Major Runtime Problems

Hi TomJScott

What version of PR are you using? Have you tried running an
unmodified version of an example program such as maybe like the example of the rotating cube example. This is a good place to start. If it runs and your application doesn't run, I can only make an educated guess that your either trying different things with an example or maybe you started from scratch. I sometimes have problems running a program. When I try to run it the program may exit imeadiatly back to my desktop. I have to ask myself what did I do wrong or overlook. Usually my failure to make sure there is a least one active camera or did I load a entity or object, so if I try to transform my entity and render it without first loading it its guess what my program going to crash. These are just examples of problems I had. Usually its my fault as a programer.

TomJScott I am a registered user of PR and I am still in the learnging stages of trying to fully use the PR API and there are still issues that I haven't completely resolved about using Power Render but this will take time.

I hope that helps
Doug

Edited by - sovereign on 3/23/00 11:53:51 PM

I am using version 2.6 until my full version ships. I have already checked that I am loading the entity and I have an active camera, but it still crashes.

It is certain that I will make mistakes and a lot of problems may result from those mistakes, but PR should not crash because I try to render an entity that was not loaded. It isn''t that difficult for PR to have validation checks to make sure entities are valid before rendering them. Frequent crashes for this kind of reason is a bad sign to me. I sincerely hope the full version is more stable or I will be discontinuing its use and switching back to VisKit.

>>but pr should not crash because I try to render an entity that was not loaded

well, perhaps you should check properly. =P

i would rather be forced to check things myself than have the api i use constantly second-checking everything i send to it. this leads to slowdowns that, well, can''t be gotten rid of (unless you purchase the source license). i like that aspect of pr, i suppose.

pr is a very stable engine. but it''s not alot more than a rendering engine (it has some collision/animation, but that''s about it). there are is no built-in game-logic constructs, which i like, because i often attempt unorthodox methods when doing things.

I am checking properly. That''s why I''m so surprised of the crashes. I have checks for all my objects to verify they are not NULL and have been loaded properly, but still I see these mysterious crashes.

I came over from using the VisKit API and I''m finding a drastic difference in stability so far. I will continue to press forward and see how the latest version works, but so far I''m disappointed in the problems I''m encountering.

I haven''t used that API so this may be out of my league. But if it''s a solid API should it not have some debugging tools? Try writing in some debugging routines, something that would somehow return error codes when the program run. When my programs just quit on me with no warnings or errors it because of page faults. Look to see if all nescesary stuff is initilized.
Hope that helps.

OneEyeLessThanNone

OK, I discovered what the problem was. If you don''t use PR_OpenViewport before loading and creating your entities, the system will crash when trying to render. Although the documentation says you must open a viewport before rendering, it does NOT say you have to open a viewport before loading or creating entities. I think this should be added to the docs for clarification.

Thanks