After activating EmberGen with the newly-bought license key it became unstable. It’s version 0.5.5.0 which was installed a few days ago and activated just a few hours ago. Don’t know how this can be linked to the activation of the software but the days before it’s been working in trial mode just fine.
Crashes have been occurring at various occasions: during playback, while AFK while the simulation is paused, during export of an image sequence, when changing a parameter of capture preview background color in capture node and animating the camera parameter or when clicking on nodes in graph editor.
E.g. while exporting images it seemingly crashes by displaying an error message with error code 0x80010108 but it continues to export images in the background. In other cases it’s also possible to continue working with the software when the error message has shown up. After a while a second or sometimes even third error message pops up and then it either freezes or disappears completely - sometimes when clicking OK, sometimes by itself.
So far it’s been impossible for us to find specific steps to reproduce the crashes reliably.
Our system specs: Windows 7 Pro x64 SP1, GeForce GTX 1080 (driver version 451.48).
Here’s the most recent file from EmberGen’s log folder:
https://owncloud.celluloid-vfx.com/index.php/s/y2VMFcHlhYh3eH5
(link will expire July, 31st).
Cheers,
Holger
Hey, thanks for the post. We’ll look into this and see what we can find. We’re doing a stability pass on 0.5.5.0 as for whatever reason this new build did not play well on most machines unfortunately.
Hi Holger!
I’m currently investigating this. These “errors” are quite curious, as they are likely exceptions thrown by external programs that are somehow caught in EmberGen, at least that seem to be the case given that it’s not actually crashing when these popups appear.
From your log file I’m seeing two error codes pop up:
0x800401fd: CO_E_OBJNOTCONNECTED, Object is not connected to server
0x80010108: RPC_E_DISCONNECTED, The object invoked has disconnected from its clients.
and I’m not sure where these are coming from yet.
Are you using any unusual setup on your machine?
Are you connecting to the machine remotely?
Are you accessing files in an unusual location, like on a network device?
Does this error code pop up on any preset?
I am assuming the random crashes are actually separate from this strange error code that doesn’t actually crash, is this the case?
If you have the chance, could you try and run the following build and see if it crashes any less? I’m currently working on improving some stability issues that’s became quite apparent with 0.5.5.0, and perhaps some of the changes I’ve made this far might help with some of the issues you’re seeing.
You can find the executable here: https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/366731224116363264/736663703524474940/embergen.exe
The .exe is not signed, so note that some antivirus softwares might have a problem with it because of that. You can put this one into the 0.5.5.0 EmberGenBeta install folder, but just make sure to not replace any of the existing files.
Hi Morten,
thanks for the reply!
I’ll have to talk to my colleague who’s using EmberGen right now to answer all of the questions fully. But here’s what i can tell you so far:
Are you using any unusual setup on your machine?
Not that i can tell. I know thath there are probably other programs running in the background, e.g. Houdini. But that shouldn’t really be an issue, should it? At least it never was so far…
Are you connecting to the machine remotely?
Nope.
Are you accessing files in an unusual location, like on a network device?
This can absolutely be since we have our work files on our file server which Windows connects to using the SMB protocol. The needed locations are mapped as network drives. But that’s not really unusual, or?
Does this error code pop up on any preset?
I’ll have to ask my colleague to answer this.
I am assuming the random crashes are actually separate from this strange error code that doesn’t actually crash, is this the case?
I’ll double-check with my colleague. But from what he told me and what i wrote in my initial post it indeed seems that the actual crash is happening later than the error code appearing.
I will have him try that build you linked to tomorrow and let you know whether this makes any difference.
Cheers,
Holger
Hi Morten,
quick update: my colleague has been using the build that you sent the whole day. The errors do still pop up but there hasn’t been a complete crash so far.
We could test the build on another system if that can be helpful for you. Is it possible to transfer the license to another machine for that purpose?
Cheers,
Holger
If you use the licensing manager to deactivate the key you can move it to another machine. We also pushed a hot fix yesterday to the live build which may be more stable.
Hi guys,
my colleage has been working with the most recent build all day and hasn’t experienced the crashes from before. The popup window with the error code 0x80010108 is still showing up more or less regularly but the software didn’t crash. He said he can make it usually crash by trying to save the scene via “Save as…” and just by selecting a folder before even getting a chance to actually save. This is on one of our network shares (mounted in Windows as mapped network drives). When restarting he can usually use the recovery file which EmberGen offers to load.
Cheers,
Holger
Quick update:
my colleague (still working on the same machine) got a new error when trying to record the Viewport with “Start Recording”. At the moment he created a new folder (on a network mapped drive) a popup window with error code 0xc0000005 showed up. Here’s the log file from today:
https://owncloud.celluloid-vfx.com/index.php/s/3X87ufo9YVB01U2
Cheers,
Holger
Thank you for the update.
Unfortunately I can’t find anything relevant in the log file this time around. Just to try and rule out if these crashes are due to using a network mapped drive, would it be possible to try and avoid using it for a time when using EmberGen? In any case, we will have to do some additional testing for network mapped drive it seems, as this hasn’t been that high on our priority list just yet. If it’s trying to access a file that’s no longer open or reachable for some reason that could explain the issue here.
I could manually add error code 0x80010108 to an ignore list for now. If you could try this test build to see if it does not display this error code anymore that would be great: https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/366731224116363264/738582345384460419/embergen.exe
Thanks!
Hi Morten,
sorry for the late reply.
Unfortunately, the error message windows did not disappear. It’s still the same codes with 0x80010108 being the one that shows up in most cases.
What’s really interesting is that when running Embergen on the same machine but with a different user account the error messages don’t show up. But it’s also back to trial mode since the registration/license seems to be bound to the account it was installed with. So it really seems that the error messages are somehow related to the license - in whatever way that may be 
Cheers,
Holger
Thanks. This is quite curious then.
Does it also happen in the latest version, 0.5.5.2? That particular code should be skipped in the latest released version, but if that doesn’t happen then that’s very strange.
And, as long as you activate the license on the new user it starts occuring again?
Hi Morten,
we haven’t tried activating the license for a different user account. But we can definitely do so and let you know whether it will make that instance show the errors as well. Should we try that before upgrading to 0.5.5.2?
Cheers,
Holger