The great bug hunt!

#19

Here is one for you, this is what happened after I click on AM to start it up. Anyone have a work around for starting AM?

Am 9.5

#20

What happens when you hold down shift as AM starts up. . .

#21

Wegg whats up with KDX?

Same thing happens when I hold down the shift key.

its ok I’m just trying to export some models to OBJ so I can
convert to a different program.

#22

You got a legit CD in the drive? I get that message sometimes if my CD doesn’t read as legit (it’s dirty, or mounted badly, etc.)

#23

LOl yeah its ok. I know it is because 9.0 starts fine.

I gues its one of those things. I will restart the machine and it will work ok if I dont run anything before I start AM.

#24

This is a pet peeve of mine. Most companies do not keep an accesable list of bugs that’s been reported to tech support

Open source projects on SourceForge.com have a section for viewing and reporting bugs

High end companies like Veritas will email users when a new bug is discovered.

IMHO, Having a user accessable list of “issues” is the most important thing a software company can do to support its users, based on a very old concept/invention.

Before written language was invented, knowledge had to be passed around by a bunch of people sitting round a campfire. So if Mr.Oog dicovers that spearing a mamoth in the butt just will make it mad, not dinner, anyone who wasen’t part of the inner circle when mamoth spearing was discussed may waste lots of time with fruitless butt spearing.

Now, if Mr. Oog paints a picture on a cave wall showing the problems that happen with mamoth butt spearing, then when a newbie mamoth hunter joins the tribe, he can RTFCW* and see what to avoid doing on the hunt. If he discovers that the 1/4 diameter spear that worked on rabbits is incompatible with mammoths, and must be upgraded to the 1 inch version, he can add that to the Cave Wall.
So, when another newbie joins the hunters, he won’t spend days trying to use a 1/4 spear on a mamoth’s butt
If new discoveries of things that don’t work when hunting aren’t documented on the CW, then a newbie may spend a week trying to use a club for the hunt. He’d be pretty pissed when talking about it by the campfire, Mr. Sapsucker says “yeh, Oog told me last year that clubs don’t work, but I didn’t put it on the Cave Wall. By the way, would you like to buy my new “Club with Rock on Top”? I used it when I made this deerskin blanket, it should be good for all your hunting needs.”

Hopefully, this made my point that if hunters errr, users can look at an issues list, then lots of time and frustration would be saved by not trying to make a known to be broken feature work.

*Read The Freaking Cave Wall

#25

Dear DearMad,

Since there’s times when I need to access more than one CD at once, and need to test how some programs I write work off a CD, I use CD Space 4.
http://en.cdspace.com/e_htm/e_home.asp

Since with this program AM resides on my hard drive as a virtual CD, I don’t need to keep a physical disk mounted in my drive.

l8tr, Jay_K.

#26

I aggree that we need a decent list of known bugs. It is Hash’s job to supply this. Asking everyone to be a lone bug squisher is fantastically inefficient. I once posted such a suggestion on the mailing list but it somehow never made it on there (well I never saw it anyway).

I may give it another go later. I wander if it is a sackable offence?

#27

If you openly post a repeatable bug here in this forum. I’ll bet you. . . a while dollar. . . that it will be fixed within a week.

This is a PUBLIC place. You will get their attention.

#28

Jay,

I didn’t want to waste the HD space with images- I just made myself copies of the CD so I have a backup. I run it off the copy and keep my original CD tucked safely away.

#29

Ok, Here are one or two things that have been realy bugging me for a good few months (off the top of my head).

Rigging…

  1. I want to be able to orient a bone like a null and then animate its offset. I could do this in 8.5 and it was very handy. I use it for toes. I have a model that I made in 8.5 where this works. I can bring it into 10 and animate that toe without rotating the null that it follows (the heel null is a child of it and I don’t allways want it rotating with the toe). Maybe this is a stupid rig, but it seems more stupid not to fix such a little thing. It is doubly annoying because I can see the offset channels moving in the timeline but the toe isn’t moving.

  2. I would like to be able to store “lock IK” information in a pose and be able to turn it on and off in an action. I can make the pose and turn it on but then it wont turn off again.

Moddeling…

  1. Stitch is great, but it doesn’t work all of the time. About one in 10 times it will move the CP in hand over to another cp and connect it there. This is annoying enough but of course undo doesn’t do the job here.

  2. When building a model, I often find that newly created splines appear to have Gamma or Alpha set. Then I click on a CP and it resets to normal. A minor thing but irritating and a waste of my time.

Chor…

  1. I have had information just dissapear! A model or channel information goes. Maybe linked to problems that I had in an earlier version where projects would crash as I saved them (an unforgivable type of crash).

  2. I have turbulence set on a volumetric light. Each time I load the project, another instance of it appears. This makes for a slow render with funny volometrics. I have to delete the turb. each time I load.

Misc…

  1. I want to have a whole load of objects (tendrils) aiming at a null so the null controlls those objects.
    If I try importing a tendril lots of times into a model, its smartskins dissapear.
    If I try importing them as action objects… well that is another story.
    If I try making the relationships in a chor (what I though to be a fail-safe method), they are gone when I load the project.

I could go on but I have a voice in my head saying “are you getting paid for this? Get a life you boring b*****d”.

It is possible that the above are all my fault, but I rarely get a reply from hash and cannot talk about this stuff on the list. Plus they blatantly are not my fault.

Lets keep them coming. It may be boring but Hash might start reading this stuff so we don’t have to waste our time indevidually sending it in.

#30

I think this is a good idea. I personally still use 8.5p++ and have some workarounds and known things that freak out.

Should we break this up into different topics for each version? 8, 9, 10.

I’d love to know what is the scoop on 9.5, as I am still trying to do some work in it.

Anybody know if black specks in renders was fixed in 9.5?

  • patrick j. clarke
#31

I’m using 9.5 and it crashes instantly when I try and rename any path object. It would be great to have descriptive names for these paths, but I’m stuck until my v10 upgrade comes which I hope will fix it.

#32

just tried it in 9.51e and it worked fine. Do you have something constrained to to when you rename?

  • pjc
#33

I think that at least half of the people on this list either don’t have A:M any more or they don’t have the latest version and if we are going to send Hash this bug list we need to have it up to date. So what I think we should do is compile a list of bugs that v8.5 and v9.5 have and then ask those that have v10(latest version) to test the bugs out to see if they are still there.

#34

Sounds good. I’ve started.

#35

Nates44: Exactly… I uninstalled A:M during the 10.0 betas, and, frankly, I don’t feel like installing it again until people start raving about the vastly improved stability (iow, possibly never;)).

#36

If a glowing object is clipped off the side of the choreography the glow fades down and creates an ugly bar. You’d think the glow would extend all the way to the edge.

When you lower toon line bias to get more lines you get hideously awful smudges. So you have to crank up the bias to at least 30 to get rid of this, but with fewer lines certain details (like noses and lips) disappear. The pic below has a bias of 15 on the legs. Default is 20, that creates smudges too but I lowered it so they’d show up better.

Both these pics taken with v10c.

#37

One bug that keeps on bugging me is a partical error. When I alter the partical’s color change ( animated color changes) in the material viewer then go directly to the choreography mode and render the particals on a model A:M freezes.

Win2k

#38

Hi again,

Dearmad said:
Skevos,
Sorry mate, but you’re talking too much like a consumer for my taste.

I struggled very hard to figure out what you mean by this, and all I can come up with is that you’re suggesting that it’s OK to read and post here, but not to complain? Leaving aside the fact that I don’t think my previous post was complaining, doesn’t this approach seem a bit inconsistent? It’s OK to rant about AM (agreed), but not okay to merely question the purpose of a thread?

If you don’t like this forum, then change it by shaping it yourself.

Isn’t that what my post was doing? By seeking clarification on the purpose of ONE thread (not the whole forum)? Given the anything-goes nature of this forum, I’m surprised to see a “veteran” react this way.

That’s the point of this forum.

Agreed.

To sort of backhandedly threaten to leave if it doesn’t turn out to be what you want seems a little poorly thought out.

How was it backhanded? Seemed a pretty up front statement of intent to me. How was it a threat? You give me too much power! What can I do to this forum? So one person (me) is going to give this forum a month to prove itself. Big deal. Would you rather we all uncritically accept this forum without complaint?
Sounds like the rules of another AM place… :wink:


Contribute where you can. Ignore the threads you find stupid (another advantage over the email list system).

I think this is where we really disagree. You say I should ignore threads I find stupid (I haven’t found any such threads yet, including this one). I say that questioning the purpose of a thread perfectly OK. Time will tell which is the best approach I guess. Assuming I stick around… (grin)

Rant when you get frustrated to relieve the pressure behind your weary eyes, and then go back to working on your projects a happier boy.:bounce:

As long as I don’t rant against the forum? :slight_smile: Let’s not forget that I saw a lot of merit in this thread and said so, it was only one out of three possible outcomes that I expressed some skepticism on - maybe you should reread my post. Maybe I should add more smilies to my posts! :slight_smile: (though there appear to be limits on how many I can use)


But boycott a forum

Boycott? A one man boycott? This bothers you?!? Are you trying to flatter me? :slight_smile:

where free speech is tolerated,

As long as I don’t question a thread’s purpose… riiigghhhttt… :wink:
Feel free to point out the error in anything I’ve said Dearmad, just don’t tell me I can’t say it! Unless there are rules here I’m unaware of.

noise is easy to filter out, images can be tied to messages easily (and not hosted at some crappy 90k/day bandwidth web host as so many people on “the list” do)

A big, BIG advantage of this place. Mind you, 30k isn’t that large, but I understand why there are limits. It’s great that “newbies” have a place to post small WIP images without the hassle of uploading to a web page and all that. I was new to FTP and HTML once, I remember what it was like…

, and you decide the tone of things yourself? I don’t get it…:hmm:

We can agree on that! :wink: (joke) I think you read my whole post but only replied to one paragraph in it! Most of my post was saying that most aspects of this thread are a good idea!

Dearmad also said:
I think the moderators should open a non-post thread that only they can post to and move the helpful posts from this thread into there. This could be our input thread, and the other (less noise in it) thread could be the reference.[/B]

Great idea. A sticky thread called “AM vX.XX Work Arounds and Known Bugs” or similar. A quick place to go if someone discovers a bug and wants to find out if they are alone or if others share their pain or, better still, know a way around it. I agreed with this idea in my previous post…

BTW, I still experience your OpenGL woes in v9.Xx and v10x, but my video card (Matrox G400) is well known as having OpenGL issues in a window (as opposed to fullscreen). So I’ve always assumed it was my card.