> But then MoI crashed XP entirely to a black screen reboot,

I'd definitely recommend updating your video drivers... The full XP crash is a sign that something is going wrong at the video driver level. It's still possible that MoI is sending bad data to the video card or something, but I'm somewhat more suspicious of the driver itself right now. If you update your driver to the latest version you can take that part out of the equation.

I seem to remember that there was a problem at one point with nVidia and dual-proc machines.

- Michael

>I'd definitely recommend updating your video drivers...

Man, I'm gettin' tired of hearing that. No offense (and I am NOT trying to be belligerent, here, and I sure don't want to alienate you, because this app shows real promise and I'm here to help), but that's what everbody says as the first default response; coders, users, you name it. "Update your video drivers." It's become a throwaway cliche anymore. Continually trying out new video drivers gets to be a pain after a short while and certainly tends to break other apps that are working. One of these boxes has a Quadro and the drivers I'm using are the latest for it. 91.85 is what NT is using on their new Quadros and it works great for all of my other OGL apps. Once I find a good set of drivers that work across the board for my mainstream apps, it will take a lot to get me to take a flyer and experiment.

>The full XP crash is a sign that something is going wrong at the video driver level.

Might be *a* sign, but not the only one. Note that this only happens when the (crash) dialog shows, not when MoI slows the machine to a crawl. This time, I had to kill MoI while sitting at the (crash) dialog after hitting the Close button and waiting 10 minutes for it to do something before doing so. That's when it crashed to black screen. The dialog box had focus.

>It's still possible that MoI is sending bad data to the video card or something, but I'm somewhat more suspicious of the driver itself right now. If you update your driver to the latest version you can take that part out of the equation.

Can't buy that absolute conclusion. The latest video drivers can't fix all things all of the time and some definitely go in the other direction. Rhino2 opens and translates the file just fine with these drivers, as do a couple of other apps, so I'm more suspicous of MoI. Again, I don't want to make you angry by any means but this hasn't been my experience and I'd like to help find a solution.

Something caused a really *nice* wireframe with all edges and curves displayed, and I mean REALLY nice! Zooming was smooth at larger factors, translation and tumbling was responsive. Perhaps I have found the wireframe mode that you are looking for. Creating a new cylinder sure looked weird; circle with a vertical line at tangent with another circle above tangent to it but, hey, if a wireframe can be developed and a complex model will open and be worked on, I'm all for it 'cuz it was nice. ...If I only could figure out what triggered it.

Hi Speed, I can understand that you don't like hearing "update your drivers" all the time, but the fact is that buggy video drivers are a constant problem.

When I worked at Microsoft, I learned that the single biggest cause of Blue Screens of Death were buggy video drivers.

Normally it isn't feasible for a regular "user-mode" program like MoI to crash the entire operating system. For the whole operating system to crash requires a driver to do something bad since they run at a privileged level and can access protected kernel memory that a regular user-mode program cannot.

Your full system crash is a very big indicator that something is going wrong at the driver level. It may be due to MoI poking the driver in some improper way that it doesn't expect, or it may be due to bugs in the driver itself.


> Can't buy that absolute conclusion.

Certainly nothing is absolute in debugging. Until you know the problem, you don't know it...

But the clues are very strong that you've got a driver problem, particularly because this is an unusual problem, you are the first person to describe these particular symptoms. If I was constantly getting reports like this (or even just more than one), I would be less likely to blame the driver at first.

One of the best approaches for successfully debugging is to rule out different problems to narrow down the issue. That's why updating your drivers would be helpful because it would help to either validate that it was a driver issue, or rule out that it was a driver issue. As it stands right now it is completely possible that it is a driver issue.

If you can send me the data, or at least try it on a different machine with a different video card that would also be helpful. If the same problem can be reproduced under 2 different hardware environments, that really helps to narrow it down to a MoI issue instead of a driver issue. Crossing things off the list of potential problems is progress in debugging!


> The latest video drivers can't fix all things all of the time and
> some definitely go in the other direction.

Well, here's the thing - if you don't think that buggy drivers are the problem, then why are you worried about updating to new drivers that might be buggy? I mean this itself is a sign that you know that drivers have problems in them!

I've never seen a driver update that is permanent and irrevocable, you should be able to roll back to your current driver (or just re-install the older one) if the newest ones cause new problems.


> Rhino2 opens and translates the file just fine with these drivers, as do a couple
> of other apps, so I'm more suspicous of MoI.

If I remember right, Rhino2 in wireframe mode does not by default use hardware acceleration, I think it draws your wireframe with my old rendering code which avoids talking to the video driver (one thing that is nice about that is that it avoids driver issues, but it does not leverage the power of modern video cards though). And even if you have it set to use hardware acceleration, it and probably your other apps are using the OpenGL system which is a completely different driver system from the Direct3D one that MoI uses...


Don't get me wrong, I really appreciate your bug report and your good description of the symptoms.... But I'm not sure what you expect for me to do about it right now. It is very difficult for me to make progress without any narrowing down or any way to reproduce the problem over here, or even any additional similar reports to look for common factors..

Did you find out if you can send me the data or not?

What about crash dump files (moi_report1.zip), if you can find those and e-mail them to me it would be something I could look at.

- Michael

>Certainly nothing is absolute in debugging. Until you know the problem, you don't know it...

>But the clues are very strong that you've got a driver problem, particularly because this is an unusual problem, you are the first person to describe these particular symptoms. If I was constantly getting reports like this (or even just more than one), I would be less likely to blame the driver at first.

This is certainly not the first time that I have been the first to have discovered something. Infact, I have been increasingly retiscent to even report stuff I find until someone else happens upon it. Trouble is, not a lot gets done to fix esoteric problems.

>One of the best approaches for successfully debugging is to rule out different problems to narrow down the issue. That's why updating your drivers would be helpful because it would help to either validate that it was a driver issue, or rule out that it was a driver issue. As it stands right now it is completely possible that it is a driver issue.

>If you can send me the data, or at least try it on a different machine with a different video card that would also be helpful. If the same problem can be reproduced under 2 different hardware environments, that really helps to narrow it down to a MoI issue instead of a driver issue. Crossing things off the list of potential problems is progress in debugging!

Perhaps it might help to read my bios so that you can understand the level that I come from when examining scientific data:

http://imperialearth.com/bio.html

Then perhaps we can talk on even ground. Talking down to me isn't appreciated.

>and probably your other apps are using the OpenGL system which is a completely different driver system from the Direct3D one that MoI uses...

Now we're getting down to it. Yes, it is. Sorry for the noise and bother.

Hi Speed, sorry if it felt like that. I wasn't trying to talk down to you, just trying to give a complete outline of what the situation is and what different ways could possibly work to make progress on solving the problem.

In general there is no way for me to know the skill level or experience of any particular person that I'm talking to in this online manner, so I will often times err more on the side of trying to give very complete information.

- Michael