Thoughts on planting crashes?

[AJ Allen]

I'm interested to know what people think about the crashes that can occur frequently, when doing planting. I've read as much as I can about this, and from what I can tell, it might related to corrupted 2D objects that have been imported into planting sets.

So, Im wondering.... suppose I was to take all the original TGA's plus some of my own ones, and maybe some that are imported from other courses (making sure no duplications), delete the planting sets in APCD and then create a brand new one with copies of the TGAs that I re-saved, would that get rid of the crashing problem?

Im just trying to figure out what is the best way to get a good quality planting set that is not prone to crashing every time I use the scroll wheel to look at what I just planted!

Cheers, AJ

[Lez Marwick]

IMO, using custom objects is the safest way to avoid crashes. My advice for your current problem is - if you have used 2001 objects, block select any objects you have mass planted, such as grasses, bushes or common trees and swap them out for any 2003 or custom one. (remember to update currently selected object as you swap them) If you have only used 2003 objects then swap them out for any custom ones. Save the course as a test course and see if the crashing is removed or improved in APCD with the test course. If this works you could then extract the tga's from your original course, add them as custom objects and do the same thing again, replacing the originals with the custom ones. This may solve your problem and also answer whether it's worth creating custom objects for all the objects you want to use.

[AJ Allen]

What exactly do you mean by "custom objects"? Do you mean trees bushes etc that I have created myself, rather than ones that come with APCD?
If so, then that is sort of what I was thinking. So (for example) perhaps there might be 20 bushes that I like that come with APCD. If I grab the TGA's for those from APCD, then delete all the bushes from APCD I could resave those 20 as new bushes, which I'm guessing would then reset them. If I did that with all the trees and stuff that I wanted, I'm thinking that might be the answer. Have a copy of APCD that contains ONLY trees bushes grasses and so on that I have saved into the program, even if they were originally part of the APCD planting sets. Not entirely sure that is correct or not.
Cheers, AJ

[Lez Marwick]

Yes, by custom objects I mean new 2D objects added to the library, created from TGA's either made or extracted from existing courses. Swapping out 2001 objects from a course that was crashing was how we originally discovered that 2001 objects could be the cause of the crashes.
Before you start creating a new library though, I would recommend that you follow my test instructions as there are many bugs that can creep into a course, and the cause of the crashes in your case may be unconnected to the planting. If it is the planting though then this method will solve the problem.

[Adelade]

I dont think there is a way to fully protect against the 2D object crashes, unless you plant in modesty, restart APCD now and then, be careful where you aim APCD's 3D views (try not to view too many objects at once), maybe use not-too-high-quality-images, and have hardware that is particularly resilient. Im not saying those all should be done, but can be good to keep in mind because then you're prepared when the riskiest occasions are and can save/restart more frequently during those times. I only use custom objects and know that they're not corrupted (in the usual sense at least), and I still get crashes on occasion, but yes you can probably minimize the risk significantly by being careful which objects to use.

[AJ Allen]

I doubt if I know where all the TGA's in my APCD have come from. Some will be standard default, some imported from various courses, some I have made myself, some will be 2003 and some 2001 objects. So trying to sort out what's what would be pretty much impossible. I think I'm better off getting rid of everything then resaving and putting them into a planting set. A lot of work, but surely a good non-corrupt set would pay for itself in less time wasted with redoing work that gets lost by crashes.

[Lez Marwick]

I doubt if I know where all the TGA's in my APCD have come from. Some will be standard default, some imported from various courses, some I have made myself, some will be 2003 and some 2001 objects. So trying to sort out what's what would be pretty much impossible.

It's very easy to see if an object is from 2001. You simply choose the 2001 planting set (V1_Default.PST) and then click the object on your course. If the picture in the APCD object box changes to the object then it's part of that planting set. Alternatively, if you don't want to change planting sets and you have both 2001 and 2003 combined then just look at the category name after clicking on the object - the categories for 2001 are labelled singly as bush, flower, grass etc. while the 2003 are labelled as plurals - bushes, flowers, grasses etc.