Mason opened this issue on Mar 25, 2005 ยท 59 posts
Mason posted Fri, 25 March 2005 at 6:03 PM
Well they added more rendering things, which are cool, but overall its just as flakey as P5 IMHO. 1. Duplicate magnet channels still are created. 2. Renders go into never never land with infinite loading texture message. No dump. No error handling. No time out. Nothing. No way to go through and check geometry etc to see what went wrong. 3. Cancel button does nothing of the kind. Nothing has changed here from P5. Whatever Cancel does it certainly does it very poorly. BTW god only knows what they are doing since you're simply cancelling a render. cancel should gaurentee exit from a render. There should be NO clean up or anything else. You're halting the render and dumping out. That simple. I am convinced, even though Cl denies this, that firefly is a seperate thread of some sort that Poser sends stuff to and communicates to via some sort of messaging system. Poser appears to have no real, direct control over firefly other than setting some options then submitting a render to that renderer. That would explain why cancel doesn't work since firefly crashes and Poser can only send a message to it to cancel. 4. Render an entire scene and no memory error. Render a small part of the scene and get a memory error. Neither condition exceeded my 2 gig mem. 5. GL preview looks nice and the preset material options are somewhat handy even though reflection/mirror didn't work right. 6. Speed appears faster but that directory switching is so slow. Overall I would trade off the point lights etc for fixes in bugs that have been reported time and time and time again. If nothing else, the cancel process or error process SHOULD have been improved. In fact, when talking to CL they promised better error handling. I don't see it here. I see the same voodoo crap P5 had. Since I get the same headaches in p5 I'll use p6 for the new features but am sadly disappointed by their lack of bug fixing. The lack of error reporting is really the hair puller for me. Gee dump to a log or something but tell me what crashed the system. as it is I might as well wear a scary mask and shake a stick at it. I thought Cl would do better than this. Yet another imple scene I must 3 finger and dump. 6.