Hi there, I am new to Synfig but I really like the way it works and the tools it has.
I am sad to start my forum experience with a complaint but… Is there anyone who can really work with Synfig on a P4 HT running Windows?
I tried to search the forum without any success. Maybe there are more tricks to improve the experience I should be aware of, except the CPU affinity (will there be a fix for this anyway?).
Right now, Synfig crashed three times in the last five minutes: I only tried to animate a frame of a 2 seconds animation of a door opening.
Hi harlock1975,
It is hard to help you without having your specific architecture available.
P4 Hyper threading was it? If it is single core the set affinity option gives you nothing.
Maybe you can help us and yourself by trying to reproduce the crash with a single recipe. Do you remember to be doing something particular during the crash?
Also, please confirm the version you have installed and from where did you obtain it. I guess 0.61.09 from the official sourceforge site. Confirm that you installed the correct GTK and GTKmm libraries versions.
Also you can load some of the provided examples with the program and start doing tests with it, before doing your own animation.
For example, the eye.sif file (the great eye animation from Voira Studios) is a “heavy” one that would be good for testing.
Open it, try to drag the time cursor. Enable the animation mode and modify the animation, save as and load the file again.
Hyper threading provides multiple “virtual cores” that are (mostly) indistinguishable from multiple physical cores from a runtime perspective. So, setting this option might help, but it remains a crude and incomplete workaround.
The real problem are programming bugs in either the synfig or thirdparty code, and the Synfig community unfortunately doesn’t have the developers with a combination of time, inclination, knowledge, and a PC development environment.
Yup - I’m running on a P4, with HT (but restricting Synfig to a single thread) under Windows XP.
There are some things that will make Synfig fall over pretty quickly, like stack up too many changes before the screen’s had a chance to redraw, or jump around the timeline…
But for the most part it’s fairly stable for me.
Save often.
In answer to your question, I’m planning on getting a faster PC in a couple of weeks, and I’m hoping I can go digging to see if I can figure out why some of these crashes are happening. Fixing them will be another task entirely, and I rely on smarter coders than me to do that…
Thanks to everyone! @Genete, I actually forgot to add details to clear out things. I am using the latest version 0.69.61, downloaded from Sourceforge, on a P4 HT (that is practically a dual core, so I use the affinity trick). I have problems in both the sample animations (especially Prologue) and this animation of mine, but unfortunately I do not have a step-by-step procedure to reproduce the crash. I do not know if it matters, but I am using a notebook with an old Geforce FX Go 5600.
Right now I understand I have to be patient and wait for Synfig to complete each operation before doing anything, and this seems to mitigate the problem.
However, as I said, this is a great sw, I hope you find enough resources to solve these issues!