I have just had this email from CL/E-frontier tech support for your info:- "We are currently testing our service updater and it will be out shortly. Sorry as I can not be more exact with a date as we are adding new fixes that have reciently been discovered. I hope this helps! J B-S Technical Support E-Frontier America"

Excellent. Thanks.

Thanks for making this unofficial announcement.

I am glad to know what I knew.

Soon. Indefinite -- but soon.

New fixes are always nice.

;)

Good news. Once it gets out of alpha testing, the beta testers here can let us know what it fixes.

"Good news. Once it gets out of alpha testing, the beta testers here can let us know what it fixes." and... more importantly... what it hasn't fixed.

"and... more importantly... what it hasn't fixed." And... what else it breaks in the process. ;)

"And... what else it breaks in the process. ;)" It's like a t**t with teeth... a vicious circle..!

WELL!!!! THE 12 YEARS OLD SCOTTISH WORKS !!!

:D

Message edited on: 05/20/2005 03:47

Thats good news. I was certain they misplaced the SR in the move. ("I thought you brought it!", "No I told you, Hey grab the SR on the way out", "Um noooo, You said, I got the SR you grab the Scotch", "Oh crap, well pass the Scoth then", "What Scotch?")

Why must I suddenly think of a "Renderosity drinking game"? For every occurance of the phrase "memory bug", you do a shot of Scotch. For every thread that has "SR" in the subject, have a bave beer. For every 10 replies to that thread, have another.

Wosh a... jollish gush... HIC... idea. I'll drinksh to thash..!

:deep sigh: It crashed last night... out to the desktop and my suitcase, too... but I don't know if it was the memory bug, or I just threw too much at it. I'm trying to make it crash again, but instead it is just rendering strangely. With 1 gig of RAM, how many Jameses should a person be able to render? Is 9 unreasonable? I really need to get some sleep, but I'm too curious to let it go. Carolly

how many Jameses should a person be able to render? Is 9 unreasonable?

Doing a clone scene, eh?

I'm sure that James is an alright guy -- but for some reason -- I'd rather see 9 V3's..........

Without any trick? I suppose that the pc would be slow as a slug at James5 and probably crashes at 7 or 8 one. Nine? On your computer I dont know. On mine is crash and die

And yes, I noticed that all operations got quite a bit slower when I added the last 4 guys!

I don't use the gen3 figures, but James has a reasonable polycount, so I thought I'd stick a bunch of guys on the screen, and try to hit the wall.

(firefly medium settings)... with James X 7 wearing a green conforming t-shirt, James X 1 50% transparent, and odeatholife's skeleton inside him, holding the skull (17 figures). All Jameses were FBM hi-res. 3 white lights. simple. No fancy textures or surround sound. ;^) I've got external morphs checked, so it is holding the file size down.

I've managed to get them to render at 600X400 without crashing, but not at 1200X800. :deep sigh: It has crashed twice, so I'll report it... but I still don't know if it was too much for the RAM or the memory bug.

If someone with oodles of RAM could stuff a bunch of Jameses in (like a phone booth) and get it to render at the larger size, than it is simply memory.

But if it has already calculated the shadowmaps and added the objects, why would the final render size make a difference? If it can render the scene small, surely it can render it large, but just more slowly?

Carolly

Message edited on: 05/20/2005 11:43

I haven't tried to crash P6 with Jessi or James....

On my system, P6 starts giving signs of memory trouble at around 3 to 4 mil figures + hair + clothes.

However, I've had P6 renders crash on me with only one V3 figure in a scene. This isn't typical: but it's happened.

The errors aren't 100% consistent. At least not from casual observation.

Other than to say that the memory bug has only kicked in while attempting a render. Never during posing. I have 2G of RAM.

The problem I run into constantly is it hanging up at "Loading Textures" part of the render on both FF and P4 engine (probably 50% of the time, sometimes with just 1 figure!). I'm not sure if this is part of the same memory bug (which displays the "out of memory" message), but I sure hope they address it.

Now, does the memory bug ALWAYS give you an error messagespecifying a memory problem? Or usually give you that message? Both times it crashed with the larger render size, I didn't get a message about memory or anything else. It also waited until everything had been calculated and loaded and was actually rendering to quit. :drum fingers: Carolly

On the hanging up at "Loading Textures", are you using any bump maps by any chance? I found bump maps generally gave me nothing but grief so I rarely use them. If I do, I often have the same prob you are mentioning here. Some time you can tweak the settings if you really want to use them, but mostly I just save myself the grief. Now, does anyone know why or a way how to cause the heirarchy editor and animation pallet editor to open with the hiearchy trees closed instead of expanded. Talk about a major pain in the butt! P6 is sluggish and unresponsive enough just trying to give the dials a slight nudge without it jumping by huge values. But scrolling down through a list of five to ten figures (clothing counts) can be a very time consuming (and did I mention annoying?). You know, there are times in this Sado-maschistic relationship, I have to ask myself, "Do the folks at CL (or whoever they are this week) actually use Poser?"

In my case, all of the textures might load successfully -- although sometimes they don't.

Occasionally, the render will go 3/4's of the way through, and then give an "out of memory" message. Click "OK" on the dialog, and Poser will then say that it can't find textures.......this necessitates quitting Poser without doing a save. So long as I've saved the file just prior to attempting a render: I can re-start Poser and continue to work on the file, no problems. I just can't render the scene.

At other times, the render will go part way, and then simply stop. No warning messages, no nothing. The render just quits.

Fun, fun.

Xenophonz, I don't know if this will help or not, but this is the work around that seems to work for me. First, I am using Win2k but I think this can be done on XP also. I have my hard drive partitioned with Poser installed on P:, so in addition to the normal page (swap) folder I set up one for that drive also. Poser seems to want to look for the page file in the same drive location. The other thing I do is I use RamBooster. Which by the way helped in Poser 4 and Pro but gave me problems in P5, but seems to help in P6. Again not sure any of this will be of any help, but passing it along just in case maybe.

Message edited on: 05/20/2005 14:17

Most of the time, I get the hangup on the "Loading Textures"; sometimes it will start rendering then just quit if the scene has multiple figures. Turning off bump maps didn't seem to have any effect when rendering with the P4 engine. I always know when it has crashed and not just being slow when the render preview clears everything but the background color, and it won't cancel (then I have to give it the "three finger salute" to kill it). Once in a while, but rare, I will get the actual "out of memory" message. I use the DAZ high res skin textures quite a bit, so I'm sure that isn't helping if they are overwhelming the buffer, but the weird thing is, I never had these kind of problems with the same figure in 4.03 that I get in 6.0 using the P4 engine. I chalked it up to the memory bug in 6, but I don't know if this is the exact cause or not. Possibly very dumb question: How do you turn off bump maps when rendering with FireFly? I use the P4 engine most of the time (I upgraded from P4) so I'm not really familiar with Firefly.

@bluecity, I did not mean turn off or disable the bump maps as this did not seem to work for me. I mean go into the materal room and delete the node for the bump map. You can disconnect them I suppose, but well, I just as soon ax them all together from my scene. hehe.

Don't ask "how many figures" but ask "how many textures": A single 4096x4096 RGBA texture takes 64MB RAM just for its raw pixel data. Two for the body (bump+color), two for the head, two for the hair (color+trans), and you're already taking 384MB RAM just for one naked figure. Enable texture filtering and you're closer to 900MB - and we're not even counting the eyes. That is why you should be using the "max texture size" option and why low-res textures make a lot of sense for background figures. If a figure is only 400 pixels tall in your final render, there is no need for it to have textures larger than 1024x1024.