Hi everybody, first of all, I read in earlier messages about the fact that Vue 4 Pro seems to be more unstable than Vue 4. I also read that there would be some kind of an anti-piracy-thing in Vue 4 Pro. I don't want to start that war again that happened here some time ago, but because I'm thinking about buying Vue 4 Professional or maybe Vue 5, I want to know what I will get for my money. I downloaded the Vue 4 Demo some time ago and everything was OK. It NEVER crashed. So I downloaded the Vue 4 Pro demo and was curious what would happen, because I read in some forums about the problems that Vue 4 Pro caused for many people, who sometimes were accused to have illegal copies and so on. So I installed the demo and realized that it crashes very very often, even without having complex scenes. I'd like to know why. The anti-piracy-thing can't be the reason, and all other apps run perfectly on my machine. Let's not have this kind of ridiculous discussions like those we had to read some time ago. Let's just find out if it's really a problem inside Vue or some incompatibility with something else. If I wouldn't have seen the dynamically moving trees in the demo-movie of Vue 4 Pro I would be satisfied with Vue 4, which is in my eyes a fantastic program. Let's share some experiences! Hannes

Does that really make sense? Vue 5 Pro is announced for end of this year. You should check your OpenGL thingies, a lot of problems come from incompatibilities between 4 Pro and OpenGL drivers. Switch OpenGL off and see what happens.

Hannes: There have been several service packs for Vue 4 Pro that have resolved a lot of the issues people were experiencing. I don't know if the demo version has been updated to include the fixes that these added. It might be worth asking e-on if they have. They wouldn't be the first software company to have a demo version that has bugs in that have been fixed in the full version. A couple of things that I find help performance and used to use to reduce crashes: The little preview window in the right hand bar can be set to only update when you click on it. Sometimes, if its set to update when you change the scene, it can start to eat up processing time. Try downgrading the quality of the panes of the 4 pane display that you don't need to be as higher quality as possible to wireframe or even wireframe box. If all of the windows are redrawing to show a change you've just made at a high quality setting this can make it look like your machines locked up when all its doing is redrawing the displays. Wabe: When I first had Vue 4 it wouldn't work for more than ten minutes without crashing. A service pack corrected the problems and Vue now works fine. However if I was still having problems after service packs and talking to e-on's support I'd want to see them resolved. If they wern't resolved why would I want to buy Vue 5 Pro?

@Impish. I only meant that someone that thinks about purchasing Vue right now should know that there is another version in the pipeline. I have some complains in mind of people that bought V4 only some weeks ago and are now not the happiest campers at all. Og course i agree that - as with all packages - sometimes it is good not to be the first in buying. To let the first updates be happening and get a more stable version. But everybody should be free and informed to make this decision for themselves.

Thanks to you for your comments, I didn't know that there will be a Vue 5 Pro version this year. Of course I'll be waiting if this is what I want. @impish: great suggestions, I'll try it. BTW...it's good to see that there are still people who are able to behave politely. Hannes

Wabe: Makes sense. I read what you said a different way thinking you were saying there was no reason to fix Vue 4 Pro since Vue 5 Pro is on its way. Something I've heard said in other software forums before. Letting people know Vue 5 Pro is on its way is, obviously, a good thing. I've held off buying V5 because I don't want to upgrade to V5 and then V5P as well. I wish e-on would announce the price that V5P will be so that I can decide if I want to upgrade to it or if I'll sidegrade to V5. Don't want to sidegrade though because I love the greater control that V4P gives me. Its having a knock on effect on my other software buying too - depending on the price I might get Adobe Premier Elements so I can make nicer cuts of my animations but till I know the price for V5P I don't know if I can spare the cash. Hannes: I'm usually very polite although I may be less polite to the two rows of drivers blocking the pedestrian crosssing in about 20 minutes if they are really annoying ;-) Hope the suggestions help.

Well Impish, just to let you know. I am a beta tester and i reported some Pro 4 bugs only a couple of days ago still. All that is reported helps E-on to make the next issue a better one. And normally i try to be nice too - if my first statement here came a little strong (my feeling), sorry for that. Premier Elements is a good choice i guess. AfterEffects of course too :D

I had some similar concerns about Vue 4 before I purchased, but I had to purchase because I like the images that are produce from it. Last weekend I purchase the sidegrade and planned to get the Pro Upgrade. I believe that there is endless possibilities with Vue, most of limits are on the artist. As for stability, with Windows XP SP2, I found that the Firewall should be turn off. Also large imported objects tend to cause problems.. I also notice that Vue gets really unstable after getting out of memory error and eventually after continue use it will crash. So if I get an out of memory error, I will save my work if not already and exit to Windows and restart Vue. Seams to work for me.

Before doing long renders I often save the project, close down Vue, shut down windows, restart with minimal other stuff running and then do the render. Working like that I've run renders for animations that have taken 72 hours and more to complete without any problems.

In my experience Vue 4 Pro was very unstable until the release of the 268493 service pack, which seems to have corrected a lot of unstability problems. I'm currently using 272334 & am having very few problems. Open GL turned on, background draw on, Win XP Pro, AMD Athlon XP running at 2 Ghz, 1Gb DDR Ram, and Nvida Gforce FX 5200. I do not do animations and don't have Mover installed, nor have I found it beneficial to turn off my firewall. Of course this is just my own experience, your mileage may vary :o).

Sirrick, Do you have Windows XP SP 2 installed.. My message about firewall is related to XP SP2. Also it is possible that Vue 4 Pro works ok - if alllow Windows Firewall to communicate on network. Stewart

268493 was the one I think that fixed the GDI bug that was causing havoc for a lot of people. My copy has been pretty stable since (currently running 4.53).

Yes, I have SP2 installed, but I have the Windows Firewall disabled (using Norton Internet Security)....

Is Norton Internet Security on, Vue's network copy protection might cause problems... just a thought

I have my firewall set to block all connections, and I have Vue set to not update or check from within the program. As I understand it, Vue doesn't have "network" copy protection, it uses the Vue4pro.eon file and the Vue4pro.reg file for verification. I prefer to get my updates from eon's web site. Of course I'm possibly a little paranoid, as I allow very few programs to access any DNS servers unless it's absolutely necessary for the program to run. Again, I'm not having any instability problems with the 272334 release, it's very stable even importing Poser PZ3's.

I read some where that Vue 4 Pro has logic if it detects another copy with same serial # on the network, it would randomly crash. I was deeply concern about when I orginally installed it because I issue with a bad disk - which E-On resolved.