Crashes in FT3

Old Guy

I am getting a LOT of crashes with FT3. It's rare to go 10 minutes without a crash. Here's my setup:

Asus G71GX notebook, Intel Core2 Duo P8700/2.53GHz, 6 GB Memory, GeForce GTX 260M 1GB Video Card, Windows Vista 64-Bit, FT 3.09 installed to C:/FT3.

I am using Wilbur Ridged Multifractal, an Editing Size of 6000, a Max Horizontal/Vertical Resolution of 6000, and have Allow Prescale Offset Editing enabled.

Since FT isn't a 64-bit program, I doubt that more system memory would make any difference. I suspect the editing size and max res probably are the culprits but I really don't won't to lower than any more than I have to. Is there anything else I can do to reduce crashes?

Also, is it necessary to match editing size to max res? I thought I read that if they didn't match, it could produce anomalies during editing with things not being quite where they appear. Unfortunately, I can't find where I read that to double check.

Lastly, editing size changes on its own. I'll be working away and then get a pop up that the requested command ran out of memory and that the suspected problem was an excessively large setting for editing size. When I check, it is set to ~4,000,000. Setting it back to 6000 allows the command to continue.

jslayton

I don't understand the "match editing size to max res" statement. Would you care to elaborate?

Old Guy

Under preferences, there is a "maximum horizontal resolution" and a "maximum vertical resolution" entry. Under World Settings > Editing, there is an "Editing Size" selector. I have all three set to 6000. Somewhere (which I can no longer locate, probably a random tutorial somewhere on the net) I read that there was some benefit to setting them all to the same value. I was wondering if this is actually the case and if so what is the benefit? Or inversely, what problem(s) arise if they are set to different values?

jslayton

The settings under preferences deal only with the displayed image; they have nothing to do with the editing data. I recommend ignoring the "maximum ... resolution" settings on the preferences page as much as possible as it is likely that they are going away in the near future. The only value to these settings is if you'd like to have FT calculate your display incorrectly at a lower resolution than your screen physically supports. I really should have removed these items from FT3 before release.

The values under World Settings >> Editing are the ones that you're going to be interested in for editing things. One important consideration is that FT isn't the best program in the world about checking for out of memory conditions. If you're using 6000 as your editing resolution then that means that you're using roughly 450MB of editing state memory. Every time that you try to do something that you can undo, FT will need to save 450MB of data somewhere in memory. FT has somewhere around 1500MB of memory available to work with and you can run out pretty quickly as it tries to save undo data when using large editing resolutions.

Looking at the code just now, I determined that FT will save a maximum of 8 undo levels, meaning that the maximum "safe" editing size is somewhere around 4000 samples. Larger than that and you probably ought to save regularly.

I'll see what I can do about getting a more reasonable memory-based undo metric installed rather than just a fixed number of undo operations.

With regards to your question about the maximum display resolution thing and the editing size thing, they have nothing to do with each other and changing them independently (or together) has no impact on the software.

jslayton

As an aside, I recommend using the improved perlin noises when possible as they scale to a higher number of octaves than the wilbur noises do. The wilbur noises start to die at about 12 octaves (the surface devolves into a few randomly spaced dots); the perlin ones will go higher.

Old Guy

Thanks for the response. That helps. I did some tentative playing with editing size set to 4000 and the crashes seem to have stopped.

While playing around I didn't have the edit size spontaneously change value either. Hopefully, that was related and is gone too.

Looking forward to some serious FT learning time tomorrow