWarp (quoted in my post above), my guess is that too many concurrent asset downloads causes timeouts, and missing costumes.

kriblo wrote:

To summarize a response to the above three posts…

I agree, this is not a problem using TurboWarp, nor when editing a project (either your own, or someone else's), and is sometimes resolved when reloading the project. This, to me, indicates that (1) it's likely not an intrinsic problem with the projects, and (2) not a problem of limited device RAM.

-Snip-

Actually I do face this problem on turbo-warp from time to time using Firefox (Assuming costumes not appearing at all is the firefox equivelant of the same issue since it's contextually similar), but you're still very likely correct.

When I get a chance I'm gonna see if I can download one of these failed svgs and then try to compare it to it's properly loaded equivalent to see what's different and what fails.

they should revert this change and make it so when a project fails to load you can either run the project with the missing costumes or reload the page/project

]

musicROCKS013Can anyone replicate this?[/quote wrote:

i got one straight from a project with missing costumes: https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/708962959/

There was a failure of the asset server on April 8, 2021.

I guess the server glitched again, because there are multiple server problems thorough the month, like “projects can't save” or “comments won't load”, and began to affect the assets server now.

Well, oh a question mark, I think probably a hacker does question marks and he/she got into your project.

Aneri9714 wrote:

Well, oh a question mark, I think probably a hacker does question marks and he/she got into your project.

that is wrong

coolmetroid112 wrote:

(#14)
]

musicROCKS013Can anyone replicate this?[/quote wrote:

i got one straight from a project with missing costumes: https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/708962959/

This is what it looks like with my extensions on:

Both fonts are forced to use the font that I set in one of my extensions.

MattCodez wrote:

(#18)

coolmetroid112 wrote:

(#14)
]

musicROCKS013Can anyone replicate this?[/quote wrote:

i got one straight from a project with missing costumes: https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/708962959/

This is what it looks like with my extensions on:

Both fonts are forced to use the font that I set in one of my extensions.

what extension

coolmetroid112 wrote:

what extension

You aren't allowed to name browser extensions on scratch.