iflights Posted January 5, 2016 Share Posted January 5, 2016 I've been reading about various scheduler/show issues in Oct/Nov threads. There was also a comment about concerns on another forum. What is the current consensus on S4 scheduler/show stability? My 3.11.X show has been bullet proof for the last 2 years, running perfectly unattended for weeks, and I'm hoping to hear that S4 has proven itself out and I can expect similar performance feedback from those who upgraded their software and ran their show on it. Any thoughts will be appreciated. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
wmilkie Posted January 5, 2016 Share Posted January 5, 2016 I used the simple show builder for my complete show; loved it, no problems Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
PhilMassey Posted January 5, 2016 Share Posted January 5, 2016 Remember, you mostly only hear about the problems. Don't get many " this worked awesome" threads.Personally, ran all season with no issues, other than those I created. I use the full show and schedule editor, and for the record, Windows 10. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CraigB Posted January 5, 2016 Share Posted January 5, 2016 I ran with version 4.1.2 Advanced, computer was unattended and ran without a hick up. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
k6ccc Posted January 5, 2016 Share Posted January 5, 2016 I started the season running 4.2.4 on the show computer, and part way through upgraded to 4.3.4. Both ran without a hitch. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
saxon Posted January 5, 2016 Share Posted January 5, 2016 Used S4 on show computer (idk ver#) and except for some Chinese text once in a while ran great for December. The Chinese text doesn't seem to effect play, just a little alarming to see it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ron Boyd Posted January 6, 2016 Share Posted January 6, 2016 Due to some last minute problems with some of my elements this year, I ran on the LOR Scheduler instead of the Pi and Falcon Player as was initially planned. The show ran without a hitch from Black Friday until New Years Eve. I ran 4.2.12 on a Windows 10 PC 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
iflights Posted January 6, 2016 Author Share Posted January 6, 2016 Thanks all, great feedback. Now those are the reviews I was hoping to hear. Looks like I'll be moving to 4.X now in the show computer. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rcktpwrd Posted January 6, 2016 Share Posted January 6, 2016 My small show ran just fine, started with 4.2.10 then went to 4.2.12 to get rid of the Chinese text. I was running 32 channels of animation only on a netbook with Win10. I used the simple show builder and it turned on and off at the desired times every night. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bob Posted January 6, 2016 Share Posted January 6, 2016 Used S4 on show computer (idk ver#) and except for some Chinese text once in a while ran great for December. The Chinese text doesn't seem to effect play, just a little alarming to see it. Just a little clarification here: The Chinese text issue affects play in some cases. For some people (not everybody), the show temporarily pauses when the Chinese text problem occurs. I suspect that whether or not it affects play might depend on things like the size and number of your sequences, but that's just a guess. For the people who get this pause when the Chinese text happens, upgrading to the version that fixes the Chinese text problem also fixes the pause. So, I just wanted to add this clarification just in case someone who reads it has the Chinese text problem and gets a pause in play while it happens. If this is the case for anybody, then I strongly suggest that they upgrade to the version that fixes the Chinese text problem. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
wmilkie Posted January 6, 2016 Share Posted January 6, 2016 bobwhat actually caused the Chinese text problem and/or how did you guys fix it? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bob Posted January 6, 2016 Share Posted January 6, 2016 bobwhat actually caused the Chinese text problem and/or how did you guys fix it? Well, that's a long and sordid tale. First some background information: For various reasons we don't want "too much" text in the log. So every so often, after a bunch of log messages have built up in the log, we get rid of the oldest such messages before adding any new messages. Specifically, we would get rid of the oldest half (approximately) of the messages, leaving the newest half so that you could still see them (at least, until the next time we do this sort of purge). We've always done this, for as long as there has even been a log (years and years). The big text area you see in the status window, where the log messages are displayed, was created using a certain standard GUI control built by Microsoft. Over the years, it seems to me like Microsoft stopped dedicating as many resources to supporting this particular control as it needed, and as a result we started seeing more and more "weird" behavior from it on newer versions of Windows and such. Not in all cases - most of the time it worked fine - but every so often we would get some trouble ticket from some customer with some weird problem, and eventually we would figure out that the solution for this particular customer was "You need to manually reinstall that standard Microsoft control", or something like that, which a customer should pretty much never need to do. These things started happening more and more frequently as the years passed. Then sometime last year, we needed to upgrade our version of InstallShield (which is the tool we use to build the installer program that you run when you first install or upgrade the LOR software suite). It turned out that the new version of InstallShield no longer had any support for this particular GUI control, which means it suddenly got a lot more difficult for us to build our installers. I don't know why they dropped support for it, but I'm guessing it was related to the sort of things we were seeing - it seemed like Microsoft no longer dedicated the necessary resources to support it, so I'm guessing it got harder and harder for InstallShield to support it just like it was getting harder and harder for us to support it, and eventually InstallShield decided to just drop it. We spent a while trying to figure out how to shoehorn it back into our installer even though InstallShield no longer directly supported it, but eventually we found another GUI control, written by a third party, which was intended as a simple drop-in replacement for this old, now-problematic Microsoft control (that is, you are supposed to be able to replace the Microsoft control with this other control, making almost no changes to your program's code, and having your program work the same way it always has from the point of view of the end users). So we too threw away the Microsoft control, replaced it by this drop-in replacement control, and everything seemed to be working fine. Unfortunately, it seems that this third party replacement control has a bug in it which, at least in some cases, caused it to display a bunch of random Chinese text whenever we would throw away the first half of the log messages. So, to stop this from happening, we now throw away all of the log messages, not half of them. The random Chinese text does not happen when we do this. That's obviously not the greatest solution - it would be nice to not throw away all of the existing log messages - but we wanted to get a fix out there quickly, since the problem was discovered right at the time of year when lots and lots of people are trying to run their shows. Now that things will be a bit less hectic for a while, we are now thinking about ways to make the logging at least as good as it was before, and hopefully better. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kzaas Posted January 6, 2016 Share Posted January 6, 2016 (edited) Awesome explanation Bob, Thanks for the clarification. I was seeing the Chinese characters before I upgraded, but never saw a pause. Edited January 6, 2016 by kzaas Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
wmilkie Posted January 6, 2016 Share Posted January 6, 2016 thanks Bob Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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