Trace keeps crashing CC3
JulianDracos
Mapmaker
This started when I updated to 3.96. Still here with 3.97. But I am thinking it has more to do with the maps I am making rather than the update.
The current map I am working on is 1200x1800. However, the land mass has 9600 nodes. I am trying to apply a terrain using trace. This is only for a small part of the map. But every time I try CC3 freezes. CPU usage is only 14% (but I do have 8 cores and CC3 only uses 1) and 500 MB of RAM.
What I think is happening is that CC3 is trying to trace all around the continent. It has so many nodes, and CC3 is just a 32 bit CAD program, that it is crashing the program.
I am trying to find a way to trace, but minimize the land border that CC3 starts with. I am not having any luck. It does not seem to matter where I click, it always wants to trace the continent. I have tried practicing on an island with no luck. It automatically traces the entire island. I then move the mouse away from the starting location and it then starts to unwrap. That is fine for an island with minimal nodes. It is not working for the continent. It starts out and then sputters. It eventually just stops responding (or really I get tired of it working/not working for 15 minutes so I use the task manager to stop it.)
I even did another map following the manual on how to use the trace command replicating what is there. Every time I click the coast to start the map, it just goes around everything.
So, so I have some setting wrong? Is there a way to fix this issue because I have a lot of terrain to fill and I need to be able to use the trace command without the program crashing.
Comments
With that number of nodes the trace will be slow, but it will eventually work. You can have more nodes than that, but you need to have quite some patience to trace.
Have you tried reducing the number of nodes using the SIMPLIFY command?
Would simplify change how the map looks?
So far I have gotten it to sort of work. I plan out exactly where everything is and then move very fast. I then walk away for 3-5 minutes. After which, it is done. I have been successful 2/3 of the time so far.
I think part of the issue is that every move of the mouse, it was redrawing the outline. So if I moved slowly there was a lot of attempt to draw.
It spends ages redrawing, but shouldn't actually crash unless you do it manually - as you discovered. This is the one drawback of having a landmass with a ton of nodes.
What SIMPLIFY does is to reduce the number of nodes. So it can simplify the coastline. However, if you set it very small it will only reduce details that aren't really all that visible, and may even improve the look of the map. You can have such a thing as details that are too small for the scale of the map. The other thing it will do is remove any nodes that are right on top of one another. You would be surprised how many of those there are if you are using (for example) an FT3 export. Save your map and experiment, checking how many nodes you have left after each try.