3d Studio Bugs
Mike:
We are running 1 AST and 9 very generic clone 486/50's with 3DS in a rather
serious production environment, and yes, we have had a few problems with
the systems. The major ones were ALL memory related, and using QA-PLUS
and/or CheckIt found them reliably. We had a flakey network board (flakey
because it worked for everyone in the office except for Martin Foster, but
when we put him on a different machine, that went away also! (are you
listening, Martin?) The other troubles were with two Hercules Graphics
Station cards which would crash every time we did a Safe Frame, but that
was fixed in the 2.01 release.
If you are having a problem with one mesh, it could be that you got a
glitch in the file, and when the program hits it, depending on where you
are in the system, you get unpredictable results. Try to DXF the entire
file out, exit 3DS to clear it out totally, then start up and load the DXF
file. Or load the DXF file into AutoCAD if it still gives you problems.
One more thing – we did have a problem with a hard disk drive controller
being pushed too fast for the system. By slowing down the bus speed a
hair, it worked fine. With the virtual memory system, this could be a
problem. Do you ever run AutoCAD on the system? If it is a hardware
problem, both programs will probably crash in a related manner. Try
running in pure VGA (yucch!) mode for a few days to see if it is a flakey
ADI driver.
This is not a word processor, as you have pointed out. It is a leading
edge graphics program, and it will stress your hardware to the max. But
with the support on this forum, I am confident that the problem will be
identified and solved. Upload the mesh, upload your Autoexec.bat and
config.sys files, and the exact details of your hardware, and hundreds of
people will give their time and energy (for free, no less) to help you get
it fixed. And if it is a bug in the program, there will be a 2.02 version
to fix it! (right, GY?) Good Luck,
Greg Pyros