Thanks a lot for your awesome help in the stream. I just updated with a fix where I replaced all null comparisons with is_instance_valid(). Could not test it a lot, but all fingers are crossed that this now actually fixed it.
Hooooray!!!!!!!! :-D
PS: I mean, this is how science works, right, one positive example is enough for a proof ;-)
PPS: And I definitely have to look closer into this issue with Godot and null values. The bottom line seems to be: do not use null, which admittedly is documented: https://www.gdquest.com/docs/guidelines/best-practices/godot-gdscript/#avoid-null-references
And now I found the issue you mentioned: https://github.com/godotengine/godot/issues/41179 Oh man, this is brutal. This explains why I could not reproduce it because I run debug but uploaded release versions. So for the next jam I will only upload debug versions to make sure that it is always the same that I see locally.
Yeah, as I've said, they have kind of fixed it in the 3.2.4 candidate release, so it throws a null dereferencing exception, but it doesn't actually help to fix it as it only shows that I have a null value inside the !=null if clause, so it doesn't make a lot of sense :D
coming from C/C++, I instantly decided there was some data racing in my code so I've started looking in this direction and wasted some time there before coming across is_instance_valid
finally, regarding their "do not use null" paradigm, they should have adhered to it themselves in the first place, as it's the engine itself that assigns this weird 'Null'-not-null value to my variable, and then shows it as 'Null' in debug, and then when I check it for being null it thinks it is perfectly not null.
It's a weird quirk and it's quite painful given I really love this engine so far and I wish the best for it :)
Anyway, the point is, you should totally check out our game, unfortunately our browser version had even more issues and it didn't work in Firefox at all and in fact freezed the browser (do you perchance know what could be the reason? could it be GLES3 or gpu particles?) so we had to put it down and now it's only available as a bunch of downloads
https://oars.itch.io/spacetoselfdestruct
I just did, see my comments there. Regarding your freezes, I have no clue. I used GLES3 this time as I thought it is ok in recent browsers and so far no one complained. My game certainly would work in GLES2 just as good. So far I had no freezes in my game experiments, but I do only very basic stuff compared to your game.