FSX GMax Has Stopped Responding...

[Denny]

Hey y'all.
I've been having this problem ever since I installed GMax on my new PC in July. This is the third, and most powerful computer I've owned and run GMax on, and so far has given me the most trouble. There is no definitive pattern to when I get the 'Stopped responding' popup and GMax freezes and closes, but usually it doesn't take more than a minute or so. It may last a little longer when I'm zoomed far out, or I have viewpoint backgrounds hidden, but even then it will still eventually freeze. One of the quickest ways to get it to freeze is drawing a line, after two or three points, it's game over.

I found a cheap work around from Google, something about memory cache, I can't remember the phraseology, but basically I keep pressing Ctrl+S every second. As long as I keep saving, I can do whatever I want and GMax won't freeze up.

Now even this is haunting me. My saving method kinda throws a wrench in the whole backing my work concept. Basically, there was no recent backup, and after a thousand saves or so, and well into the project, GMax produced a corrupt save file and I lost a lot.

I need to find a more solid solution.

Computer specs are as follows. I build it myself, so not sure if that has anything to do with it.

Intel i7 3770
Nvidia GTX 650
16Gb DDR 2400
Windows 7 x64
1Gb 7200 RPM HD

 

[Tejal Bernardo]

the issue begun after updating the PC ? or you have problems with Gmax before ?

 

[Denny]

Began as soon as it was installed. I haven't had it work properly on this computer once.

 

[Tejal Bernardo]

Gmax should work, win7 64 here and no problem. only can say uninstall and reinstall again . check the paht to the SDK etc.
what display driver have you set in preferences settings/viewports :Heidi, openGl, direct 3d, usually it's direct3D. but try changing this

 

[hairyspin]

Humm... Do you have DirectX 9 installed? I'd expect this latest and most powerful rig has Win7 and therefore lacks DirectX 9. Get it from Microsoft

 

[Denny]

Yeah, switching up the display drivers was the first thing I tried. Same result, I'm leaving it in Direct3D for now, as that one gave me the least amount of troubles.

I'm rocking DirectX11. Will rolling back to an earlier version lead to potential conflicts with other programs down the road? The last computer I used Gmax on was a laptop. I'd wager it was running a later version of DirectX than 9, it was purchased July of 2011, and I usually accept prompts to upgrade those sorts of programs, again it worked fine on it.

I'm going to go ahead and re-install GMax, maybe that could do the trick. First I gotta back up what I do have, and we'll go from there.

 

[hairyspin]

DirectX 9 as linked above is compatible with Windows 7 and coexists with DX11 quite happily. It's also needed to run creaky old programs like FS9 and X.

 

[Deleted member 1281]

Post a screenshoit, maybe it can tell us something. Have you got any of the W7 'Aero' designs (or whatever it's called) on? If so, revert to classic.

 

[n4gix]

Denny, the DXn versions are completely separate and need to be installed and available to any program that needs them.

 

[Here for the Beer]

I'm a bit late to the party here, but FWIW my experience with this error was down to my bad practices in Gmax. I would allow the materials to stack up - having loads of them when just a few would do - this really slowed down my system and I'd get lockups. Reassigning materials so that everything used just one of three materials (landing lights, taxi lights and the aircraft material itself - a single material with one or two textures (lightmap and normal) on an AI plane, so this was easily do-able) made a vast difference to performance on my elderly development computer. If yours is state-of-the-art then you may notice this less than I did.

The other problem was leaving operator stacks open. Collapsing these the moment I was satisfied with their effects also helped performance on my geriatric computer.

Seems that many materials and many open operators eat memory for breakfast. Now, assuming that you are also doing many operations, there's also the possibility that Gmax's undo buffer is saving the state of all these open operators and materials in some way, which might make any memory hassles even worse unless these undo states are swapped out to disk.

I've no idea if these are anything that would cause you a problem, you may well be far more disciplined than I was when I started using Gmax!

If you do have loads of extraneous materials, the quickest way of cleaning things up is to select all the parts that should use a particular material, open the material navigator and assign the material you want, to all the selected bits, then save the file and exit. Restart Gmax and merge the saved file into a new scene. All the unused material slots are now gone and Gmax runs far better.

 

[hairyspin]

If you do have loads of extraneous materials, ...

Be aware that you can have different materials with the same name - or lots of copies of the same material with the same name. When this gets really out of hand, Gmax will crash except in wireframe mode. If the Material Navigator shows lots of materials with the same name, then you have that problem exactly. There should be one material per material name only, even though Gmax lets you do otherwise!

 

[Here for the Beer]

There should be one material per material name only, even though Gmax lets you do otherwise!

Yeah, I have noticed that and always thought it was odd, as though the numbering algorithm for auto-created materials was never actually written! Not sure whether it'd make any difference to the memory problem, though.

I had a conversation here with Fr Bill a while back where I was chided for not being careful about creating materials willy-nilly in my projects (I was dragging and dropping textures directly onto parts and getting the materials created for free). Although at the compilation stage it makes no difference (as Arno said later in that convo) because Gmax/MakeMDL apparently aggregates the identical materials into one drawcall - it makes one helluva difference when creating the model on a low-spec development machine like mine. Very easy to (G)max out the system resources and lose work. It was the spectre of losing work that drove me to get more discipline into that aspect. Luckily in AI I really have just three materials to worry about, landing lights, taxi lights, and everything else. I still sometimes create new materials just for convenience of speed, but then select everything except the lights and assign them to just one of the "everything else" materials. Then save/create new scene/merge old scene back into it and the project is clean again.

My old Falcon 2000 which just got a revamp for a new version ran like a dog when I reopened it; I'd started it nearly 2 years ago and was still very new to the whole Gmax thing having made my first model (Twinstar) just a few months previously. When I saw how "quickly" it opened, the first thing I did was get the broom out...