by mcgilles » Tue Sep 05, 2006 5:38 pm
that makes sense about the file size. are they stored as an absolute path or a relative path? I suspect that they are absolute paths which would make the most sense, however it has the limitation that if I were to transfer the save file with the image files over to another machine, if the images are not placed in the exact same location on the other machine the save file would become useless. some packages have an option to embed the images or keep them as references, maybe the option would be something to think of some day, however it is not a major concern.
I tend to make large screensavers for my own use. I have run into probelms with large screensavers on other packages and before buying this one I wanted to check to make sure it would handle some extreme data. professional screensaver producer in particular has a great looking interface, but it has terrible memory leaks, when I added a bunch of pictures to a slide show in that program it allocated all of my system's ram very quickly then crashed...your program does not do that, it works very well by comparison, no increase in memory usage even as I added a tremendous amount of images to the slideshow. looks like a well done program!
my test was with a bit over 20,000 images, most around 800x600-1024x768 or so. the total size of the compiled scr was around 1.6GB. I know that's extreme, but I wanted to see what it would do. I found out that if I add all of those pictures to it at once, it does appear to work. the user interface appears to freeze, task manager says its not responding, but the harddrive light still blinking indicates that it is still busy, I can also tell from the CPU usage that its still working. it takes a long time to add that many images but that's to be expected, once it finally completed it, the user interface started working again, and it was able to compile a screensaver file with that many images sucessfully. I was quite pleased with this result! I make big screensvaers like this for my own use so I can set the delay to 30-60 seconds and go literally months without seeing a repeat image.
I'm not sure what the problem is, the most important thing is that it does in fact work. even though task manager says its locked up and the interface will not respond, I know that if I just leave it alone it will eventually complete and start working again, but if you want to try to investigate why it did that, there's the info.
thanks!