#Animator Studio HELP!
15 messages in this thread
Dear Tech Support,
I just bought Animator Studio and installed it. Problems right off the bat.
First particulars:
CD-ROM S: drive INstalling A.S. on D: drive Windows 3.1 is on my C: drive
Runnign on a 486-66 with 16 meg, DOS 5.0
I put diskette in A:, CD in S:, went into Windows and from File Manager
selected RUN and A:SETUP
It "installed" but no install options came up as documentation specified. Also
only the Animation Player icon was in the created Window. After rebooting for
Windows to kick back in, and clicking on the Animation Player icon, I got a
Write Protect error. This happened agian twice after cold reboots.
What gives? What program icons should be in the group and what can I do to get
them there and how can I get past this write protection error?
Your help is much appreciated.
Peter Nowell (408)266-4945
Hi Peter, I had the same experience. In the program manager / File Run /
Browse/ go to the CD and run the setup file. You will get a dialog saying it is
allready installed, etc. Go ahead and do the install after which Studio will be
properly installed. At least that is how I did it, and it worked.
Will Tait
Tech Support,
Sorry about jumping in, but my mouse just failed and my modem is going
fast……
I attempted to install Animator Studio as instructed in the manual, only to be
surprised by the lack of further instructions and it's insistance to be
installed by floppies. Outside of that, though, it seemed to load OK. (all
the icons appeared in the newly created group.)
The next surprise was the Flipper GPF. So far, Flipper has caused 3 GPF's on
my system, and I would like him to stop. I am running a Pentium 90 with 64 MB
RAM, a Diamond Viper PCI graphics card and a SB 16 sound card. I have Windows
relatively well-streamlined
already; how much of a swap-file should I set up, and if the swap file is set
too large, won't I be setting myself up with a disk-thrashing problem?
The next problem is with the scripting. It is not working well; it did not
operate smoothly through the tutorials. After angel.avi was extended to a 2
second duration, it hung while playing through the script (I discovered quite
by accident that pressing the spacebar would free it up and allow the script to
continue to play. (I was not into the slide show mode; it is not set up to
pause and yet continues to do so.) I also get an error message when I attempt
to add sound to the Angel.Avi file; something stating that if I add a WAV to an
AVI I wil no longer have use of audio. This does not make sense, since I have
been able to add sound to all the tutorial AVI files (aha–not to stills,
though—Is there a problem with adding wav sounds to stills?
Cheryl,
I have the same problem with flipper, I have not heard anything from the Adesk
folks. I'm waiting for a reply.
Cheers,
Tom Flannery
So you too have become a friend 🙁 of Flipper. I wish he/she would "bug out" 🙂
so to speak. I have also discovered that I can fairly quickly put the app into
a downward spiral to a crash and burn. Hope a bug fix comes out soon.
Will
I am trying not to get too friendly with Flipper, although I must admit that on
one of the crashes I am probably guilty for bringing the nasty little critter
into action. It's unfortunate, because I am really beginning to like AAS. The
hardest part is getting used to the changes from Animator Pro; I think AAS
would be easier at this point if I had no prior knowledge of the old Animators.
And, of course, I don't EVER recall having crashed in Animator Pro.
I just completed a modem replacement (the old one finally gave out) and I must
now leave so that I can free up some hard drive space to create a humongous
virtual swap drive. It's at least encouraging to know that we're not alone
when the little Flippers come out at night……
I too stripped my hard drive to the bones and optimized it to the teeth. Now
have a 124 meg swap file. Thus prepared, I return to the games. It really is a
very nice program.
Will
Will, from your posts it appears you have gotten Anim-Studio running pretty
well. Two systems (Dx66/32mgRAM and P90/64mgRAM) – optimized everything,
defragged, created 130mg PSF and find that even at low resolution Anim-Studio
is very slow. Surround and drag, pastes etc. lack sufficient response time to
enable effective functionality. As a production tool, it is necessary to run at
752×480 and above. At those resolutions, I just gave up. Load-time on sprites,
file streams etc. were impossible. Is there something I'm missing? Run
EReality, Painter3 and WinFX very crisply. At 800×600, which is my standard
development res for 2-D images, a simple drag and drop and execute became an
ordeal. WHAT DID I MISS (frantic yelling) Jeffrey
Long load time? Are you referring to the conversion time which occurs when you
load a compressed AVI, Flic, etc., and it's turned into an uncompressed AVI?
There may be some advantage to preloading and saving everything as
uncompressed. Thus, the next time it's loaded, it pops right up. Don't save
it compressed until all your editing is over.
I wonder if Macros can automate this…
We have noted your comment as a wishlist. Thanks.
Hi Nik: <long load time> all streams are taking a long time to load. TGAs
uncompressed or compressed, CEL streams and FLCs. However, what is more
perplexing is the very slow frame to frame navigation, surround/drag/drop/
stretch/etc and all the little function that go into animating frame by frame.
That was most urgent need. I've tried working with only a few frames, and even
that lacks the response time I need to be effective. Jeffrey
Hi Jeffrey
I think I understand what you're referring to now. Is there anything in the
way of our samples that you can point out (or give us specific directions to
create) so that I can perhaps write it up as a bug or something tangible for
the programmers? What speed machine you have, and an estimate of how long you
would have expected the operation to take (vs. actual) would be helpful. If
you can specify where your expectation comes from – e.g EReality, Painter3 and
WinFX timings for similar operations.
Nik, frankly, I deleted the software. E-mail if you wish, I'll give you my
studio number and we can discuss it. Jeffrey
<<WHAT DID I MISS (frantic yelling) Jeffrey>>
Jeffrey, I had to find a combination of settings on my machine to work best
(not perfect.) For instance. I have to run 1024 x 768 @ 16bit color for my
system to run right. 24 bit doesn't work at all running a #9 GXE 2 meg board
with latest drivers.
800 x 600 doesn't work either. Artifacts all over the place. I found a new way
to crash it today after thinking I was through with that. I haven't documented
this one yet but will post when i run into it again.
Will (hope this helps some)