Can someone fix the forum?

heyvern · Post by **heyvern** » Thu Mar 27, 2008 9:43 pm

Basically Mike is the one I think who manages this forum. No one at SM can do anything here. It isn't part of the "purchase" or part of their job.

We have to wait for Mike I think, to figure out what's going on or tell us what's going on.

This is a shame. I was going to post over at content paradise... but sheesh... very little activity... and it feels dark and cold.

-vern

Post by **Lost Marble** » Fri Mar 28, 2008 1:45 am

We had a partial database corruption. I believe posting should be working again, although searching is a little weak still. I'm in the process of re-indexing all the posts to get searching back up to speed.

-Mike

synthsin75 · Post by **synthsin75** » Fri Mar 28, 2008 2:00 am

Thanks Mike. Yeah, I agree with Vern. The CP forum kinda sucks.

slice11217 · Post by **slice11217** » Fri Mar 28, 2008 2:07 am

Thanks, Mike. I was getting a little worried. First Smith Micro fumbles the upgrade, then the forum tanks... didn't look good.

heyvern · Post by **heyvern** » Fri Mar 28, 2008 3:34 am

Finally! Now I can post some tricks and tips on the new features!

I LOVE that new image texture effect... brilliant. It is cool cool cool. I may be imagining things but it seems to render faster than image layers.

Sorry for all the whining about the forum... some of us are AS forum addicts and we were going through withdrawal symptoms. I was getting the "shakes" and starting to hallucinate.

-vern

Post by **Lost Marble** » Fri Mar 28, 2008 5:58 am

heyvern wrote:I LOVE that new image texture effect... brilliant. It is cool cool cool. I may be imagining things but it seems to render faster than image layers.

It probably does render faster. Although the result is similar, it doesn't have to go through the masking step. Masking has to analyze the entire layer, while shape effects only need to process as many pixels as the shape occupies.

heyvern wrote:Sorry for all the whining about the forum... some of us are AS forum addicts and we were going through withdrawal symptoms. I was getting the "shakes" and starting to hallucinate.

No problem. Sorry about the delay - I had to give myself a crash course on database administration and SQL queries.

heyvern · Post by **heyvern** » Fri Mar 28, 2008 6:44 am

Lost Marble wrote: It probably does render faster. Although the result is similar, it doesn't have to go through the masking step. Masking has to analyze the entire layer, while shape effects only need to process as many pixels as the shape occupies.

Ha! I knew it. The test images I was using were pretty darn big. Full NTSC resolution, and I had 3 separate images with transparency (png) applied with multiple styles on one shape... those suckers were rendering really fast... very zippy.

-vern

mkelley · Post by **mkelley** » Fri Mar 28, 2008 11:58 am

One thing I noticed that's slower (but it doesn't bother me) is if you try rendering some point in the middle of a long animation it now takes a LONG time to "catch up" and actually start rendering where it needs to.

In the past I used to do this a lot to overcome layer ordering -- render a thousand or two frames and then switch the order at that point and render the rest (I'm rendering to bitmapped images I then use Premiere to combine). It was lightning fast at "picking up" where it left off, but now it spends quite a bit of time trying to find the right point.

I assume that's because it has to go through and keep track of the layer orders -- that's really the only significant thing that has changed in that regard. But the first time it happened I was very surprised (almost shut it down until I realized it was doing something, as the progress bar wasn't moving for a minute or two).

It's a small price to pay (sometimes I make a change late in the animation and rather than rerender all the frames only do the relevent parts, but as I'm usually needing to take a break at this point I don't mind walking away. Besides -- compared to my "normal" 3D rendering this is still lightning fast).

synthsin75 · Post by **synthsin75** » Sat Mar 29, 2008 2:34 pm

Well, now the forum is asking for a password.

The server www.lowrestv.com at www.lowrestv.com requires a username and password.

You can just hit cancel, but it's annoying.

Samb · Post by **Samb** » Sat Mar 29, 2008 2:47 pm

synthsin75 wrote:Well, now the forum is asking for a password.
The server www.lowrestv.com at www.lowrestv.com requires a username and password.
You can just hit cancel, but it's annoying.

seems like some user uses a protected webspace for image linking.
so everytime you open a forum-site,with that picture, you get that prompt.

Post by **Víctor Paredes** » Sat Mar 29, 2008 2:50 pm

lowrestv.com is not the heyvern's server?

synthsin75 · Post by **synthsin75** » Sat Mar 29, 2008 2:50 pm

Samb wrote:seems like some user uses a protected webspace for image linking.
so everytime you open a forum-site,with that picture, you get that prompt.

Damn them.

selgin wrote:lowrestv.com is not the heyvern's server?

Yeah, his avatar is missing now. You'd probably see it if you 'signed in'. So now everywhere Vern has posted does this. So basically the whole forum. That's funny. Finally Mike starts to get to forum back up and running and then fellow forum addict Vern adds to the grief.

No hard feelings Vern, I'm sure you'll correct this when you get the chance.

If it's not one thing, it's the otter!

heyvern · Post by **heyvern** » Sun Mar 30, 2008 12:27 am

It's fixed!

Sorry... my stupid server got messed up. It is fixed now.

My images were causing a popup for access to my website.

p.s. Another good reason for file uploads in the forum rather than links.

-vern