I have been experiencing issues with Quest which seem to occur when using the program for extended peroids of time.

The first problem, is failure to produce a working EXE file. It will go through the export process without any errors but when I try and open the resulting file, I get the following error/message box:

TAG
BAD DEC LZMA
[ Ok ]

Followed by:

Error
Can't find project type
[ Ok ]

This happens quite frequently. I generally have to reboot my machine and open it fresh to get it to export correctly - sometimes this does not solve the problem.

Which leads to another problem, which is corrupted files. Recently I've been getting an error with 3DObject Data, which is vague and difficult to find. I have had to either revert to back-ups or search every CGR in the project seperately to find the culprit.

These errors seem to occur only after I've been running the program for awhile. Generally when I experience the Bad EXE file, a single reboot will fix the problem... this was not the case today, unfortunately. It has become somewhat of a concern in our development process. Are there known memory issues? Or does something else cause these problems that I can possibly take steps to prevent?

I am running with:
GeForce 7600
Win. XP sp2
Intel Core2 - 6400
2.75 GB RAM

[EXE, .EXE, corrupted EXE, Corrupted 3DObjectData]

I run various q3d version for days on a row with big projects, and other people do the same.
So Im afraid its more a hardware/config/windows issue then a q3d issue.

But is it only when you work on a specific project, or it can happen with any project? (if so how big is the project in the memory?)

This kind of errors can occur when Quest3D runs out of memory while publishing your file. This happens whenever Quest3D needs more than about 1.5 GB. Especially the 7z compression that's being done on publish takes a lot of memory. You can see if the compression is the problem by trying to publish without compression (i.e. turn it off in the preferences). Another option is to split any big cgr files into smaller cgr files.

Are you by any chance running Quest3D 4.1.2? In that case this behaviour can be caused by problems with the animazoo tracker dll's. See the [4.1.2] Errors running published project (exe and viewer) for details on how to fix that, or better...upgrade to 4.2.3 (not 4.2.2!).

Thanks for the help...

When I'm loading the file up, the memory usage is only at about 212megs. I am using 4.2.3.

I have a scene that is about 900,000 polys. Would this have any impact?

We've tried this on other computers, with the same EXE errors, on a fresh reboot.

The part that concerns me is the corruption on the 3DObjectData or CGR corruption in general (where we get the message saying Quest Cannot Load a File because it has been locked/is not a valid CGR).
These corruptions appear to happen without any warning. Saving a file will give no indication of a problem, but upon rebooting and reloading the error presents itself. This is a big problem because there is no way to tell how far back (how much work I've lost) I will need to go to find a backed-up version.

Since the problem with the EXE appears to be resolved by a fresh reboot it is more of an annoyance than a big concern. They appear to happen at the same time, so I assumed they were related.

Thanks again for any ideas/help.

[1. publishing EXE:]

Problems could still be related, but not 100% sure though. Good to hear that you are using 4.2.3! That narrows it down.

1. publishing EXE:
This could be the problem with Quest3D needing more than 1.5 GB of memory during the publishing process. How many memory your CGR takes when loaded is not the issue here. What happens when you turn off compression? If publishing always works without compression, then you know for sure that the publishing problem is caused by memory problems. Could you check this? Does this fix your EXE problems. Do you still get corrupt CGR's?

2. corrupt files:
Hard to say what causes this, but could this perhaps be caused by a failure in the publishing process or saving process as well, whenever it runs out of memory? Anyone from Act3D that can comment on what would hypothetically happen to the original CGR's if Quest3D runs out of memory during saving or publishing?

The above is supposing that 1 (publishing problems) causes 2 (the CGR corruption).  If the above doesn't solve your problems, then maybe it's the other way around: the CGR corruption is somehow occurring and causing the problems with your EXE. This is the case that Peter was assuming, I guess. Possible causes for the corruption in this case:

• bad sectors on your hard drive, check with scandisk
• unstable memory(?), check with memtest '86
• some weird bug in the saving process (but I think that's unlikely since it does not use compression at that stage).

But if it's a hardware issue, you should at least see different behaviour on other computers, which you apparently don't. So my money is on the publishing process somehow creating all these problems, especially because of the LZMA (=7z) message.

Mark:

I just tried publishing with compression off. The resulting EXE gives me this error now:

Clicking OK gives the same error with a different number (up to 20) then it tells me it can't load a CGR file from a temp directory...

[hardware?]

Ok, so that's one bug less to deal with...now the 'only' thing is to find out what is/was corrupting the files and at what point exactly

hardware?
Your current set of files seems to be corrupt (if we can believe the errors). Can you start from a clean working set of files and reproduce the error somehow in order to narrow it down further? Also check if you can reproduce it (starting with a clean working set of files!) on multiple pc's. If you can do that it's probably not any hardware that's at fault.

software?
Did you try a complete uninstall / reinstall of Quest3D already? Are you running a updated virus-scanner, and did you recently do a full system scan?

Can you also reproduce the error with a file that's small enough to post on the forum? In that case we could try to publish it and see if that works.

Quest3D vs. QuestViewer
What's weird though is that the QuestViewer (which is used when running the EXE) gives the errors, but Quest3D doesn't give those same errors when you load the files(?). Are there any checks that the QuestViewer performs that are not performed by Quest3D?

it seams to me that either your hard drive will die soon or your memory is is bad.

I had these issues with an over clocked machine.
Is it a new computer ?

Did you run some stress test ?

[developers]

I just wanted to chip-in here as well.

Some of our customers are getting the same exact problem with the following message:

TAG
BAD DEC LZMA

then

Error
Can't find project type

The executable works completely fine on about 80% of the machines that we tested it on (including my development machine) but a small percentage get that error message. We don't have physical access to those machines and can't debug them at all.

Could the developers of Quest3D tell us exactly under which conditions the "BAD DEC LZMA" message is displayed so that we could at least pin down this issue? I realize it has something to do with compression, but what aspect of it? Is it because the downloaded .exe is corrupt? Or is it because there is not enough free disk space in %TEMP%\Quest3D0? Or is it because the published .exe was corrupt in the first place?

PS: We've also had some strange .cgr corruption issues but they don't seem to persist. They just happened once when we did a Save All command. Our main project .cgr got corrupted and we had to re-do a day's worth of work.

I also witnessed "BAD LZMA" on a regular basis:
http://forum.quest3d.com/index.php?topic=66660.msg92011#msg92011

Chad, could I hazard a guess that your projects files are pretty big and/or numerous?

The only solution I had (which only works up to a point) was to disable compression
when publishing.

I'm usually pretty good at hunting down the source of a bug (at least to some problem area)
but BAD LZMA still alludes me.

The only thing I haven't tried (because I doubt that it is the cause) is turning off compression
on all textures. That's a lot of work as I have too many to count.

Unless I'm mistaken, BAD LZMA may be related to some compression process,
(i.e. LZMA Compression ? ) which is why I initially suspected that some
compression (or decompression) functionality was failing.

I just joined the Bad Dec LZMA club... Yea!!!!!!!!!1

Not

So if i leave off compression i dont get that error but one of my groups is missing when the project opens???

Q

After a reboot i was able to produce a proper exe that had all the groups and no errors. And i was able to stall my client on the phone while i uploaded it.... phewfffff   Friday deadline!! 

Q

Nice!!!

My butt clenched just reading and reliving it.. 

It was just the end of a long procession of issues for the past 24 hours except for 3 i spent sleeping... But what i sent made the client happy. Onward. Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

Q

So does anyone know any more about this error?

My reboot did not do it this time... I did manage to make a project with not compression that worked But still... My uncompressed exe is 58 meg... I have done no optomization so it is bloated a bit but still...

Mostly just geometry from Collada imports from Max with and without animation and textures. Almost no logic in it. Textures are currently pngs.

Q

[Immediately]

The only other 'cross your fingers and hope' hack I have is as follows:

1) Shut down Quest

2) Run Quest

3) Before you load your projectr.cgr click 'Project View',
    or any other view that doesn't show your 3d scene

4) Load your .cgr

5) Immediately try a publish without doing anything else in your project!
    i.e. don't show any preview that will suck up sys or vid memory.

6) Try with and without compression

If that doesn't work then I'm out of ideas.
It works for me ..up to a point