Does Isadora hate copying & pasting of actors /scenes?

[lemond]

Dear all,

in my recent project, but also in one or two other projects with Izzy that I have worked on in the last months, I see a strange behavior that I can't explain. In the most recent case, I did a sample scene with a movie player, a projector, a keyboard watcher and a jump actor, because playing movies and sound is what I'm doing mostly in Isadora. No fancy stuff, just a few aiffs and movs in PAL resolution. Then I duplicated that scene a couple of times and modified each scene to fit my needs, remove some actors, adding some, etc.  Starting in scene, let's say 7, the keyboard watcher does not jump +1 but  to absolute scene 1, even though "relative" is selected. replacing the actor with a "fresh" one also did not help. This behavior went on about 10 to 20 scenes, until it worked fine again. The "solution" was to change the key in the keyboard watcher to something different than the space key. With the space key, it would instantly jump to the first scene, no matter if i restart isadora, the whole computer, change actors, scenes, etc. I suspect this comes from wild copying/pasting of scenes and groups of actors, because I had similar problems in older projects where I pasted a custom user actor which had all the key commands (backward, forward, jump to the end/beginning) - at one point, it just would not go forward. Back then, nothing but erasing and rebuilding whole scenes helped me getting out of this.. 

My actual project is working now, but izzy still crashes randomly..

Did anyone have a similar behaviour or ideas, how to stop this? It's quite embarassing, sitting in a rehearsal,having to tell the directors I can't play back a simple movie when it is due, because my software jumps anywhere else..

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

all the best!

Daniel

[mark]

Dear Daniel,

I have never heard of any bugs like this, related to copying and pasting scenes, nor with the Jump actor not jumping where it was supposed to go. So I feel this is highly unlikely, though I won't say it's impossible.

Did you by any chance have more than one Keyboard Watcher + Jump actor in a scene? This can be especially problematic if both are set to the "watch" for the same key, and if the Jump actors point to different places. If you have a patch that demonstrates the problem, send it to me at mark [atta] troikatronix [dotta] com. I'll examine it. If you don't have a patch that exhibits this behavior right now, but encounter the situation again, immediately do a save and then make a duplicate of the file so you can send it to me.

Regarding any crashes, follow the instructions here and I'll investigate.

Also, for what it's worth, the new pre-release is seeming to solve a lot of random crashing issues. See here: http://troikatronix.com/download/isadora-pre-releases/

Best Wishes,

Mark

Best Wishes,

Mark

[lemond]

Just for the record, I sent Mark the patches and he found the problem! It wasn't Izzy's fault but mine. I did not take into account the order of execution in Isadora. I caused the problem by activating a background scene that had a jump actor in it which would cause Isadora to jump to the next scene which is my "Init" scene. This background scene and its actors were executed before the keyboard watcher/jump combination in the actual scene, which is why it did not jump forward, but backwards, because the background scene is the first scene in the project...

So if you experience weird behaviour like this, always keep in Mind that Izzy tries to execute a scene from top to bottom... 

Thanks Mark for the explanation!

D.

[mark]

Dear All,

Regarding lemond's comment

_So if you experience weird behaviour like this, always keep in Mind that Izzy tries to execute a scene from top to bottom..._

This is one factor. But the real root of the problem was his secondary scene had a Keyboard Watcher and a Jump actor -- and didn't realize that these actors were attempting to Jump at the same time as the Jump actors in his main scene.

Best Wishes,

Mark