Digital Workshop

Hi Ad,

K-lite is royal pain as it over writes the default codecs used by Opus under XP for playing MPG1 files and causes everything to crash as you describe. If you've not already got, ch4eck out gspot as it helps track down video problems.

Also if you're feed up of the mouldy 1GB check out VRAM Suite.

Mack

Hi,
The machines which gave problems were mostly (less then a year old) standard Dell machines with XP-sp3 in standalone and networkconfigurations. When I reported the problem to our IT-department though, they could not find the cause (but for K-Lite). On all machines in their office (mostly Dell) the pub worked frustratingly allright.

K-Lite is indeed a pain, because it won't uninstall properly and if you use some tool to really remove it, chances are that mp3 or other mediafiles won't play anymore, because it changes all kind of settings.

Ad

ps. I'll check out Vram suite

Hi Paul,

I've had a good play with the program and it's an excellent idea, but I think that it's an extremely ambitious project to undertake without scripting. Nothing jumps out as a specific cause, but then there are just too many actions and objects to look at them in detail or isolate them for debugging.

I crashed the program about half a dozen times on various screens and caused various other issues mostly by triggering the mouse over audio events.

Personally, it's difficult to control a program using just Opus actions and my opinion would be that this is behind the problem with the program. Behaving like a child, if you move the mouse back and forth over the speaking letters you're triggering dozens of events as well as slurring the sounds together and this did seem to led to problems such as crashing, missing graphics and muddled sounds. On the matching card game, if you click two or more cards from the same set , then you have effectively broken that activity as the program doesn't know what to do.

It's little things like that, that although they might not break every time can over time and use cause publications to fail if you don't lock down activities.

Regards,

Mack

Thanks very much for your time looking at this. The matching card game I thought I had 'locked down' so will amend this.

Could you possibly let me know on which screens you managed to 'crash' the program, or get missing graphics, as I'm unable to replicate this on any of 8 PC's in the office?

I've never used scripting, but are you saying that if I'd written similar screens with scripting it'd be less likely to crash? If so, is there a 'quick way' for someone with no experience of scripting to get up to speed with it - a course or similar for example?

Many thanks[/quote]

Hi Paul,

Not a problem - it's always interesting to see people's ideas in code. And given the governments u-turn on dyslexia and the general mess with frequently changing schemes - good & affordable phonics programs need to be available to schools.

Both the alphabet based screen with the mouse over letter sounds crashed. The letter C on one of these was missing at the start of an activity. The two games where the sounds or words are missing sometimes had one less card - I wasn't sure whether there was a page somewhere that didn't have full set or whether this was caused by a bug.

I should point out that these could easily be the result of a different problem due to extreme testing and also unless a computer is restarted after Opus has crashed then the problem can continue when restarting a publication.

As I said, because of the complexity of the actions and number of objects it's difficult to pin point an issue especially because you have what appear to be similar pages for each each set to give the appearance of a random range. My only advice on debugging this would be to keep pushing it, until you can get it to break and then strip each section back and testing until you find an underlying problem.

With regards to scripting, no it won't necessary stop crashing but IMHO it gives greater control over the management and development of complex projects - although, I must point out, that yours is probably the most comprehensive action based publication I've seen. And probably most importantly, scripting makes it a lot easier to debug and change if written well.

Learning material wise, there are no specific Opus Script books, but it's almost identical to JavaScript 1.2 so that's a good place to start for understanding the language and key concepts. The thing to remember is that JS is designed to control web pages and examples don't always relate. You are also much better off picking up an old book rather than a new one as the syntax is more likely to conform.

If you follow the forum, then you may have heard some people, including myself, talk about OOP - this can be a confusing concept, but is important for developing larger more manageable projects and IMHO extremely useful when understanding Opus. It's based on the idea of programming using Objects. There are some posts regarding this but I've yet to come across any decent JS OOP books.

I hope you find a suitable solution. If not give me a shout as I'm actually in Chester during the summer holidays and we'll see what we can sort out.

Regards,

Mack

Many thanks again for your detailed account.

The screens where letters (such as C) or cards are missing are all deliberate programming within the software. If pupils make many mistakes, then the number of options are reduced to give them more chance of being successful. And the C disappears if the answer is K, to stop them clicking a letter that makes the correct sound, and being told it is wrong.

I've not encountered the alphabet pages causing crashes before, so will have to look into this in more detail. Out of interest, what PC are you using that is exhibiting these problems, as it could be worthmy while acquiring a similar machine?

Explains a few things

Mostly tested on XP SP3 Quad 3.2ghz with 4gb. Crashed both in Opus preview and published EXE that you sent.

Also tried on XP SP2 (clean machine) with 256mb and also crashed.

Mack

Same on Vista Duo's and Quad, crashes during preview and published exe.

I don't think it's an environment problem; it looks like a sound sequencing problem, although the large number of actions used makes it difficult to pin the problem down.

One of the advantages with using script objects in a project like this is you will have less places to look for problems when they do occur.
Also a single change in a script could be made to work globally inside the pub; makes it much easier to debug any issues you might have.

Paul

I was going to take a look, but I can't get that link to work.

hi

Link is now working

Paul

Got it now.

I ran the install, but that seems to need a CD. Can I get the published version to go? Maybe I need to write it to a CD.

Hi

It just checks that there's a CD called 'Booster Phonics' in the CD drive - sorry! I can upload an exe without the CD name check if it's easier - let me know - either here, or email paul@wishtrac.co.uk

Thanks

Dave,

If your testing in a VPC, have a virtual drive or simply want to burn a disc - here's the ISO I used to test the program. It's just a shell but works for testing purposes.

http://sandbox.interaktiv.co.uk/Booster.iso

Mack

Thanks Mack. I've got it going, but it isn't crashing for me.

I think the large number of preloaded sounds are the most likely thing to be causing the problem.

Thanks for looking Dave.

I've a number of clients who can get the software working fine on one type of machines, but exhibit repeated crashing on another type of machine. I've not got detailed specs of the different systems, so have now written to all clients asking for their specific feedback in this area.

As you can see by design of activities, I need a large number of possible sounds ready to be played. Is there a way to do this without pre-loading them, and what (if any) effects will this have on (a) speed to play sounds - as it needs to be virtually instantaneous and (b) the resilience of the program?