#Silver Problems
7 messages in this thread
Hey, Greg, maybe you can give me a quick answer to a problem I've been having
with Silver. The demo problems the tutorial has work just fine. When I
tried my first decent animation of my own design, (17 frames of 200 line HAM
with 8 objects) I can't get it to work. The MakeScene function seems to work
(although it used up an empty disk and I had to insert another one), but when
I use LoadScene, it appears to work, until you try to use the menu to find
PlayScene. Surprise! The menus have dissappeared, except for the menu
titles. I have a 2000 with 1 Mb, and version 1.1n of Silver. Am I running
out of memory already? This thing took over 30 hours to generate, and I'd
really like to see it. Also, once the scene is generated, the little
asterisks inside the frames dissappear, so I <xoZ>|ve them as a ILBM file
without generating them again. I think I must be missing something
somewhere.
I know, I can call the Silver hotline and get an answer (on Monday, at least
two eternities away…) but I thought you might be able to give me a quick
answer. Besides, would they help me before they recieve my owner
registration in the mail?
Any help is appreciated.
Douglas, your message had some noise in it, but I think I got the gist of
what you are experiencing. Ok, thinking back to Version 1.1x….
Ok, you generated 17 CELLS. After they were generated, an asterisk appeared
in each CELL. OK so far?
Then, you selected all the CELLS (highlighted white), and selected MAKESCENE.
After some gronking it was done. Right?
You then select LOADSCENE, then select PLAYSCENE (Once|Loop). And the
animation should play.
-If you want to play the animation at a later time from within Silver, you
would load Silver, then OPEN that File, Select LOADSCENE, then PLAYSCENE.
This should also work.
Let me know exactly what is happening if the above doesn't help any. What
you may want to do is Edit the <File>.SCR file, it is ascii and tells Silver
where to look for the .CEL, .STL, and .ANI files. It could be that Silver is
looking for the .ANI files (directory) in the wrong place.
GreG
GreG ; I also tried to help him. But it just dawned on me that he could try
using the player to view the animation. It wouldn't need so much Chip Ram.
Stan
GreG, I have tried both ways of doing the animation, generating the cells
(and having the asterisk appear), and then using MakeScene, and by just
selecting MakeScene, which generates the cells if they are not already done.
I can get all the way upt to LoadScene, which seems to work OK, but, when it
is done, the menus won't display below the title menu, and I can't use the
close gadget, either. The only way out of it has been to reboot.
I'll try your suggestion of reading and possibly editing the xxx.SCR file.
Thanks for the help.
Douglas, as Stan noticed, it seems like you are short on CHIP mem. Use the
PLAYER program without using SIlver..see if that helps. BTW, how much mem do
you have?
GreG
Just happened to see you note! (Lucky you!) The problems you are having, are
related to the insufficient CHIP ram in the Amiga. Screens, menus, and such
reside in the first 512K only. If the scenes you are constructing are large,
or there are alot of them, and you dont have alot (or any) extra ram, you can
suck up all the available chip ram rather quickly. We have tried to correct
this problem with Turbo Silver, by using a virtual memory system so only the
current cell being edited needs to be in memory, but on a 512K machine there
will still be a problem as we have added so many new features to the upgrade,
that the program itself is now much larger than before. You could also try
using CLI only instead of workbench, or disconnecting your external drive.
These last two options will save quite a bit of chip ram. As Silver is a
"total load" program, once it is running in memory, the disk can be removed
and a data disk replace it.
If these things fail to help, please call our HotLine on Monday.
Stan Kalisher, Impulse
Thanks, Stan, I will try several things. I'll try to reduce the number of
cells, and see if disconnecting the second disk drive of my 2000 to see if
that will help. I sent in my upgrade fee with my registration card the day
before yesterday. If I can't get things to work, I'll call the hotline.
Thanks for the help.