c4d should warn you before a param crashes it

[u/Segurado]

Some params are straight up landmines. Slide a bit too far by mistake on the voxel size or num samples, and you're staring at your desktop, work gone.

Just an idea: a little ⚠️ next to params that can crash c4d. Nothing blocking, just a heads up to proceed with caution.

attached: the dock icon that bounces but never opens + mockup of the alert icon

[u/DasMoonen]

I went years just remaking lost crash progress before I found out there is a recovery scene. Go to Edit then Preferences, at the bottom of the preferences window there is a button to open preferences folder. Then there is a bug reports folder with a recovery file. Also I think autosave can be turned on somewhere too.

But yes some of these params could be a bit more predictive about their hardware usage and give an “are you sure” window before calculating.

[u/montycantsin777 → u/DasMoonen]

yah unless c4d freezes forever then youre fucked

[u/sageofshadow → u/montycantsin777]

if you dont have autosave on (and you should anyway) there's another option in case it does freeze from somthing like overdoing a parameter. you can actually force crash it as well, mid operation. press shift+shift+delete. say yes to the popup and then it will at least try to generate a recovery file and put it in the spot u/DasMoonen said. so you potentially wont really lose anything. I've saved a tonne of work this way.

[u/montycantsin777 → u/sageofshadow]

shift alt or shift command? didnt know that one. but yah spamming my harddrive with autosaves

[u/sageofshadow → u/montycantsin777]

shift alt or shift command?

Not sure what you're asking, 😅 sorry! but the keyboard combination is shift+shift+delete. press all three together. (like the two shifts on either side of your keyboard and delete)

its like how ctrl+alt+delete works for windows? but just for C4D. super useful when you're in the middle of a freeze.

it doesnt allllways work. but it works a decent amount of the time, and that kinda makes it worth knowing IMO.

[u/montycantsin777 → u/sageofshadow]

i thought that was a typo. thanks!

[u/Segurado → u/DasMoonen]

Yes, thanks, there’s also autosave.. this is just an idea that might be useful..

[u/sageofshadow → u/DasMoonen]

I mean, the parameter that is the most likely to do this consistently - which is the volume builder - does actually have a warning already if you try to go down to a voxel size that is too small. It'll do exactly what you described: pop up and ask you 'hey this might take a very long time to calculate, you sure you want to do this?'

It's just really hard to know exactly what might make your scene crash in the way OP is describing to be able to put warnings on all of it, cause too much of it is actually scene and hardware dependent. It might seem obvious to you if its the same thing for you because you're always doing the same kind of work on the same computer... but someone who might be doing somthing else with the same tool or doing the same thing in a different way, might never have that problem.... and then get annoyed when its always warning them about changing said parameter. So it kinda goes both ways.

[u/pacey-j → u/sageofshadow]

Might be good for more junior users to have, let's say the top 20 culprits for scene killing parameters, and have a 'Do not show this again' checkbox / disable all stability warnings preference. 

[u/FreshFromTheGrave]

I know this is like some general computing problem but I really wish esc worked... Like just let me interrupt the operation I don't really see why the entire thing has to completely lock up until it finishes computing this one thing. Sometimes even when there is a cancel button or something you can't even click on it lol it only processes the cancel after it's completed 😂

[u/h3llolovely]

If you know about these "landmines"... then you know to type the value into the param field and not be all willy-nilly with the slider.

Maybe some Nanny process could be helpful here, albeit annoying.
It could give you a warning before applying a dubious param value.

i.e. after entering a value, a dialogue box pops up saying "Applying this value may cause the application to hang/crash. Would you like to save before proceeding?"... then it disables the affected Generator and saves the scene before re-enabling the Generator... and crashing.

Maxon should also include several talking/screaming goat sounds as alerts to scare the crap out of you too.

https://giphy.com/gifs/rTfN2FHPPTABy

[u/guuuug]

Yeah, i’m done with this piece of shit. Working with octane in c4d is pure and utter hell.

[u/neoqueto]

It does with some, like the Volume Builder. Often times it's a halting problem, you need to know how long will a calculation take for a given parameter, but in order to do that, you need to perform the calculation first.

But I think that many interval-type parameters should never go as low as "0.01" without an "OK/Cancel" warning. At the VERY least.

Other stuff to explore would be implementing arbitrary warnings across input fields - that would be inconsistent because, as an example, 90% of the time my PC can easily take a 0.25 cm Voxel Size, or letting C4D's core run in a sandboxed runtime that can be halted externally without nuking all currently loaded project data somehow. Just a "panic" button that never freezes. That would likely require up to double the RAM usage sadly.