Hi everyone! Ive been a Rendosity member for a very long time and it had never crossed my mind to take the opportunity to come into this forum and see what its all about. But a Bryce problem crept up on me last night that after trying everything I could, and after hours of pondering about what could I do to salvage my Bryce scene, I finally remembered that this forum existed and figured, why not come in here, introduce myself to the other brycers, say hello and drop the situation on them and see if they can come up with a solution. Upon coming in here I immediately realized Ive been missing out on a lot by not coming here sooner. There seems to be a very nice and helpful crowd of people here. And whether or not a solution to my problem is forthcoming, I plan to continue to visit this forum and partake in its activities as much as I can.
OK, here is my situation in a nutshell; I spent most of my day yesterday (@ 10 hours) modeling a Bryce 5 scene. Of course as I worked along in it, I would save it so as not to lose it if some disaster should occur. At one point I started to play around with the Display Mode button and changed the mode from default to OpenGL to DirectX and back to OpenGL and wondered off back into my scene and forgot to reset the mode to Default. My video card does support OpenGL and I really dont know if this is the source of the problem. After long hours of Brycing, I decided to do a final save before going off to have something to eat. After diner I booted Bryce up again and found to my dismay that when I tried to open the file, I kept getting an error message that said;

Bryce 5 has caused an error in Bryce5.exe.
Bryce5 will now close.

If you continue to experience problems,
Try restarting your computer.

Ive tried everything! Shutting down, rebooting, changing the Display mode between all the modes and I keep getting the same error message. So it seems obvious that the file is now corrupt. It probably was saved corrupt for some mysterious reason, maybe the Display Mode switching, I dont know. But, is there anything I can possibly do to salvage the file? I know that some 3D packages have an auto save feature that saves a copy of the active file every so often and I guess Im kind of hoping that maybe Bryce has a hidden Easter egg that offers the same feature. I would hate to undertake another 10 hours recreating the scene over so any help would be great! Thanks, and Ill be seeing more of you folks from here on.

There is a temp folder in the Bryce 5 folder that sometimes a copy is saved there but if you shut the program down I'm not sure it'll be there. I'm afraid to say that your scene is gone, unless someone else can think of something. When saving files it's a good idea to wait a bit after it says it's finished before even clicking a button or anything (I usually wait until the menu bar disappears) because that has been known to corrupt files. Switching display modes I'm not sure about, I haven't run into that but I may just be lucky. BTW welcome to the forum! It's a great place to be.

You could also try running a scan disk with auto fix and see if it can sort the problem. It may be just lost fragments that are causing this failure.

You could try to merge it into a new file. Just a thought, don't know if it would work or not. Good Luck! Arleen

Well, thank you all very much for your responses. There's absolutely nothing in my Bryce temp folder and Bryce continued to shut down and give me the error message when I tried to merge with a new scene. So I guess all that work is gone. Maybe some kind of auto save feature would be a welcomed addition to future versions of Bryce.