Populate your eco system, all ok, tick the box "full quality near camera" and Instant lock up, can't do anything. This only happens when you tick the box.
I did report it and before the nay sayers come in, it has been confirmed as an issue that tech is working on by e-on, so for now it's leave it unticked if you know what's good for you! [LOL].

I've had problems full stop with ecosystems.  Some of Martin Frosts piles crash the programme.  He confirmed that it did his too so we both reported it.  A bug that'll be fixed in the next patchthey say.  Except I don't think they've fully found the bug as they said it was to do with glowing materials but some that are crashing mine don't have glowing materials....

I'm really not impressed right now.......

Yea I'm not everly impressed so far either with this and the problem of having to re-download over 30 models and install them again.
To be honest I haven't used it much to date, so I'm getting a bit worried about what else I'll find when I do start hitting it hard!
But we're all used to it by now aren't we!! [LOL].

 I'm  not getting the lockup, Win7 64bit, with display set to billborads, and full quality near camera set to 3 meters  with a standard terrain populated. Is it 32bit specific? But  I have slowdowns using shaded billboards, though, even without full quality near camera.

No, I run Vista 64 with 8 Gig RAM and an Nvidia 9800 GT graphics with 1 Gig RAM, the card is set to use over 700 Meg for Vue, more than enough.
I guess you're just lucky seeing as e-on have admitted to it being an issue.

It's not even happening on populate - it's crashing before the mat has even finished loading

Makin' me grumpy 

I just tested something and this is extreeeeemely weird:

One of the ecosystems that's crashing is one I made a few months ago with 3 eco layers - trees, grass and houses.  (The houses are simple onesmade with Vue primitives)

By process of elimination, the houses ecosystem layer is the one that's crashing Vue 8.

So, in 7, I deleted all the houses in that layer and replaced them with one simple sphere.

The resaved mat loaded in 8 without a hitch.

Then, still in 8 I deleted the temporary sphere and reloaded the houses into the ecosystem layer and saved it.

Now loaded exactly the same material that was crashing, only difference is that the houses were added in 8 and it loaded and populated without a crash.

Think this needs reporting to e-on........

Quote - Populate your eco system, all ok, tick the box "full quality near camera" and Instant lock up, can't do anything. This only happens when you tick the box.
I did report it and before the nay sayers come in, it has been confirmed as an issue that tech is working on by e-on, so for now it's leave it unticked if you know what's good for you! [LOL].

I can't get it to lock up from any of the views.
2Ghz P4 with 2GB RAM running WinXP32bit and ATI Radeon X1650 512MB AGP card.

Doesn't happen here either. Vista 64 bit 8Gb RAM, Intel quad core, nVidia 8800GT.

I have Vista 64-bit and 12 gig ram. Made a 2 layer ecosystem with plants and rocks. Put both layers at full quality near camera leaving the default of 20 m. No lock ups.

Well you guys are just lucky then, here's the reply from Lee Randall

*The shaded billboards become an option for ecosystem viewing if you are using OpenGL shaded. You'll see it in the droplist right above Full quality near camera.

I'll forward this to the techs - this is happening with every eco?

Best regards.
Lee Randall

NOTE:  This is happening with every eco......*Her words, not mine!

note the ? on the end of her statement - means she's asking you if it happens on every ecosystem

Ok I missed the ? [LOL]
I know of others having the same problem with eco's as Gillbrooks has provided also.
It happens only when ticking the quality near camera, eco's are fine to that point. At the minute I'm just not bothering with ticking the box.

It's not all ecosystems, just certain objects causing problems

I made a mat in 7 using a simple soil material layer base and ONE house made with Vue primitieves.  Crashed in 8.

E-on now have that mat but if anyone here would like to check also, just yell and I'll upload it to my server when I've finished watching telly.

Here's something Ijust got from Martin Frost over at Corn PM...............

"Yeah I think there is a problem with ecos containnig objects. I tried skull piles today and it crashed vue 8.
From what they said to me there is a bug affecting the ecosystem handleing in vue 8 - and i think its a pretty major one... lol
Also there seems to be horrible memory leakage and renders are taking forever!! Back to vue 5 render times for anyhting more complicated than an object on a white background... and thats on a quadcore with 4gb ram!!"

I tried it on my other machine which has 8 gig, but a video card that doesn't support shading. I set 1 eco layer at 3m from camera and the other at 12m. All works OK.

I did a render of a scene  on a quad-core with 8 gig and XP 64. It was a scene I created in Vue 7.5. I set the User settings a little lower than normal (left out multipass). It took 9hrs 17mins 45 seconds in Vue 7.5 and 9hrs 26 mins and 52 seconds. I forgot to check the leakage in Vue 8 even though I had writtten a note to do it. Senior moments or should I say perpetual senior moments. In Vue 8 the 3d display was OpenGL fixed hardware pipeline .

In the next few days on my more powerful machine where I can use the new OpenGL 2.1, I plan to do 3 renders using 7.5 and the two OpenGl settings in Vue 8. I'll post my findings.

Ok..Update....The "pastures" eco seems to be the worst for doing this, the freeze isn't 100%, sometimes it will populate but there is a major delay in ticking the box and then being able to click anything else, the ok button for instance, seems like it is taking way too long to actually do what I asked it to!
If I've ticked the box and clicked ok and click ok more than once that is when it locks up. Even though my card is more than capable of than using 2.1 OGL, I have it set on pipeline.

My rig is as good as anyone's with Vista Ultimate 64, Quad core Q6600, 8 Gig RAM, Nvidia 9800GT 1 Gig card with over 700Meg set for Vue8, don't even go there that it is my computer at fault here.

I did have to update my ATI video driver though to get Vue 8 Infinite to work as advertised.  Vue 7.5 didn't care if I was using very old drivers from years ago.

Attached Link: Simple Eco Mat that Crashes

Quote - Ok..Update....The "pastures" eco seems to be the worst for doing this, the freeze isn't 100%, sometimes it will populate but there is a major delay in ticking the box and then being able to click anything else, the ok button for instance, seems like it is taking way too long to actually do what I asked it to!
If I've ticked the box and clicked ok and click ok more than once that is when it locks up. Even though my card is more than capable of than using 2.1 OGL, I have it set on pipeline.

My rig is as good as anyone's with Vista Ultimate 64, Quad core Q6600, 8 Gig RAM, Nvidia 9800GT 1 Gig card with over 700Meg set for Vue8, don't even go there that it is my computer at fault here.

Strangely enough 'Pastures' loads,populates and renders perfectly for me with no hitches or hiccups

Thanks Gill, I'll try it, I'll get back to you on this thread!

Tried your mat, instant crash with the report function coming up!
Now I don't get that with the problem I'm seeing, just the freeze or HUGE delay in doing a next step!

Gill your eco works fine in 7.5 and below, 8 crashes every time.
Tried my issue in 7.5, same problem with "pastures".....Tried it in 7.4, no problem at all, there is clearly some failure somewhere regarding eco's I think.
I think I'll go back to 7.4 for now until they sort it.

Thanks for trying it.  Yes, you can see how simple the mat is.  It seems to be object more than plant related problems.

Lee hasn't been back to me since I sent them the mat so waiting to see their responsewhich I'll post here when I have it 

Gill.  Your MAT dies right near the end of loading it.

 I'm on a mac and I've also had major delays in certain circumstances in being able to tick those little boxes.  I wrote to eon and this is what they told me:-
"Do you have the Auto Update feature checked for the little preview window? If so, try unchecking it and see if it helps."

Quote - Gill.  Your MAT dies right near the end of loading it.

Yep, that's where it crashes every time.  Thanx for double checking

Quote -  I'm on a mac and I've also had major delays in certain circumstances in being able to tick those little boxes.  I wrote to eon and this is what they told me:-
"Do you have the Auto Update feature checked for the little preview window? If so, try unchecking it and see if it helps."

Sounds like plucking at straws to me.   I think they've made some big mistakes with this version.    I forever wonder why their beta testers don't find these faults?

 well quick just pay the  300+ dollars for maintenance before the free maintenance expires, and you can get the  next 0.5 upgrade for free.
Love esther

Tried Gill's mat and it crashes as described. The 'pastures' eco works fine, no problems with or without the quality near camera box checked.

Quote -  well quick just pay the  300+ dollars for maintenance before the free maintenance expires, and you can get the  next 0.5 upgrade for free.
Love esther

That's the same price for the upgrade, too.  :)

I tried every single one of the eco's that came with Vue 8 tonight, the only one giving me problems is the Pastures one and tonight it isn't half as troublesome as it was the other night when I posted the topic!!...Go figure!
I mean just WTF is going on?
How can it be a pile of crap one night and almost perfect the next, makes no sense, I haven't changed anything, haven't updated anything, except Vista did an update yesterday, could it be that??
I hate this stuff, if it's not working, great, at least I know it won't work, like this it could work one minute and not the next.....WTF!!

Pastures tells my that 5,000,000+ instances will be created and that my resources will vanish, blah blah.

I say OK anyway and my resources dropped only 20%.  Did you turn off that warning and are low to begin with?  I'm assuming your have just a blank scene with just a standard 1024x1024 terrain to cover.

Just the one terrain to try it, resources at start show 87% which is about normal, I switched the messages off anyway, always do [LOL], after populating the std terrain, resources dropped to.......wait for it.....86% so I don't think that's an issue there, after ticking the full quality box, the resources stayed at 86%....I would expect nothing less, I do have 8 Gig to play with!
It's gone real slow again now, bordering on crawling, resources still show 86%, poly count is 469,819,700
It's slowed to a crawl again now!!!.......really puzzling!

By way of comparison, the windy hill eco comes in at 4,968,804 polys with resource at 86% and no slow down.
The problem does seem to be associated with the pastures ecosystem!

Ok.  I moved the camera much closer to the pasture grass and now I'm getting C++ Runtime errors.  Resources are dropping to 2 percent and no responce from Vue 8.  This makes sense though because my system can't display every individual blade of grass in OpenGL.

I will try again using just a 1ft radius.  But I have doubts it will make a difference.  This eco-system is not meant for high-quality preview.

ADDED:
Works fine again once I drop population density from 100% to something much lower.

I looked at the eco-system and it uses the Patch of Grass plant.  So I cleared everything and chose to paint using just Patch of Grass instead of painting with an eco-system and everything is much smoother in high-quality view.

Quote - > Quote - Gill.  Your MAT dies right near the end of loading it.

Yep, that's where it crashes every time.  Thanx for double checking

Gill,

I'll try yours on mine as soon as I can. The bad news is it seems from what I have read here and other topics on various sites, Vue 8 is FAR from being stable. There is the eco bug as you found, some cloud/atmosphere issues yet again, render times and more. I said it before and I was hoping e-on would WAIT to release Vue 8 until late next year. The reason is they have a history of releasing versions full of bugs, making a patch or two then announcing a .5 release without fully fixing prior issues. It has been going on for some time and I really wanted to think they would wait to fix the bugs and do more work in 7.x THEN release 8 sometime late 2010 making it more solid but with a few new features.

I will report back on what I find using both the Mac and PC version and what my render times and resources are then. In the mean time, it looks like I may be working with Vue 7.4 until some BIG patches are released for 8 as the older version seems to be more stable at this time for some things.

Quote - It's slowed to a crawl again now!!!.......really puzzling!

By way of comparison, the windy hill eco comes in at 4,968,804 polys with resource at 86% and no slow down.
The problem does seem to be associated with the pastures ecosystem!

Also check your 23bPasturage.mat file.  Mine is 180KB (184,320 bytes) on disk.  Hopefully yours has not been altered.

Vue 8 Infinite runs fine on my old system.  But the MAT file has 100% density grass in it and grass can clog any system if viewed at high quality.  I don't think Vue 8 is to blame here, but the combination of MAT content and video settings are.

Mine is also 180kb!

As a temporary fix (until E-on repackages it with future updates), you could make your own Pastures MAT and save it and not use E-on's.  That way you have better control of its optimization and its better use in painting/populating.

Heck.  Give it to E-on so they can bundle it.  Or you can sell it.

LOL, TBH I'm not that bothered about using it anyway at the moment, it was the fact that it has a performance issue [for me] that bothered me. I still have 3 previous versions of Vue to use that don't have issues like this if need be! [LOL]
I still use 6 Infinite for when I use RenderStudio because that works all wrong in all other later versions of Vue Infinite, the lighting is completely different to how it should be from 7 up.

Yesterday I had no trouble with ecosystems, today they can be sluggish or the program stops responding. I realize I am not the only one, but I can't always figure out what is responsible. I can be doing the same thing in one file, and all is OK and in another slow as molasses to respond to commands.

I think I found the problem. Somehow I think the file got corrupted. I'm trying to recreate it to see.

So far with Vue 8 Infinite, I'm not getting resources back after doing a render.  So I've been exiting Vue and starting it up again to get back RAM for my next render.

Quote - So far with Vue 8 Infinite, I'm not getting resources back after doing a render.  So I've been exiting Vue and starting it up again to get back RAM for my next render.

Now that is interesting and could be a huge hassle. I know others have said they feel there is a "memory leak" or some sort of memory issue too reporting various slow downs and other issues.

Are you running the Mac or Windows 64 bit version? I will be testing both this week and was wondering if there may be any difference between them. Soon I'll find out though.

I'm using WinXP32bit.  E-on fixed memory de-alloc in Vue 7.  So it shouldn't be a problem finding the error again in Vue 8.  Vue 7 always shot resources back up to 89% for me when I deleted everything from a scene.  Vue 8 sticks wherever it gets used up at.

Vue 8 is very quick at returning RAM to WinXP32bit though when I exit the program.  So I don't have to wait for it to happen.

Just got this repoly from e-on techs.....

Hi Gill,

This problem of backwards compatibility has just been fixed. A patch with the fix will be released very soon (it will be availble from the Updates page)

We apologize for the inconvenience, and thank you for your help improving Vue 8!

Best regards.
Shawn Remo

Hmm, so there was a problem then!
A bit late now but at least those to come will benefit!
Thanks for the update.