v.8 sluggish moving controls

[dunbarx]

v.6.7 moved a large collection of selected controls around the card quickly and responsively, whether via the mouse or by the arrow keys.

v.8.1.7 is painfully slow in either mode. A real pain. I don't suppose there is a reason for this, never mind a solution?

Craig Newman

[bogs]

When putting a control onto the card from the tools palette, do you see a momentary square shaped distortion in the color of the card around the control? Just curious, since I do occasionally.

I remember experiencing this stuff in XOJO, the thought process there was that it was somehow due to the graphics card / drivers of the people who complained about this. Lc isn't as slow as that was (least on my machine), but it sure seems headed that way.

However, if it isn't that, then I have no solution for you to try. On this machine, parts of 8.1.6 move infuriatingly slow, other parts not so much.

I just played around with moving about 8 objects, it didn't go noticeably slower than say, 7.x.x., so something got better since the last time I opened it.

[FourthWorld]

Is this just in the IDE or also in a standalone?

If the former, try closing the Project Browser.

[dunbarx]

@Bogs.

I am hoping not to be sorry I migrated to v.8. The first time I tried to move about 30 controls at once, I thought LC had crashed. Nothing seemed to happen. So I closed out and restarted. Same thing. Then I noticed that the "group" of selected objects nudged themselves one pixel. So I waited. After a while, and many nudges, LC was free again.

Just made a new stack with about 80 buttons. Selected them all and tried to drag the bunch around. LC seems to have frozen. Waited about five minutes.Dead. Is this something I should report?

@ Richard.

IDE. Project browser not open at all. Users are not going to do anything like this in the standalone.

Craig

[dunbarx]

Not reproducible. I just crashed LC again. Reopened, made a card with 600 buttons, and though sluggish, I can move the entire bunch around without issue. I then opened the project I am working on as well, and still OK

This has frozen a handful of times, though, and I am scared to death I cannot trust that my project, that I migrated from v.6 to v.8 yesterday, is not somehow endangered.

Craig

[bogs]

I'll assume Richard's question was for you, I spend very little time in 8. In the off chance it was directed at both of us, when I use any Lc version, I use the project browser as well. As far as I can tell in the earlier versions I use, this has never been an issue, is it considered an issue with 8 -> up?

@Craig -
I hope you will not be sorry as well, I hope just as fervently that you have backups of your projects just in case. As to whether or not it should be reported, I don't know. Certainly if there is no other bug reports, and if others chime in saying this is not the usual behavior, then I would report it as it is unexpected.

On the other side of that, I can't ever remember trying to move such large groups of controls at one time. The reference I made about XOJOs behavior was literally for one object, i.e. you took an object off the palette, placed it, and tried to move it. The placing took 2 or more seconds, moving it was as you described, very haltingly and inaccurate on placement as you had to wait for it to catch up a long time. Their take on it was that (apparently) the IDE was now going to be using a large amount of your graphics cards ability, and if the card was sub-par, or the drivers not up to snuff, oh well.

My belief is that a programming environment should never require that kind of resources be thrown at it to write any program, after all, the IDE is a tool, not a game. I should also clearly state that I do not know that this is whats causing your problem, but if you were moving large groups previously with no issue, and can not now do so, then *something* would not be kosher and, if the dev team is unaware of that behavior then they should be made aware of it.

After all, you can't fix something you don't know about, right?

[dunbarx]

Bogs.

When putting a control onto the card from the tools palette, do you see a momentary square shaped distortion in the color of the card around the control? Just curious, since I do occasionally.

Yes I do. And the rendering of grcs and fields seems to leave, after manually moving them, "ghost" objects left in the vicinity, that go away if I pull a large selection rectangle around the pile of distorted pixels. The selection rectangle erases those bits and pieces. These seem to be errant bitmap leftovers that have no real existence, though they surely are visible. This is all IDE stuff, as you mention, and likely will not appear when working the stack.

Very wary of this, though I am going forward. I am using 8.1.7 indy.

Craig

[dunbarx]

I also see sluggishness when scrolling in the script editor. Very jerky, annoying and disconcerting, since I am used to my old pace, and am constantly surprised that I am not moving like I expect.

That should not be so, right?

My current project contains cards with many controls. I now move them by moving just one of a certain type, and the using the alignment tools to set the others. I suppose I will get used to that.

I cannot wait to see what else is lurking...

We seem all to have accepted these little annoyances for the privilege of having v.8.

Craig

[capellan]

Just for curiosity, Could you replicate the same behavior
in standalones? The description of this behavior suggest
that LC IDE is causing this.

Al

[bogs]

Yes, that is what I was referring to. Those are all signs that the repaint of your screen isn't fast enough to keep up with the action on the screen, which should *almost* never be the case. I noticed it in earlier versions of 8.x, but never saw it in any version below that. Usually the only place you would see that would be in a very intense application, like a really high definition game played at really high resolutions.

I certainly don't expect to see it as I was saying, in a development tool, and I really wouldn't expect it to show up in a stand alone. I also don't know the why behind it in this case, so as before, we can only wait to hear others chime in on the subject.

We seem all to have accepted these little annoyances for the privilege of having v.8.

Well, I'm kinda lucky there, I only use it for forum testing

[jacque]

Will your users be moving controls or is this just a development issue? If dev only, try turning off messages when dragging huge numbers of controls. There's a lot going on behind the scenes for any drag operation.

[jacque]

I also see sluggishness when scrolling in the script editor. Very jerky, annoying and disconcerting, since I am used to my old pace, and am constantly surprised that I am not moving like I expect.

That should not be so, right?

I haven't seen this. Are there any background scripts running? Please say you don't have an idle handler.

Edit : How old is your Mac and more importantly, how much RAM is installed? Do you have a way to test on another machine? Bogs has a point. It sounds like your project is holding a lot in memory all at once and struggling to keep up. Besides your stacks, the IDE has grown considerably so there's a lot going on. The Mac may be paging to disk constantly.

[jmburnod]

Hi Craig,
Maybe I am lucky.
I can move 419 controls (btns, imgs and flds) using pointer tool on ide without issue
(LC 8.1.7, MacBookPro,2.4 GHz Intel Core i5, 4 Go 1333 MHz).
Jean-Marc

[capellan]

Does anyone knows? If this screen flickering behavior occurs only while dragging controls in the LC8 IDE,
Could be replicated in Livecode 8 standalones?

[dunbarx]

VWill your users be moving controls or is this just a development issue?

Dev only. I will try turning off messages. That is an interesting idea, though I go back and forth with that pile of controls during development all the time, tweaking stuff, so am likely to forget. And then LC will freeze.

As for the script editor, no idle handlers. Do you think I live in 1987?? And no bg scripts.

I have a 27" iMac. 3+ GHz, (not at the machine right now) and I think 8G of RAM. But will check. If it is only an issue of Ram, that is easily fixed, though I am not sure what the limit on my Mac is.

I had saved my latest build for 6.7, but have done much additional work fully in v8, and would hate to have to revert. Do I understand that one can save a v8 build backwards? I see options to go back to v7, and v5, but not v6. I never used v7 at all.

Craig