Graphics - Boilded or Scrambled? Scrambled in TPDesigns case!

colinhasted

Hi All,
I'm doing a rather large touchpanel project with a heap of graphics on TPDesign v3.3.0 Build 674. My colleagues and I have seen a return of the graphics scrambling bug.

Everything looks ok onscreen until loaded to the panel, at which point the graphics have been randomly juggled around, text only boxes have pictures of speakers welded to them for example. Looking again at the TPDesign file, all looks ok. Close and reopen and then the jiggled items show up permanently. Also cutting and re-pasting a broken button then displays the broken graphic.

Is this seriously still a bug? Or has my version (and my colleagues infact) version of TP4 been corrupted. More importantly, when TPDesign decides it is going to f**k up all your hard work. Is there a way to get it back? At the moment we are having to use incremental backups as it is not entirely obvious that anything is wrong straight away.

Help!

a_riot42

I learned a long time ago not to trust TPD and to commit touch panels to the repository often to be able to recover from disasters like the one you describe. As far as I know there is no way to recover a corrupted file. I have seen panel files scramble images, but then fix themselves though. You should have a backup file as well, that TPD keeps somewhere but I don't recall exactly where.. Perhaps someone else knows.
Paul

justin.r.beattie@gmail

colinhasted wrote: »

Hi All,
I'm doing a rather large touchpanel project with a heap of graphics on TPDesign v3.3.0 Build 674. My colleagues and I have seen a return of the graphics scrambling bug.

Everything looks ok onscreen until loaded to the panel, at which point the graphics have been randomly juggled around, text only boxes have pictures of speakers welded to them for example. Looking again at the TPDesign file, all looks ok. Close and reopen and then the jiggled items show up permanently. Also cutting and re-pasting a broken button then displays the broken graphic.

Is this seriously still a bug? Or has my version (and my colleagues infact) version of TP4 been corrupted. More importantly, when TPDesign decides it is going to f**k up all your hard work. Is there a way to get it back? At the moment we are having to use incremental backups as it is not entirely obvious that anything is wrong straight away.

Help!

Hi there,

I have had similar issues across a large project also.

- graphics scrambling or disappearing
- page flips disappearing
- pop-up pages disappearing
- pop-up pages reappearing after being deleted
- pop up/pages commands not being able to be called from code or control a device (resolved by copying the pop-up page out of the panel file and back in)
- panel file corrupting as it is being downloaded meaning I can no longer download or retrieve the file. (resolved by downloading via USB drive after taking panel out of wall)
- subpage buttons turning to a fill colour after download even though they are either set to transparent or a bitmap
- endless and random crashing of TPD4 on multiple PC’s especially when in resource manager
- slow performance of TPD4 (AMX has a tech note for dividing large images into strips, is that really a solution?)
- levels in the touch panel not being displayed (resolved by re-downloading)

This is just a few of many more stability issues.
I haven’t been able to recover a corrupted file either. When your TP4 file corrupts all you can do is start the tedious process of copying all of the good pages (one by one ) from the corrupted file to a new file.

TP5 also needs to include basic functionality like :

- scaling bitmaps inside buttons (people have been asking for this functionality on this forum since 2004 )
- copying and pasting more than one popup/pages at once

Overall all of the above issues paired with the many faulty X-series panel that have shown up and the clients very specific requirements for interface design makes for an excruciatingly tedious and painful rollout across a large project .

We can only hope that TPD5 is going to be a complete overhaul because continuing to kludge and adapt a decade old program to todays high resolutions and touch panels is clearly not working.
It would be great to have a response from AMX in regards to these issues and the much needed improvement in the stability and functionality of TP Design & X-series.

John Nagy

BACKUPS:
If you haven't changed the path or turned it off, there's a backup file from every revision saved in:

C:\Users\[YOUR USER]\AppData\Roaming\TPDesign4\BackupFiles

I turn it off in PREFERENCES because I get many gigabytes of files there as I work. Filling my fast but smallish SSD.

I have seen the scramble happen too, and found no way to fix it once it starts. Going back to before the mess is the only way... that or copying all the pages out to a new project, painful in the extreme since you can only copy one at a time.

colinhasted

Sorry to bring back an old topic but I'm working on a very large old iPAD panel which gets tinkered and added to on a yearly basis. After my graphics have been scrambled twice in two days I rang tech support to see if they had got anywhere with this issue. After all, every programmer I know has reported it! Seems they have never heard of it....... Heard that story before..... I politely explained that I'm getting bug fixes from a rival brand with a seven day turn around and that some other issues I'd pointed out haven't been fixed in 7 years! <rant rant rant>

Anyway... Long shot but.... Has anyone found anything in particular that makes a project scramble the graphics? Is there anything to avoid doing to improve the matter such as short graphic file names? Any work-arounds that people know about other than taking a shed load of backups?

The panel which mashes regularly is around 50mb with 2000 graphic elements and about 200 pages. As you can imagine, when adding to the project it is a mammoth task to go through and ensure that nothing has been broken by tp4 each time you see a hiccup.

It makes me sad....

a_riot42

Incremental backups are the only defense I know of. If anyone has come up with a magic solution, I've not heard. You could try converting it to a different panel type and then changing it back to iPad to see if that resolves the issue, as it recreates the database.
Paul

colinhasted

Using a different control system also works :-) I've logged it again (as they have no recollection of it), we'll see what AMX come back with.