Material Editor crashes still persist

#1 Have you had this problem in just Torque 3D? I have been using AFX B3 and I run into the same problem at a little over 400 textures. Today I built a new instance of basic T3D with an empty project. I then moved all of my shapes and mission files to the project. Now I can open the material editor and display 250 mapped textures and 22 unmapped. None of the textures in my project are larger than 2048 by 2048. I am not certain yet if the differnece is in the materials that come with AFX or just the number of mapped textures in general. I have checked the AFX forums to see if similar problems are reported but it seems this is assumed to be an issue with basic T3D.

#2 Scot, I know i ts a bit to check with that ammount of materials, but do you have any that are an odd shape ? ie not a power of 2.

#3 I have been having this problem, in basic T3D over the course of several betas now. I don't think it has anything to do with AFX. That being said, I have no idea why what Parker did solved the problem for him. I have done exactly that with no change to the problem.

Andy, I am going to check as you suggested. If a texture is 512 x 256 for example, does that classify as "an odd shape"?

#4 nah their ok, i know torque dislikes image dimensions that arent a multiple of two (IE 1025x1025, some reason my photoshop7 batch resize has an annoying habbit of randomly kicking them out instead of 1024)

#5 I have played around with some of the shapes I use. I started over with a brand new build of AFX since it is such a large part of my project. I then moved over one folder at a time with various models and material.cs files. I was begining to think that around 400 textures, the editor would crash so I removed some folders and put in others. I came across some models that seem to always casue the crashes even if i changed the materials apllied to them, and some that only casue crashes after so many other textures are preseant. Anyway, somewhere between 300 and 400 materials cause issues in my project. My next step will probably be dropping all textures to a lower resolution jpeg file to see if it is a memory issue rather than bad files.

#6 I have been through a lot of this. I have actually had the same shapes (with their mats, of course) sometimes cause that crash and sometimes not! I have had it where I had it down to very few shapes and still the crash occurred. I have never been able to isolate one shape with its materials that will cause the crash every time, on every computer.

Still, ideally, a bad material should not cause a runtime error. Whatever it is with the materials that the C++ doesn't like, it still should be able to handle it, shouldn't it, or am I missing something?

Apparently, not too many people have this issue. It was never "confirmed" as a bug by the T3D QA dept.

I still have yet to check out Andy's idea, but at this point, anything is worth trying.

#7 everyone loves a puppy Steve!

- Anyone willing to share files that cause this issue, please contact me..I'll help track it down.
If you have files on an SVN already, even better. ;)

#8 After playing around the new standard T3d build I was able to create the same crash by adding some older shapes that I had decided I didn't need for my project. I have a mixture of models from arteria 3d and dexsoft until I am able to replace them with custome shapes made for my game. I don't know if either of them are known for models or textures related to torque crashing. If so, I may just need to look into making my own as placeholders for the time being.

#9 But shapes shouldn't have anything to do with the material editor crashing, just the textures. I also have a large variety of Arteria, Dexsoft and others. So many now that it's going to be really hard to pin down a specific texture. If anyone finds the answer, I'd love to hear. I'm still working on it as well.

#10 I also have large number of both and it is hard to pin down which one may cause the problems. My paln for this evening is to remove all of my arteria models and place all of my dexsoft in a project as dexsoft typically uses more textures. The most recent problems I have encountered seem to come from the arterria shapes when loading. For example, adding one of their castles into a project that already contains numerous shape files already tends to crash the engine even before going to the material editor.

#11 Yes, I have lots of old models, some from Arteria, none from Dexsoft. Already, on a cursory scan I have seen some oddly sized textures as Andy suggested looking for, but I have not had time to delete all those and see what happens.

Since I have none from Dexsoft, but all three of us have some from Arteria, I think your plan to start with those is a good one, Parker.

At least I learned one thing the hard way. Do not add external artwork "en masse". I must have added hundreds of arteria models/textures because at that time i did not have a DTS viewer, and so the only way to choose which ones to use was to load them into Torque.

Eb, thank you for your offer of help. I will get together a "file" that causes the problem, but I can't send you my entire file..it is like 1.7 gb. I spent a long time cutting stuff out, but because the problem doesn't happen every single time, just when I think I have gotten rid of the problems, I suddenly get the same error again!

When I can isolate it to a reasonably sized file, I will ask you where to send it. Give me a few days, please.

#12 I never confirmed it as a bug because it couldn't be reproduced by anyone other than the few people that have encountered it. I was able to confirm that the number of materials present is not the source of the issue.

If anyone is able to reliably reproduce this with 1.1 Beta 3 I'd love to take a look at it.

@Steve
When you're able to isolate it, try it on a clean copy of 1.1 Beta 3. I'm beginning to think this may be another issue where its a bug that was mistakenly ported in from a previous version by those that are seeing it.

#13 I can confirm it is still a issue, we don't even use the material editor. Its just better to do it by hand.

#14 I have a project that will consistently exhibit the above mentioned symptoms on my system who have a 256Mb video RAM system, but not my 512Mb video RAM system. I have not worked on a solution or cause, as I am still in the prototyping stage. {EDIT: I figured it was my older/weaker 'puters fault...}

My assumption, going with the details of this thread, is perhaps something to do with Material Editor and Video Ram? Anyone wish to collaborate this hypothesis?

#15 I get same problems in every T3D Version (alpha - 1.1beta3)
My solution is to use the filter function, so it dont needs to load too many textures at once. I for me, i think is something with the video ram !

#16 Started testing again. Initial results:

1. Definitely occurs in a clean Beta 3 install.

2. Eliminating all non power of 2 texture sizes in the data set, as Andy suggested, has no beneficial effect.

3. Reliably producing the error on different computers has proven to be very difficult. I am still having trouble isolating a data set of reasonable size which *always* causes the crash, on all computers. Hope to continue work today.

@Caylo: I have 2 computers and the material editor seems to perform better on the one with less Vram and older hardware. Also, I did at one time, in this post www.torquepowered.com/community/forums/viewthread/119131/1#comment-771135
post the call stack when the Torque C++ code bombs. That would seem to indicate it is not the video card, but a problem where Torque is not dealing with an exception properly. It was beyond my ability to go any further into the C++ code, sadly.

#17 The work I have done so far has lead me to clean out my material.cs files in search of multiple materials calling the same texture. I have noticed that several models from both dexsoft and arteria fail to stick to a strict naming convention. For example one dexsoft model may include a material called con_1d_smoothing that refrences texture con_1d.tga. A completely different model will include a texture called con_1d that refrences the same texture. Now I have 2 materials in my project that use the same texture. So, I spent the weekend opening each model in milkshape and renaming the materials and exporting them back to collada. I have also gone throughmy material files to fix the horrible naming associated with adding collada files, such as turning stairs1_con_1d_smoothing to simply con_1d_smoothing or con_1d.
The reason I had for doing all of this is not just the runtime error but a differnt texture problem that may or may not be related. While looking for reasons for the error, I discovered that adding a certain number of textures not only caused the material editor to crash, but it also cause thumbnail images to not populate when editing terrain textures in the terrain painter or simply selecting a material from a folder. While I am still crashing with all dexsoft models and textures in the material editor at around 370 +/- materials, I haven't had thumbnails fail to display or display solid black while pick textures from a folder after removing duplicates.

#18 try removing DTX3 dds files, or make them DTX5
I get the same crash, and keeps tracing to that format, with an out of memory crash
I remember reading a while ago that the engine doesnt like the format
how to tell if they are DTX3 or DTX5 at a glance, I dont know ;o(

#19 I have gone through just over 400 textures in my project. I have converted everything to either .jpg or .png when I need transparency. The material editor crashes pretty fast now when opening it. I have placed roughly 120 unique shapes into a test level(not making use of all materials called in my material.cs files) I am also using AFX so a portion of those materials are loaded for effects, but I don't have any running. Adding anymore unique objects(I'm guessing anything that calls a new texture that isnt already loaded in the mission) crashes the engine. I am left wondering if the project I have in mind is simply too complex for Torque 3D. If so, I would be interested in knowing how complex a game world I am able to create with the present engine. My first attempt at writting my game required loading one mission after another as quests were completed, going in and out of large buildings and such. But doing so always crashed the engine. My current test was to see if I could create one large game world instead.

By the way, I am writting and testing my project on a Dell XPS 435T/9000 with an Intel i7 920 @ 2.67GHz 4 Cores with 9 GB of ram. My current video card is a GeForce 240 with 1 gb of memory. I am running on Windows 7. I dont know if that helps anyone, but I don't believe the problem lies in my computer's lack of power.

#20 Do anyone know of a easy quick way to track video memory use?

I recall dong it in the past, but it is not the type of thing I have often found myself in need of, ergo have forgotten.