Andrew Cocker wrote:
> 
> Ratboy, that's really nice. I especially like the horse..it looks like it's
> made of chalk. It's a shame you lost it. I'd have liked to see the spotlights
> lighting up a dusty media in the ceiling, and the floor AA'd. Why do you think
> you suffered a crash? Was it a POV thing, or a Windows thing, do you think?
> You have 128Mb of RAM, so surely it can't have been lack of memory.
> 
> --
> Andy

 Ratboy responds with,

   Funny you should mention the media. I had arranged the lights as they were
 with media in mind. I wanted a misty colored glow encircling the room with
 the bright statue and the string of water like beads shrouding the statue.
 It would have been a neat effect. This was rendered at 800x600 with an AA
 of 0.3. While a lot of the details are still fresh in my mind I might retry
 it but I doubt it will ever be the same as seen now. Might be better who
 knows. So many things to try so little life span to do it in.

   I have had problems with Pov in the past when hitting memory use in excess
 of 100 - 200 megs. My swap file right after the crash was over 250 megs and
 add in the physical ram you have a quite a bit to manage. For some reason
 somebody in the system gets confused as to who has control over the
 operation and the swap file goes into a permanent read/write mode. The only
 way to stop is to shut down with the windows task manager. First time it's
 ever taken out a 1.2 meg file with it in the process.

   I suspect the data loss comes from the way the Pov editor keeps the file
 in a memory buffer instead of taking care of everything by reading and
 writing to disk. When I had to shut down the program because of a memory
 problem, as it shut down it tried to write back to the file to reflect the
 current state. Unfortunately the current state was corrupt and it wrote a
 0 byte file. If it relied upon the hard drive instead of the memory buffer
 it would be a much safer process. This is all of course personal observations
 based on conjecture because I haven't a real clue how memory management is
 taken care of at a system/program level and have to guess a lot.


-- 
Ken Tyler

mailto://tylereng@pacbell.net

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