Multiple instances still running after crash to desktop.

[CJO Games]

I noticed that I had multiple instances of editor.exe; preview.exe and that they had pushed my cpu useage up to 100% - I think these were from previous running of the game engine and had been left over when I'd experienced crashes. I was able to close all of these through the  task manager.

[Josh]

Occasionally I have seen the preview app hang, although it has not occurred in the more recent builds for me (the last couple of weeks). It might be an improvement if the preview generator gets launched to do a folder at a time. Right now it communicates with the editor back and forth via the CLI.

[CJO Games]

The engine is still continually crashing to desktop with an associated Preview.exe hang that is gobbling up resources on the CPU and RAM. This is usually as a result of adding textures to a material or adding material to a model and can occur on various types of texture and model formats. The preview.exe hang is particularly problematic as it is acting like a resource drain and has been causing my PC to hang even after the editor and/or client are closed - the only way to stop preview.exe after a crash to desktop is to force close through windows Task Manager. The crash to desktop is frustrating as any work up to that point is lost and is causing corruption of my maps meaning they will no longer open in the editor so hours of work are going missing or are lost.

Cutting.zip Mountains and tarns 2048.zip

[Josh]

Hi, what GPU do you have?

[CJO Games]

Hi Josh, it is an MSI GTX 1650 4gb (ddr6) please see attached the Nvidia driver system information:

NVIDIA System Information 02-14-2024 09-12-50.txt

[Josh]

Okay, thanks, and this is version 0.9.4 of the editor, right?

[CJO Games]

I'm on the dev channel so which ever version that is.

[CJO Games]

Please see attached for an example of this issue at its worst - note the high cpu useage and number of open preview.exe

[Josh]

Are you saying that the editor crashing is related to the preview app not closing? How do you know these things are related?

[CJO Games]

I'm not sure how its related but I'm relatively certain that preview.exe shouldn't be running that many times(x4) when one instance of the client and one instance of the editor are running. What I can tell you is that this occurs when (as explained above) the editor crashes to desktop when adding materials to models or textures to materials or adding models to a map or adding textures or materials to maps or anything that seems to involve the preview.exe is invoked. Does that help?

[Josh]

Yes, that is a bit more clear, thank you. I am working on something that I believe may solve this issue automatically.

[CJO Games]

I know this is (hopefully - fingers crossed) going to be helped by the upcoming update but I thought it would be useful to let you know that I have narrowed down the cause of this to creating materials from textures. It's not something that happens all the time and it isn't contingent on a specific set of textures (as far as I can tell it doesn't matter where they come from). To reproduce try (for instance) the Modbuilder pack from the Leadwerks workshop or the Port pack from the Leadwerks workshop and choose any of the textures and create a material from one of them. The chances are it'll work fine but if you work with the engine for long enough it will crash to desktop but preview.exe will remain open in the background and will need to be force-closed.

Hopefully that is a little more clear...

[Josh]

Preview.exe has been rebuilt and may work better now.

[CJO Games]

Sorry Josh but it has made no difference to me - I am still getting the crash to desktop and preview hang and it still appears to be corrupting maps - this is in the 0.9.5 version. Attached is a map I worked on yesterday which, although opens would appear to be corrupt as there is nothing there at all.

 

The hang is caused when creating materials or working with materials in other ways (such as for instance applying them to a model or opening a model that has previously been wrapped).

 

 

WoodenFort.zip

[SpiderPig]

I was going to see if this happens for me too but I tried your map file and it didn't load for me.  I mean it didn't do anything, it's like the editor ignores it.  Is it missing assets or are they included in the file?  I don't know how the map system works, I don't use them much.

[CJO Games]

It should load with or without the assets and only load what is available to the engine as a default ( the CSG built boxes) of which there are quite a few because of the way I build maps. The assets aren't necessary and I can't attach as my assets are proprietary.

Like you though, I get nothing - its as though the JSON is being ignored by the engine.

[SpiderPig]

Oh okay.  Yeah, I get the exact same problem.  No errors or anything it's just ignored.

[CJO Games]

I opened up the JSON and found that some of the braces were incorrect - or at least the closing braces were missing. Unfortunately, fixing these errors didn't allow the map to open. I think the crash to desktop is obviously causing some alteration to the JSON file which prevents it from actually loading.

[Josh]

If you edit a map file by hand you will destroy its contents, because there is some binary data at the end.

[CJO Games]

It was already destroyed Josh, so that point is somewhat moot...

The point was the missing braces - not the contents - if the braces are missing in the map that won't open but not from those that do then that suggests a problem writing to the JSON file - hence the fact that it wouldn't open in the editor. 

The editing of the JSON file was, instead, to prove to myself that editing it couldn't make a difference.

I hope that makes sense and isn't distracting from the original issue I raised at the top of the page as I think that is the more important part of this chain - namely, that the Preview.exe is still causing a hang and its rebuild hasn't solved anything - in fact it would have appeared to have made matters worse. 

 

[Josh]

A bug was fixed that would cause launched processes to hang. This may resolve your issue with the preview tool.