Unable to open course after planting crash

[sagevanni]

Hey Lez,

Do you have any advice on crashes due to edge manipulation.........?????

Sage.....

[Ian Wells]

Hi Lez,
I thought that the only time auto save caused a problem was when you had the panorama displayed, because when panorama is displayed all the seams are messed up. i normally do not display panorama but if I do I switch off the auto save.
As I mentioned in my last post I also do a Save As every 60 minutes or so, therefore I "should" only lose 60-75 minutes. (Did I just say "only" )

If other designers find any problems with auto save switched on I will be very interested to hear them.

Ian

[Adelade]

I've never tried autosave, always had it turned off, so I dont know how large the risks are, but - Saving normally tends to take a few seconds when APCD is kind of frozen up while working with the save, and if the course is near completion and is a large file, can take more than just a few seconds. If APCD did that on its own every so often without me telling it to, those moments when APCD is slow or frozen because of working with the save sounds like they would be really annoying and perhaps, in the middle of doing certain things, might even be risking something unpleasant happening. I much rather choose myself when APCD should do the save so that I know when its happening. But thats just me. If one is used to having autosave, and dont mind APCD randomly lagging while autosaving every so often, and dont mind the potential risks, I suppose there is something to be said for not needing to remind oneself to save now and then.

[Lez Marwick]

Hey Lez,

Do you have any advice on crashes due to edge manipulation.........?????

Sage.....

A lot of different bugs in APCD that cause crashes and corruption of the course file are caused by the same thing... a memory leak, and edge turning is one of them. If you keep turning edges, sooner or later APCD will crash. This will obviously vary according to the memory of your computer, along with how much memory APCD and other programs running in the background are taking up with other things. Exiting out of APCD clears the memory (of APCD's use of it) and so I strongly advise regular saving and to include an EXIT OUT OF APCD after each save as standard practice. Coming out and back into APCD after a save takes very little extra time and will stop the majority of APCD crashes from occurring which will save you a lot of time in the long run. Also turning off objects whenever possible (crowds especially) if moving around the course in the perspective view will keep memory use lower, and give you much more time before you will need to exit APCD to avoid crashes and file corruption, especially when your course file is larger and heavily planted. When I was designing regularly I created multiple courses that didn't suffer from a single crash by following this save and exit policy and this was, I believe, the main reason. Of course, there were other ways to crash APCD as well, and I've since forgotten most of those! I found a bug only yesterday when planting sounds that I was unaware of. This one doesn't crash APCD, but crashes the game when you try to play it!! I'll make a post about it soon so that other people can avoid falling into the same trap I did, as my video on sound planting doesn't cover it.

[sagevanni]

Thanks Lez............