CompuServe Messages

Hi Gary, pretty scary question, huh? Sorry for bothering you yet again, but I'm running into trouble yet again, so I'll cry for assistance… Remember my problems with corrupted GIFs about half a year ago? Well, this bug (we settled for faulty hardware back then although I couldn't find any proof of it) is haunting me again. But this time I'm gonna develop an excessive testing strategy so this bugger won't escape me again – I'll keep you posted about the results. As for the non-deterministic behavior of 3DS, while running some test patterns (scenes) in order to find the above mentioned error I discovered an interesting phenomenon: different stills of one (same) frame are not byte-equal. Responsible for this is (seemingly) the DITHER TRUE COLOR option in the Renderer options dialog. If DTC is set to 'yes', pixels differ between both pics, if DTC is set to 'no', pixels are identical. I could verify this behavior on two completely different computers, so it seems that 3DS uses a randomy dither algorithm for DTC. Is this a bug or a feature? <g> Not that I think this behavior is connected in any possible way to my 'corrupted-*.?IF-problem', but I'm just curious if you already knew about this feature (well, the possibility for _that_ is in the 99.9999% range, but anyway…) and even if there's no possible way for a connection, what about an _im_possible way…? Be back soon (hopefully) with new results, Volker