designer 20 bug - also pro+

[Acorn]

I cannot turn the Volume all the way up to 11.

In Pro+, I get:

• Off-page - scroll zoom to 5000% and no further.
• On-page - 6400%.
• Up/Down for drop-down - 4000%.
• HotKeys - 1/2/3/4 all OK.
• Zoom to selection - I added a small Box and zoomed to it (Shift+Alt+Z) then halved its size and zoomed again - it breaks and the design is no long accessible.

I tried with all Lines hidden and in Outline mode, same problems.

A new design handled the small left-most brush, the large brush and a small Box but you could see the application rendering breaking as it rendered all part of the large brush, on- and off-screen.
So the breakdown seems to be the available RAM for rendering (I'm using 32GB). As it breaks, it tries again from the start for all the brushes so with three, nothing works so I suspect the housekeeping does not clear out the buffer and so it chokes.

If you try and use a Live Effect, it messages: "Failed to setup bitmap for rendering. The requested bitmap may be too big."
I thought if I could lock a simple Live Effect, the rendering would be performed the once so it was a simple bitmap.
It could be an internal Xara rendering matter.

For this file, I deleted all the Lines and left the Box, it still stalls.
I copied all the Lines to a new file and all works.

Acorn

[handrawn]

thanks for looking at it acorn

I copied all the Lines to a new file and all works

are you saying that if you copy everything in my file to a new file the issue goes away ?

[Acorn]

thanks for looking at it acorn
are you saying that if you copy everything in my file to a new file the issue goes away ?

Yup, seems to.

I wasn't going to waste all my prior investigations, was I?

Acorn (the verbose)

[handrawn]

hummm... ok, I only came across this in passing when checking out cache as per here: https://www.talkgraphics.com/showthr...662#post658662 I rarely use art brushes in xara these days

zooming in on art brush strokes crashes or freezes all my xara versions except 15.1 so I guess I need to check what registry changes I have made when I get a round tuit; my ver 15.1 is a humble bundle version should that make a difference...

[handrawn]

update - it does not happen with designer pro 18 on my laptop, which has different graphics: nvidia GeForce RTX 2060

the GeForce GTX 1070 on the desktop is over 6 years old, the oldest hardware component in the machine as it happens, been lots of changes to windows if not xara since then

to be sure I'd have to install ver19/20 on laptop, yet more round tuit....

thanks again for the help

[handrawn]

UPDATE:

upgraded my graphics card [to RTX 3060], which I was going to do before too long anyway; that in itself did not fix the issue - but it did go away, ie stopped happening, when I made the following changes in the registry:

Computer\HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Xara\XtremePro Perpetual x64\20\Options\Screen
IsRenderingRAMInfinte set to 0 [default is 1]
MaxRenderingRAM set to 3145728 [default is 786432]- this may not be necessary in practice...
SmartRenderingRAM set to 0 [default is 1]

after these changes the program ceased to crash without warning on zooming right in - sometimes got message about bitmap being too large to render, no surprise at this level as the artbrush texture is a bitmap, the program however was stable

it does mean that zoom screen redraw becomes visible on high render drawings, but that is acceptable if the alternative is to risk the program crashing out

I am still not sure of the cause of this, but the fact that it does not happen in my pro 15.1, but does in the later programs, might give someone in xara a clue

[handrawn]

FOOTNOTE:

it does still happen after a second or two, if I zoom right in to 25,000 ish; not always, sometimes I get the bitmap too big message

thinking a conflict with a background process maybe, as it is intermittent