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TP4 slow when working on MXT panels

I'm experiencing a weird issue with TP4. I'm using version 3.3.674. My computer is a Core2 Duo T9600 @ 2.80GHz with 4.00GB Ram, 64 bit Windows 7.

Whenever I'm working with an MXT panel, and I try to move items around on the screen, the program gets incredibly laggy. This seems to happen more often on the main screen than if I'm editing a popup page, but it's not exclusive to the main screen. Editing properties of an item still works nice and fast, but if I'm moving a button around, either via drag and drop or by using the arrow keys, it's really slow. This extends to trying to select multiple buttons. If I hold down shift and click on four buttons in order, it takes several seconds to show that I have selected them, and often misses at least one of the buttons I intended to select.

I pulled up windows task manager to watch what was happening while I worked. If I'm using the properties window to edit the properties of a button, TP4's CPU usage is between 00 and 07%. The moment I start trying to work on the panel image itself, CPU usage spikes to between 25 and 52%. As soon as I stop messing around on the image, it goes back down to the very low usage again.

I'm not talking about a slight delay, It's to the point where it might take 20 seconds to move an image across the page, and if I go to far, undo is pretty painfully slow as well.

Anyone else run into this? I don't seem to have issues like this anywhere else on my computer, it's pretty snappy, just in this one area.

Comments

  • JeffJeff Posts: 374
    Additional Info: I haven't tested extensively but this only seems to happen on MXT panels, and it doesn't seem to matter if I'm using subpages or not. The example I'm working on right now is an MXT-1000 file, with no subpages at all in the design.
  • DHawthorneDHawthorne Posts: 4,584
    How big are your images? I've seen similar performance hits when working with large resolution background images on other panels, and the MX series has an even higher resolution the panels I saw it on. TPD4 seems to have difficulty rendering large images, whether due to the rendering engine or the memory cache, I couldn't say.
  • JeffJeff Posts: 374
    Holy Crap.

    I'm using the stock template that's been fairly heavily edited, but I did replace the background image. Now that you mention it, I couldn't figure out why the stock template had the background image broken up into 4 images. My background image was 1280x800 and was 547k. Seriously, a 547k background png was causing TPDesign to choke. I selected the button and deleted the bitmap on it (leaving the button in place), and all of a sudden everything was snappy.

    Seriously, this is a pretty big bug in my mind. What's the best method to get AMX to respond to it?
  • This was encountered by the designer of the template, which is why the background was divided into 4 parts.

    It's not so much of a bug as an unfortunate side-effect of the larger panel resolutions that utilize a large button as the background image. After each edit, TPDesign4 will determine which buttons on the page are affected by the edit so it can redraw the view optimally. If a large button is being used as the background, then this button intersects with each and every every other button on the page which then results in everything being redrawn for any given editing operation.

    The solution was to ribbon the background into sections, which restricts the intersections to that particular area and thus the number of buttons that will need to be redrawn as the result of a given modification to a button.
  • JeffJeff Posts: 374
    Does this happen only with buttons or with page backgrounds too? i.e., If I redraw the template so that the background image is actually the bitmap for the page itself and not a standalone button, would the problem be fixed?
  • I’ve been having the same issue too, is this issue documented anywhere?
    Jeff wrote: »
    Does this happen only with buttons or with page backgrounds too? i.e., If I redraw the template so that the background image is actually the bitmap for the page itself and not a standalone button, would the problem be fixed?

    From the experimenting I have done It seems TPD4 still runs slowly if you set the full-sized background image as the bitmap for the page itself.
    It's not so much of a bug as an unfortunate side-effect of

    TPD4 being over a decade old ? :(
  • AuserAuser Posts: 506
    I’ve been having the same issue too, is this issue documented anywhere?

    +1. Me too.
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