White Block of Failure.

[kcress]

Hello,


I use Autocad for my layouts. I export the drawings as DXFs. Then I open them in SheetCam. Most of the time this works very well. But sometimes what happens is the drawing shows up exactly as I expect then the SheetCam display changes to just a single white square about 1/16" x 1/16". This happens in a flash.

It's soo annoying to see this flash of what you expect only to be rewarded with this tiny useless white square. It seems to invite you to zoom it. But, you can't zoom or do anything else that directly relates to the display.

You can't close the job and then open another drawing that didn't demonstrate this behavior. I have to close SC then re-open it.

I've tried everything I can think of. Different dxf types. Different origins, material sizes, machine sizes. I'm stumped. On the jobs this happens on I'm toast, they can't be done.

XP SP2 1G RAM Matrox Millennium P650 Display Adapter

Ideas?

[Les Newell]

Does it only happen for specific drawings or can it happen at any time? If it happens for specific drawings can you send me one to experiment with. This could be a display driver issue. Try disabling graphics acceleration http://faq.holdemmanager.com/questions/ ... celeration Start with the slider all the way to the left. If that fixes the problem, move the slider one click to the right and try again. You want to try to keep as much acceleration as possible.

[kcress]

Hi Les.

It was specific DXFs and they would always fail - reliably.

After reading your response - thank you - I messed with the acceleration one step at a time. When I got to the second to last one from the slowest. It loaded the DXF correctly, every time. Unfortunately SCam also started failing to initialize reliably. On opening SC it would never actually fill in SC's drawing window. I would still be looking at the desktop in that frame. This was on about 35% of SC startups.

At this point I swapped in a new, unused identical Matrox P650. This changed nothing.

So I pulled that out and replaced it with a Radeon 9600 I had laying around.

SheetCam now initializes every time correctly and has no issues with the DXF. (at full acceleration)

Must have been funky Matrox drivers. Good riddance.

Problem solved as far as I'm concerned.
I could send you the dxf if you want it but it's probably not worth your effort as that DXF loaded just fine if I used SC on my Dell laptop. I suspect it would load fine on whatever you're using too.

Thanks again.

[Les Newell]

I'll run some tests to see if SheetCam is doing anything strange with OpenGl. It could be that it is doing something unusual that is making the Radeon driver fall over.