every couple of months...a gentle prod

You can use V2.2.2b1809.:)

It runs fine on vista :headbang:

best regards Roman

[QUOTE=Roman]
It runs fine on vista


Yes, It will install on Vista, but there are problems. There are several UI windows that can get lost because Vista handles windowing differently. A few common actions will leave the UI in the "Application Not Responding" state for a rather long time. And you'll find the UI has quite a few Vista-related font and redraw issues. Not to mention issues with Widgets and Wings dropping offline.

One real "gotcha" is that the "Shows" window sometimes has problems. I tell you this so you don't do a bunch of work on 3PC under Vista and then find yourself unable to save.

This is not the full list of issues, I just wanted to give you an idea of what to look out for.

Thanks Roman and Eric. :notworthy:

Dear Eric,

I just want to report that I didn't had any problems on Vista.
I used it for a backup situation with an Ipc.
Had also attached a prowing and a playwing and there were no problems. :)

Maybe I had luck :cool:

My Notebook is a Fujitsu Siemens Xi 2550 with running vista sp1 home pro.

Is there a timeline for a release version with vista enabled? or maybe a beta? :notworthy:

All the best Roman

Eric ( / Brad / Robbie):

Yours is the first Re: Windows I've seen on the facing side of this forum that details actual issues, rather than iterating the same, tired and trying, default-constructed official position. I thank you for that.

IAssert you’ve brought to attention discrepancies still present in the current mainline, as opposed to a purely historical account of the Great Freeze of 1809.

I’m sure you guys actually do spend a lot of time working, and I’d love to hear about it, but in the invested interest of your current offering, I’m urged to examine critically the migration paths you’re exploring.

[quote=ericthegeek]There are several UI windows that can get lost because Vista handles windowing differently
Can get or do get?

Lost?

I’ve seen "Shut Down" and "Failed to load object in array" forget to be topmost.

Conversely, I’ve seen more than a few "Please wait..."s that just might get "lost" one day if they don’t start obeying the boss.

Or at least they could not do it consistently. Merge Show > Begin > .tar.gz > Begin’s cannot be moved, but $_ > (wait) > red-X Cancel’s can?? There are plenty more.

By the Way, deleting temporary files should be done on a low-priority (yay Vista prioritized I/O!, but in this case) thread, there’s no excuse for it to be a modal operation, or to even have a msguebox (which can’t actually cancel) at all.


I know 3PC has had horrible history with regards to windowing on Windows.

Everything, from the seemingly-abandoned-in-place MID attempt towards RPC/IPC signaling (which is so ancient as to be registered ANSI), to hooking shell events as a means to handle activation issues when changing focus within the "same" application, to the need to coexist with Qt (3...)’s signal/slot scheme, all with Os:: messaging #ifdef’d win32 and otherwise, none of it has been pretty.

So i appreciate the complications involved in 3PC windowing.

One thing i don’t appreciate: taking an entire year to get the splash screen to not be topmost. Seriously, an entire year to get one hello-world bit set to zero.

Now windows are getting "lost", and it’s Vista’s fault? I just don’t buy it.

Isn't it more likely that someone’s constructors are behaving unpredictably, perhaps by initializing against runtime variable vs. defined constant styles?

Last time I checked, the most-consumed API in the entire world is, after 15+ years, not suddenly causing regression failures of global proportion.

[quote=ericthegeek]A few common actions will leave the UI in the "Application Not Responding" state for a rather long time.
Like dispatching MID_CHANGE_STATE, or WM_RBUTTONUP? Oh yeah.

I gotta call you out on this one, though; Windows has nothing to do with whether your message pump is designed to spin a thread and return, or to block until completion.

True, Vista is more pro-active than XP was about providing visual indication of top-level message loops that block for >5 seconds, but there’s nothing fundamentally different about the actual message queue, or the system’s response to an application that doesn’t Get/Peek/Wait/Send in a timely, UX-guidelines-conformant manner.


Accrediting this to Vista suggests quite clearly to me that your shop no longer has its win32 asset in place.

What’s being done to address that?

Who controls Controls now?

[quote=ericthegeek]And you'll find the UI has quite a few Vista-related font and redraw issues.
I’m not sure what redraw issues you’re referring to.

GDI/+ is an Etch A Sketch compared to Avalon. It hasn’t been touched, except to patch some overflows and a quickie Metro retrofit.

As for font issues, I have to assume you’re referring to the DPI Scaling facilities.

DPI Scaling is, of course, not specific to Windows Vista; it’s available in Windows XP (SP2) as well. High-density display technology is very rapidly decreasing in price and is only recently achieving wide consumer-level availability, so I do understand how new hardware with Vista preinstalled can lead to the mass misconception that high-density display support is a Vista-only feature, and hence a Vista-only compatibility issue.


Now, I don’t give the first flying pig whether your paint routines use a hard-coded font size or the system-supplied (variable, based on DPI) default font size. Making desktop and dialogue DPI aware would be a fantastic feature to include in the first officially-compatible version, but I find it Absolutely Unacceptable that a font size is considered a release-blocking defect.

What I find to be actually insulting about this is that an old Windows technology is, instead of being finally recognized and celebrated, being used as anything to discredit Vista and dissuade its use, while at the same time, these same DPI Scaling artifacts have been deemed fully suitable for use in official publications, and can be found both in the manual and in Brad’s Release Notes as far back as 1.4.0b1112 (or in Vista terms, the Feb06 CTP, about a year prior to release).
[quote=ericthegeek]Not to mention issues with Widgets and Wings dropping offline
I accept that this may happen.

I do, however, run x86 checked.

And I’ve never seen it. (Good job, guys; I appreciate your work.)

I’ll assume "dropping offline" is meant to imply that an error exists in the 3PC software, and not that any hardware devices are suddenly disappearing from an otherwise stable system.
[quote=ericthegeek]One real "gotcha" is that the "Shows" window sometimes has problems. I tell you this so you don't do a bunch of work on 3PC under Vista and then find yourself unable to save.
Oh the things I can make "Shows" do just by rolling up on a spring-loaded scroll wheel... (intuos 4d, cuz some of us actually do use tablets...)

I’ve noticed Type Merge never shows XYZ icons...

Don’t feel bad, video calibration windows sometimes have problems too...?

But back to reality:

I’ve made quite the habit of merging a new show onto a backup of itself to get everything serialized before starting any work. That’s a, what, roughly 100,000-file operations operation? Which works every time.

Is there anything that doesn’t get saved automatically? What specific portions of a showfile cannot be saved in any way other than "Shows", and would therefore be lost if and when "Shows" has a "problem"? On (on, not under) Vista?
[quote=ericthegeek]This is not the full list of issues, I just wanted to give you an idea of what to look out for.
I really do applaud that. I of course realize that I’ve just created the perfect example of why it’s best to stick to the canned text, but I also heavily value communicative efforts.

I’ll finish by suggesting that a more comprehensive, more refined, list of "what to look out for" be produced, accompanied by instructions on how to use an MSI table editor to alter a certain Launch Condition row, and provided for the users that have been left completely unable to run 3PC or are forced to use a build that’s now an entire year old.



In general, I'm done looking out for; It's time to look forward to.

This is not the best venue to discuss software internals. The important point is that there are behavioral differences between XP and Vista that effect how 3PC works, and can significantly degrade the user experience.

In my earlier post, I wanted to point out some specifics of what to look out for. You'd be shocked at the number of support calls we get that go something like this: "It works fine on Vista, why are you holding out on us? Oh, by the way, I can't shutdown properly so I have to kill the processes and it corrupted my patch database. Could you fix that?"

If you want to run on Vista, the installer hacks are well documented. We've made no attempt to hide or supress that information. In the end it's up to you, and how comfortable you are running your shows in an unsupported configuration.

where can i get a copy of V2.2.2b1809 ? because the current one on the High End site is newer and i cant even install it on my computer :(

Hamish,

I am not supporting that you use older software, but there is a software archive on the FPS site at:
www.flyingpig.com/support/hog3/downloads/archive/