TG crashes upon completion of (or during) populationg

[N-drju]

Hello,

Just yesterday I bought a new computer, theoretically much better than my last one. Now I have Windows 8, 8GB RAM and i7 processor with eight cores. However...

Terragen (I'm still using version 2.5) crashes each time I try to create a large population of 9-10 million instances. This was easily done even with my older, slower computer!

I'm thinking about returning my new purchase back to the vendor. How can a better computer crash Terragen this easily??

[Oshyan]

These kinds of issues are very often related to graphics card/driver incompatibilities. Do you know what graphics system is in your new computer? Do you have the latest drivers for it?

To test this you can try to close the 3D preview before populating and see if it still crashes.

- Oshyan

[N-drju]

Hey Oshyan,

     My graphics card is NVIDIA GTX 950M. What do you think about it?
     Strange... I've never seen any graphics cards requirements in TG...?

_________________________

Could you also remind me how to run a no-preview mode? Or is it ok to just click the "close" icon?

[Oshyan]

There are no formal graphics card requirements for TG aside from OpenGL compatibility. But for some reason even the basic OGL stuff we do in TG seems to work and then not work, depending on the graphics driver version! I suspect it may be because the graphics card companies are constantly trying to optimize for the latest games, sometimes making changes in how some things may be handled, and they don't test with Terragen or most other software, just with the games they're targeting and a few other specific applications most likely. So they never see these crashes, even though it's clearly something they're doing that's causing them (which we know because some versions of a graphics driver work fine on the same card where other versions do not).

In any case check to make sure you have the latest graphics drivers first.

To disable the 3D preview you can just close it with the X (close) button.

- Oshyan

[N-drju]

Yesterday it dawned upon me that there might be a good reason why Terragen crashed in the middle of populating.

I just realized what I was doing that day:

- I gathered one of my projects made in 64-bit Mac operating system.
- I opened the project on the new computer and tried to render it using 32-bit version of TG.
- I hit "Populate" and got the crash.

So Basically, I tried to open a project, fully prepared on a 64-bit version (and system) on a 32-bit version of the software. Do you think this might have caused the problem? When I launched the project and some tests with the use of a 64-bit TG I got no crashes at all.

What is strange though is that even when I tried to populate an entirely new scene using that 32-bit version, the populator still crashed.

[Oshyan]

If you're used to the lack of memory limitations with the 64 bit version then it's quite possible you're pushing the populator to create enough instances that the total memory use goes beyond the default 2GB allowed for 32 bit processes. Even if you're running 64 bit windows, 32 bit processes are still only allowed to use a max of 3GB. So it really depends on the specifics of your population tests. If you test a population of simple objects with few instances and it still crashes, that might indicate some other issue. But you should also use Task Manager to monitor memory use. And again all this only matters in the 32 bit version. Presumably you're now using the 64 bit version, which is what you should stick to anyway.

- Oshyan