Crash and lost half a show

[freadZdead]

Hi Claude,

Just came out of a rather tight rock/n/roll type tech, and lost half of my show during a crash (while working on an effect, if that interests you, I can elaborate more in a different thread).

My point is - yes, I should have saved more often, but whenever it is a manual process and the program not 100% stable, there is always a chance in highly stressful situations to forget to save for a while...

Would it be possible to offer the OPTION to turn autosave on? I could see various models; i.e. timed (every minute), event driven (i.e. every time you record (over) a cue)... and ideally that saving would not affect the undo/redo stack, so that you can still do whatever you need to (un-/re-)do.

Thanks for considering!

[freadZdead]

PS, another option could be to always save (kinda like google docs) whenever there is a change made, but into a shadow file (like i.e. sketchup), so that you still keep the snapshot/milestone you actively saved last, and that the backup only gets used when the program crashes - as an option next to using the last actively saved snapshot/milestone?

[admin]

Not quite the same as auto-save. But, if you have a folder called LXConsoleSnapshots in your Documents folder, every time you save, LXConsole will also create a time stamped copy of the file in this folder.

If you can e-mail a copy of the crash report, it would be good to fix whatever caused the crash. Please don't post the crash report as that really is not meaningful to others searching the forum for information.

[freadZdead]

Hi Claude,

Does LXConsole automatically save the crash reports in a log somewhere? In the heat of the moment, I did not think to save it manually.

The step that lead to the error was:

Creating an effect on an intelligent light, based on Color Wheel-RGB, Then duplicating the channel 3 times (potentially assigning things), then deleting 3 of them again; on the last delete (in theory leaving the one, original channel), it crashed.

Cheers,

F

[freadZdead]

PS, the snapshot is a great feature, though like you say, not quite fixing the problem described... could it be modified to save whenever a change is made (with a setting to use it like that or to use it the way it currently is)?

[admin]

Auto-save of the kind that is used by office applications may not be a good idea for show control software. There's always a chance that the auto save will cause a delay if it runs at a critical time that overlaps when a cue is triggered.

Although it is easy enough to add a control to enable/disable auto save, forgetting to turn it off is at least--if not more--likely than forgetting to save in the first place.

So, the best plan for automatically saving as cues are being created may be to save a temporary file every time a cue is recorded. Generally this will not be at a time when is critical and a slight delay won't matter. If you record an update during a running performance, you will be able to judge if it has the potential to interrupt the flow of the show. (Or, provided you remember, you can shut off the temporary file before you start the run)

If something happens and the app quits while you are cuing, you'll have the tmp file in the LXConsoleSnapshots folder to recover all but any work that happened after the time that the last cue was recorded.

This strategy is available as a preference in the latest build of LXConsole, 5.2.3 (11830.1).

[freadZdead]

Amazing, thank you! Will sleep better at night now

Cheers,

Freddy