"Chris Cason" <new### [at] deletethispovrayorg> wrote in message
news:40cff7b3@news.povray.org...
> > in any event, do you have a recommendation on tracing what happens that
> > causes the crash? or should I just make a step by step documentation of
how
> > to reproduce the crash and submit a formal bug report?
>
> the easiest way for us to fix it is if you can put a reproducable scene
file
> (as small as physically possible considering it has a mesh in it) into a
zip

Well it seems that the size of the mesh might be key in reproducing the
problem. i cannot reproduce it with a mesh of a single face forming a
triangle. nor a 6 faced box mesh, just a large mesh containing thousands (i
think something like 4500) vertices. and I think the problem comes from
povray trying to print out the parse error message in the "Messages" tab. it
tries to print out the vertices for this mesh, and might be running out of
memory somehow? i don't know how, i have severeal hundred megabytes disk
space for virtual memory and 128M of physical memory. i only speculate that
it's a memory thing because when it tries to print out a few lines of the
beginning of the error message (before it tries to print out the vertice
list) it gets really slow, then eventually fails when it tries to print the
vertice list.

in 3.5, the error messages are much more succint and it doesn't try to
display the list of vertices. i tried turning off all error messages in 3.6
by adding -GA in the toolbar command line options area but it still tried
printing the error and subsequently crashed. Is -GA not what I want if the
goal is to turn off the message? I have not tried redirecting the messages
to a file yet, maybe sometime this weekend. My attention span faded and I
went back to working on a real scene.

so i hesitate to post a substantially large mesh (honestly i don't know how
big this mesh file is in bytes) especially since it might not be
sufficiently large depending on how much memory you have, or anything like
that. basically here is a shell of a pov file indicating what I do, camera
and lights ommited i've changed them enough to know they don't cause or
prevent a crash:



#declare t1 = texture {pigment {rgb 1}}
#declare some_big_mesh = mesh2 {
 vertex_vectors {...}
 normal_vectors {...}
 texture_list {
//  1,                  // this is what works
  0,                    // this, a parse error, causes a crash.
  texture {t1}
 }
 face_indices {...} /* needs to be of the form: face_indices
{number_of_faces, <a, b, c>, texture_index, ... }*/
 normal_indices {...}
}

object {some_big_mesh}


Again, this is a bug that occurs on parsing of an incorrect file. so it may
not be too important on a priority list.

Computer specs:
WinME
AMD Mobile Duron 800MHz
128MB RAM

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