CompuServe Thread

#MEMORY BLUES

8 messages in this thread
#34115From: david sellJan 21, 1992 2:01 AM
Something odd happened last night. From another BBS I downloaded a TurboSilver object. I knew when it didn't appear to load in IMAGINE 2.0 that first, I would have to load it into TurboSilverSV, resave it and then load it into imagine. It wouldn't render. I got a wire frame but couldn't even use Shaded perspective, my machine would crash. It was a big object 330K. I'd downloaded a similarly sized object (ROBOTCOP) and the rendering would always crash. but it would render on a friends A3000. I,m using an accelerated A2000 with 9 megs. The odd thing was that the Turbo Object was able to render in Turbo Silver! Why? I've been getting system crashes not only in IMAGINE but also Journey man I can only use their equivalent of Scanline. My accelerator is Commodores A2630. I realise their must be a limit to the size of an object(bytes) but I thought 9 megs was a lot of memory. I was recommended to change the world size and that had some effect on my ability to raytrace but that's a separate problem. The other solution was to try to use the MERGEMEM command. But my machine still crashes. This is not a gripe on Imagine, it's a great program. Otherwise my Amiga works fine
#34132From: PETER S. WASONJan 21, 1992 2:04 PM
What size agnes do you have (what machine do you have?) If you have a 500 with a 512k agnes that might be the problem; if you have a 1mb agnes on a 2000 you should be ok……unless the thing is brush-mapped to infinity….. Are you running other software? Is the object available her on CIS? I might want to DL it and try it; I use the silver-imagine path for Terrain objects and it seems to work fine, but I havent tried it with 2.0 yet…..you might have to go silver-imagine1-imagine2…… -Scott
#34166From: david sellJan 21, 1992 11:24 PM
I have an A2000 with 1meg chip ram. The STEAMENGINE I tried to render has no brushmaps. I got it from PORTAL. Today I tried to altitude map a 16 color black and white hi-res to a simple plane to make a sea for the galleon.obj included with IMAGINE 2.0 and again I crashed. I have a total of 9megs of memoryand can't figure why I can't render. I did successfully render the galleon by itself and I know altitude maps need lots of RAM. I also use ASDG's VD0 recoverable ram device.
#34204From: John PendergrassJan 22, 1992 9:39 PM
David, as you say, altitude maps use huge amounts of ram. You have 9meg? How much of that is in use when you start rendering? (do an 'avail' just before you hit the render button) Also, what bitmap size is your altitude map image? I have 10 meg of ram, and had memory problems with 768×480 altitude map once. Even if that is the problem, however, it still SHOULD NOT CRASH. I know programmers do their best, but I don't see *any* excuse for programs to crash because of lack of ram. A graceful exit should be provided. –jp–seattle–
#34245From: PETER S. WASONJan 23, 1992 5:29 PM
VD0….hmm….never used it, but that _could_ be the cause of the problem; how much of VD0 is CHIP ram? How much ram have you got left after? Are you running anything else weird like animpointers? You should _not_ crash with Imagine. I almost _never_ do, but your object, again, could be the cause of the problem. Portal is not without some bad files! 🙂 -Scott
#34274From: david sellJan 24, 1992 2:27 AM
I've not got a bad file as I said a friend, loaded a RobotCop object and succes sflly rendered the object, and Th Steamengine renedered in TurboSilver. VD0 is arecoverable RAM device and thinking that might be the problem I disabledit. I run ScreenX and that watches available memory and after startup sequence stuff I end up with 800k Chip and 7megs of Ram. The Altitude maps I used were big but not huge. My question is rather thaseems to be plenty of memory around, where else can I look in the configuration of my computer A2000 with Commodores A2630 accelerator card to hopefully solve my problem?
#34290From: PETER S. WASONJan 24, 1992 1:10 PM
Call Impulse direct and ask them about the card and compatibility problems. Do you have an FPU? Are you running the FP version of software? -Scott
#34449From: Karl SparklinJan 26, 1992 4:33 PM
David, Message #33992 mentions that Steve Worley finds that Imagine 2.0 can't wrap 8-bit black and white images. Maybe that's causing your crash? I have the RobotCop object around here someplace. If you haven't found a solution yet, let me know and I'll do a quick render. (Like a quarter-screen HAM one, eh?) Karl – via Whap!