Crashing on Player View

[MNBlockHead]

With the recent update, RW is stable for editing again, which is a relief.

But I still encounter an issue that I've had for some time. Occasionally when I try to share something in player view, RW will crash.

I don't know that this is a bug, it may be a memory issue. Usually, at the start of my session, I share the World Map, which is a very large image file. I believe I received a size warning when I first added it as a picture snippet in the "Known World" topic.

Sometimes, when I share the map RW crashes. If I have to map open and share it, sometimes RW crashes.

It seems to be more common in the last two sessions when I've included a remote player using Google Hangouts.

Has anyone else encountered this? Are there any "best practices" regarding the player view in terms of how many items to share at one, image-size limitations, etc.?

[Farling]

Well you could go back and address the size warning issue by loading a smaller resolution file :-)

Splitting up one big map into multiple smaller regions would help keep detail for when you need it.

[Lexin]

I found when I was playing yesterday that RW crashed repeatedly when I'd got a lot of tabs open. I don't know if this was because of the number of tabs or for some other reason.

I sent crash reports - there should have been around five or six.

It did get a bit annoying towards the end of the session, but we persevered.

When my players had gone and I was doing a final update, I did find that it wouldn't even load and I thought I was going to have to reinstall, but I rebooted my computer and that seemed to sort it. Fingers crossed, because I do have more to put on over the next week or two, but I'm not playing again until January, so that should give sufficient time to sort it out.

[MNBlockHead]

@farling, well, I can throw the file up in an image viewing program if that file is that issue. At Lexin states, it could be the number of tabs. I just need to take the time and test while monitoring the memory usage on my laptop. It could be the image size, the number of tabs, plus the other software running or, more likely, a combination.

I though I'd start a thread on this in case others have experienced the issue and found ways to work around it.

[MNBlockHead]

So, I made some time to run some tests and I think it is due to the large image size (2.32 MB). I'll put a smaller resolution image in the topic, or display the world map in a separate image viewer when needed and hopefully that will make RW player view more stable in game.

[davidp]

Keep in mind that the disk size of an image may not have a bearing on memory usage. It is more tied to the resolution. When an image is loaded into memory, it has to be uncompressed and the memory usage will be simply 4 bytes * width * height (plus some overhead). So if the image is 4,096 x 4,096 in size, it will take up at least 64 MB of memory. And then when showing in player view, Realm Works needs to create a copy of that image with the mask applied. So it could easily be taking up more than 128 MB of memory. Have a few images like that and things can go downhill from there.

[MNBlockHead]

Image is 5395 x 3372, so . . . yeah . . . this is this problem. <sheepish grin>

I like throwing this image up on my large plasma display when the group is discussing the world at large, but it really isn't used for encounters. I can just have it in an image viewer so I can zoom and pan in its high-def glory and use a lower def version for pins.

[adzling]

I've encountered the same problem with high resolution images shared on player view.

Realmworks is just not built to handle it well.

[rob]

Realm Works is built to handle the standard types of things that we expected users to throw at it. We provide warnings to users when they choose to venture off into territory that is known to be potentially problematic. Dealing with high-resolution images is not typical for most users, nor is it something that will be advisable once web-based access enters the mix. So I don't think it's realistic to expect Realm Works to be designed to handle something that is an uncommon use case and well-established as a specialized domain for software.

[MNBlockHead]

This was the very first topic I created in RW, before I had any idea what I was doing. So this is definitely an issue caused by my *ignoring* a warning.