Planting mystery

[Lez Marwick]

Because it's such a rare bug, the cause of this one may never be found with so few people designing these days. It might need a combination of things to occur before it happens, and with each designer working in different ways, and with different APCD settings in use, it may be impossible to pin down a cause. I still think the safest way to avoid most problems is to save and quit APCD regularly to avoid the memory leak causing problems and file corruption.

@Colin Jones - I doubt if the normal forest tool is the cause because that has been used by a large percentage of designers over many years. Most of my planting on the 20+ courses I worked on used the normal forest planting tool extensively and I never had the problem on later courses.

[Colin Jones]

Recently found this 2020 post by accident - which I didn't see on my original searches. So just for the record, cannot be certain about what causes this bug and a complete replant seems to be the only solution so far, but Derreck Summers had the (simple) fix all along..................


Sometime ago I was given a course to look at, the problem was that down one
side of the fairway nothing could be planted, and the plot was completly bare.
I made a copy of the course, box selected the entire plot and deleted using the
red cross. So far so good, no plants were in sight but I still could not plant any
objects.
When I checked the course details it said that there was still hundreds of 2D
objects planted, even though nothing showed up on the course. I decided to
try a different method of deleting. Again I box selected the entire course and
this time I clicked on Select at the top and then All and deleted. This time the
course details said that the course was clear of any 2D objects and from then
on I had no problem planting

[dorse72]

Colin did you try this? what happened if so

[Colin Jones]

It worked for me - the simple trick is to use Select All then delete the objects, not to manually select your 2D objects before deleting them. Go figure. So you still lose your planting but at least everything else is in tact.

[dorse72]

but what causes it, did you figure it out? and can you forest plant again? hate to say it but I'm experiencing it now, only able to plant 1 by 1, slow and tedious. going to save as a another backup and try to forest plant again, have 1000s of plants around shoreline to put in.

[Colin Jones]

Hey mate - sorry to hear that, it must be pissing you off. I feel your pain!

I only have theories. And so the rules I now follow are:

- Don't forrest plant into more than one shape at a time;
- As you forrest plant, watch the shape carefully. If, as can happen, the plants do not display - then immediately undo that planting;
- Don't save with 2D objects displayed;

After you save following some planting, exit and then re-load the CRZ. Check that the section is still planted OK (box-select all your 2D objects in top view - you'll soon know if there are missing areas).

Once you have a section planted and it saves and displays fine, then that planting is good forever in my view. In my experience, you won't suddenly suddenly begin to have problems in a shape - unless you then do some mass deletions, additions, etc to it. So once its OK - leave it alone if you can!

From now on, I will complete all the forrest planting on my course as a priority when planting, i.e. before planting any other 2D Objects. Just so, that if I run into trouble with this again and have to delete all the 2D objects, then it will only be the mass plants affected.

Keep an eye on how many 2D objects you have (via the checklist). If you are deleting objects but the number of 2D objects is says you have planted is not decreasing, then you have a problem.

[Adelade]

I cant say whether the reason I've never run into this issue is because I've simply been lucky, or because Im doing something right, or because some random thing I do is different, or because of something special about my APCD or object library or planting sets, or whatever reason - so Im certainly not trying to tell anyone to do or not do anything, just because something has worked for me doesnt mean it will work for everyone.

However, for science sake I do want to say that I've personally always done forest planting in several shapes at the same time without issues. On many courses I did for 20 or so shapes at once across the whole course (and using the delete forest planting function for all objects and shapes too). What I tend to do, which may or may not be part of my success in not encountering this issue, is to test out the forest planting on a completely different test CRZ and write down my planting "formulas", and only after that I proceed to forest plant on my actual course, doing so swiftly without fussing with anything else in between, including not panning around or changing views (I tend to have the view to only show a small part of the course which is easy for APCD to load, where I can still see whether objects get added or not), with many saves and occasional restarts of APCD at regular intervals, until all forest planting is fully complete. Then I might make edits here and there afterwards, but any forest planting I try to get done in quick and clean sessions.

About only saving with 2D objects not showing, this is something that I remember having done here and there, at least in the perspective view. I dont know if I always followed this "rule" rigorously, Im thinking I probably havent, but it is something I tried to do here and there to be on some kind of extra safe side, so we could perhaps add a tiny bit more probability to this theory.

[sagevanni]

APCD is an OLD program in a very basic form. By that I mean it is missing some commands we now days and in the past find very standard i.e. copy/paste.
Having said that we all have modern machines even if some are old, probably none are as old as APCD.
What works for one person will not necessarily work for another.

It's hit or miss on a lot of what will work and not work on a consistent basis.
I still get crashes for no apparent reason. Just BAM and I'm screwed.

My 1 cent worth of wisdom............................

Sage.......

[dorse72]

Without going into alot of detail, I can verify this remedy works, I selected all the 2Ds, de-selected the 2Ds I wanted to keep, deleted the forest grass plantings I just did, then redid carefully with just 4 grasses, making sure they showed up and went slowly. checked all around, turned off 2Ds, saved, saved as a test playtest, V&S, then tested in Links, and they are all there, no strange squares w missing plants. so back on track, though took acouple days to get this sorted out, takes forever to get a course out omg.

heres a screenshot of the strange areas - this area was planted entirely in one shape. the lake has about 4 shapes to plant the shoreline - 3 big lakes here surrounding the course, and all the shorelines have mass grasses covering them, just looks wrong to leave them bare.

[dorse72]

screenshots, those are the strange areas leftover from the 'forest planting' so weird they are in straight lines, almost like its a viewpoint or something, no clue. Collin and I have tried to think of everything, like Jon W did previously, been yrs since I talked to him but I could reach out to him i guess.