You may already have heard of this bug:
- The Tech Preview stops working, ok that's no news
- Windows stops working properly too
You can't open the task manager and if you can it's useless.
Programs don't start anymore.
I usually try to log off and on again if possible.
Is that a known bug? I'm not the only one having this problem from time to time.
Can you reproduce this reliably?
- Oshyan
No, but it has never happened before I used TG2TP and several (at least 4) people on terradreams.de reported the same thing.
FrankB thought it wouldn't be TG2 causing the problem since none of the alpha testers ever had it.
I have not had it render my windows useless, but after a crash it often leaves my videocard in an odd state. Like it's become very slow. If I move or minimize windows I can see al the steps where normally it's all smooth motion. Changing the display depth from 32 to 16 and back to 32bits again solves that (iow, the card gets a reset).
I had a similar sort of thing last night where I had trouble closing TG2 and it was affecting other programs. I keep Task Manager open at all times to monitor resource use and end programs when necessary, so I was able to get that to come up just by switching tasks. But I can see I might not have been able to bring it up otherwise. I did manage to get TG2 to end after a while but it took a minute or two. Once it finally quit then other programs were back to normal and I simply started it up again and continued working. But it's definitely an odd problem. It seemed to me like it occurred after a long-ish period of working with it. Would you say your experiences and those at Terradreams have been similar?
- Oshyan
Quote from: JavaJones on December 25, 2006, 01:43:18 PMIt seemed to me like it occurred after a long-ish period of working with it. Would you say your experiences and those at Terradreams have been similar?
Yes.. I've been working with the program for hours when it happened first. I'll ask the others from terradreams to report their experiences here too.
I have had the same problem a few times. I figure it's a memory leak because it happens after working with Terragen for hours. It can take up to 5 minutes to close the application down.
I am able to open other applications when this happens however, but this may be because I'm using a dual core CPU?
I'm using a dual core too. I didn't try all applications, but at least the ones in the start menu don't work. Or maybe they start extremely slow. A memory leak could be the problem. I also hear users stating that TG leads to memory disappearing in task manager but i never checked that.
Now I had the problem again - after closing photoshop everything worked fine again. So I suppose it could be some memory problem although tgd says it doesn't need more than 30MB of ram.
All in all there are 150MB ram "missing" - no process uses it but someone IS using it. Now I don't know how much Windows itself is taking up without mentioning it in the process-List.
It can be hardware problem. As yet I havn't experienced it, even when I opened two TG2's and rendered in them different scenes simultaneously. TG2 always closes in a second (I use graphic card integrated with motherboard).
what i would like to know then is...why does TG2 always crash..? where as previous version and my main one now does not do this...? ive given up using TG2 it just seems to eat all my memory where other terragen does not...in fact can play games etc while rendering there...i dare not do anything else with TG2...
kim
This is what I get every single time I use TG2. In fact I never close the program. It closes itself and the whole operating system. I can't see any pattern to it.
The reason Windows crashes i probably because the pagefile usage in TG2 is HUGE. If your runt out of space this can cripple some critical tasks and windows will crash.
There are a few ways, other than getting the latest hardware, too speed things up though. I will probably post a tweak guide (i will focus on a bit older computers since they need it the most) later on so keep your eyes open!
Quote from: SuperNova on December 29, 2006, 07:34:19 AMThere are a few ways, other than getting the latest hardware, too speed things up though.
Thats good news since I already own a core 2 duo pc and 2GB ram ;D TG seems to use the pagefile even though there's a lot of ram unused.. but that might be a windows-caused problem
Quote from: SuperNova on December 29, 2006, 07:34:19 AMI will probably post a tweak guide (i will focus on a bit older computers since they need it the most) later on so keep your eyes open!
8)
I'm having the same problem. Drop down menus stop working, some of the properties panels vanish and unable to close programs.
Also, I tried doing a hot key save so that I could save what I had worked on and when I rebooted and reloaded the project it gave an error indicating that the file was not configured correctly. So it may not be wise to save your project while seeing this bug.
Did you encounter this after a long period of use? Can you reproduce it consistently? Did you happen to check memory use at the time? Were you running any other significant applications?
- Oshyan
Oshyan -I can report similar symptoms, but I can't give specifics as to system memory status, etc; I afraid I was caught a bit off guard. It definitely looks like a memory leak. After a long session, property pages became blank - TG seemed unable to create child controls. I tried starting another app (don't recall what) and windows reported it was unable to start the application because of low system memory (!). Quitting the program did not release the system, although I admit to being a bit short of patience and rebooting after a couple of minutes.
I haven't crashed Windows, but I have seen that after awhile on the previous version that I would run out of resources, which caused menus to stop functioning and previews to stop. It was usually after a long duration of time with the window of TG2 open. Of course, I would have other things going on at the same time (email, surfing the net, Word...)
I haven't seen it since the new release came out.
Hello,
I have seen this behaviour both before and after the update.
Menus would not open, submenus would not appear. A few times it would appear suddenly, following a flickering of the screen, but most often it followed after keeping Terragen open a long time and making many changes, alternating tabs etc. The most usual event that started it was when I tried a different seed in a population, checked the "preview" button, unchecked and tried again. After a few times of this, the GUI stopped responding.
Minimizing Terragen for a few minutes, sometimes restored the problem, but it was unsteady afterwards. Once I tried rendering after the function was restored and the rendering stopped as soon as it began. The window caption was: "Rendering (0:0:01s)" and the CPU usage was 0%.
Most often there was no memory or resource problem and if I started other programs, they worked as usual. But, there was a similar problem on the desktop, when Terragen was that way. Right clicking and double clicking did not work. Only the tray menu programs could start, which did not need double clicking. The desktop came to normal, as soon as Terragen closed or was closed by Task manager.
I thought it might be a problem with the visual something used to make the GUI - maybe I don't have the right version of the runtimes or it is corrupted.
Helen
Thanks for the reports folks. We'll look into these issues for fixing in a future update.
- Oshyan
I've had similar experiences to Helen. Usually right-clicking doesn't work and/or menu selections do nothing in both TG and other apps. Luckily I usually have another program like Photoshop running at the same time so I shut down the other app which gets things working again, save my work in TG and close TG.
This seems to be enough to free up resources again to start another session. I don't think it's a RAM issue as RAM usage was not suspiciously high (not higher than expected). On the plus side, since the update I've had far fewer occasions where the display has started failing to redraw on screen.