Hi all,
I am having a problem with Vue 8 Studio crashing when I use the spherical terrain features (located in Options) to make planet scenes.  Frequently it crashes when I'm trying to tell it the radius I wish to use when I'm beginning a new file.

However, more serious (to me anyway) is that I've now had two spherical terrain scenes crash AFTER I've exited the Options menus and done work on them.  One of these files had several hours worth of effort put into it and I would GREATLY like to recover this file.

Once these files have crashed in this manner I cannot open them again.  Vue will start to load the file and then I get the message "Vue 8 Application quit unexpectedly" every time that I try to reopen it.  Usually, at this point, I have to kill Vue from within the Task Manager as it is not responding.  This also applies to the .bak and recovery files that I've tried to open for these files.

My system specs are:
Vista 32 Home Premium
2.66 Ghz Core Dual CPU
4 Gig ram (yes, I know that Vista doesn't see all of it)
Nvidia GeForce 9500 GT 1024 MB
350 Gig hard drive

If anyone could either provide me with any suggestions as to how I could possibly open/recover this file, or help me to stop Vue from crashing with the spherical terrain option, I would really appreciate it.
Thanks!

One thing I can help on is that even when you're in the editor you can save your file - save frequently after every major change.

It sounds to me that your .bak file is corrupted unfortunately.

Thanks Gill for your quick response.  Unfortunately I had been saving this file really often, and it just decided to quit loading at one point after a crash.  I've learned the hard way down through the years about crashes and lost data.  I'm a long time Autodesk product user so I'm quite familiar with the "goodbye you'll never see your work again" feature.  :)

I have a feeling that things may have just gotten corrupted and I'm heading towards regenerating the image (provided that Vue doesn't keep crashing).  Maybe a reinstall if the crashes continue.

Maybe you could try to delete the environment files. Sometimes these get corrupted and these kind of things happen. Or there's some temporary file in your project folder. Try the following:

1. Go to your project folder and see if there's some file with a really strange name. Sometimes Vue creates these as temp files and doesn't delete them. These create confusion afterwards. You can just delete it.

2. If the above didn't solve, find the Environment folder in the Vue installation folder (normally c:program filese-on software...). In this Environment folder there should be several files with "env" extension. The "collections.env" you shouldn't need to delete (these are the libraries you defined) but the others you could try to delete, one by one (with each deletion checking if Vue already works). Vue will create these files again but, for example, if you delete the "config.env" you'll lose the changes you made in the configuration.

Hope that helps.

Thanks Artur.  I will try these things tonight when I get home.  I'm at work right now.  I really appreciate any help that I can get with this problem!

You could also try making extra save files, numbering each one as you go (or as I do, just have 2 and suffix them A and B)  then if one does get corrupted, you have a 2nd to go back to.

Amazing how resourceful all the years of using a very crashy programme makes us

That's a really good idea!  I've done that occasionally with work stuff so that I could keep various design revisions but somehow it never occurred to me to keep various increments at home as well.  Duh!  You can bet I'll be doing this in the future.  Thanks so much for the tip!

Quote - "You could also try making extra save files, numbering each one as you go (or as I do, just have 2 and suffix them A and B)  then if one does get corrupted, you have a 2nd to go back to."

I do something similar as well and I thought everyone did it too. :-) In fact, I don't just keep two copies, I keep a lot of them. I number them and every second or third save, I do "save as" and create a new copy with a new number. When a project ends I may have 10, 20 or more copies. Then, to archive the project, I delete all copies except the last two.

I don't do this because of crashes (I have few), I do it because this way I can always go back to any past version, to get back this or that detail that I liked best. For example, I may end up preferring the atmosphere of the 7th version but the tree configuration of the 9th and so I can just go back, recover both and merge them in the 12th file version.

Although I have few crashes, I did already have several, of course. And it has happened to me that none of the saved copies would open again. Even copies that I hadn't touch since a crash. After doing the steps I described above (delete temp and/or env files), I was able to open the files again.

Quote - However, more serious (to me anyway) is that I've now had two spherical terrain scenes crash AFTER I've exited the Options menus and done work on them.  One of these files had several hours worth of effort put into it and I would GREATLY like to recover this file.

I had a similar problem 2 weeks ago and sent e-on the problematic file, which they couldn't open either.
Yesterday the newest beta release of Vue 8 was available for download, and it loaded the file without problems. Dunno if it's because MY particular problem, but they somehow fixed it.
As soon as this beta is available to the general public I'd give it another try, so backup your corrupted file in case you should need it.