itch.io

The only explanation I can think of is "something goes wrong when trying to draw to the surface", I know alpha + surfaces is a bit of a wonky mix. I did a bunch of searches through the codebase to see if there's any unresolved alpha settings that might carry over, but I couldn't find anything suspicious. So... derp, back to square one.

Some things to investigate...

• The size of the view might be zero at the moment the surface is created, perhaps? Try printing out the surface's size with a debug message after creating it.
• If you use draw_clear_alpha to fill the surface with both color (preferably something like c_fuchsia so it's possible to tell the black background from a black surface) and 100% alpha at once, does it show up properly?
• If the object that draws the surface draws something else at the same time (e.g. a gradient circle with draw_circle_ext, large enough to be visible even if the thing is offscreen a bit), does that work or is it also invisible? Depth sorting, accidentally turning off visible etc all could explain it being gone.
• This goes without saying, but do you re-create the surface if it gets destroyed? It doesn't happen all the time on a desktop target, but it's definitely going to get destroyed eventually.
• I noticed the view/HUD control object has a depth outside the 16,000 range, perhaps that could lead to oddities in the depth sorting? (I had similar issues when doing the DDG2 port job, changing depths had absolutely no effect when objects were outside the valid range). Changing the object's depth to be in front of everything else (e.g. -4000) could help shedding light on this; if it draws at the new depth the depth sorting is the reason why the surface is invisible.