Frequent Crashing (solved in 13.5.4)

[jahnocli]

Well, comets were ancient harbingers of doom, so...yeah!

[rikberryere]

...and we're crashing again. Six crashes in the last half hour. Nothing at all different from the last week, just adjusting point positions from frame to frame. I'm doing manual saves after every significant change (about every minute or so) because once, autosave didn't work. Just the once, mind you, but that's enough.

Is this an ongoing issue elsewhere?

[Greenlaw]

Wow, that sounds really extreme and unusual. My thoughts:

1. Have you checked for negative keyframes using Synthsin's tool?

2.Is there any particular activity that causes a crash? If so, try removing the item (movie, vector, bitmap) you're working with and see if that makes the scene any more stable. It's possible you have an imported file that's partially corrupted. (If you're importing a movie file, that would be my primary suspect. After that, maybe an audio file.) If a corrupted item turns out to be the problem, trying getting a clean copy from the source. Sometimes just opening and resaving the file in a compatible program can do the trick.

I haven't seen crashes like what you're describing in many years of using Moho, but one of these two was usually the cause.

Hope you figure this out.

[Seb78]

Hi there,

I am new to this forum, so hello to everyone!
I also have experienced several crashings, especially when operating with "cut" and "paste". And not only when using the shortcuts, also when turning to the "edit" tab on top and operating from there. I thought that this bug got fixed when switching from Moho 12 to 13.5, but it is still the same - and it is extremely annoying. Because these essential functions are used every minute, right?
Does anyone of you know if the Moho developers have at least registered this and are thinking of fixing this?

Many greetings and have a great 2022!

Sebastian

[rikberryere]

Wow, that sounds really extreme and unusual. My thoughts:

1. Have you checked for negative keyframes using Synthsin's tool?

2.Is there any particular activity that causes a crash? If so, try removing the item (movie, vector, bitmap) you're working with and see if that makes the scene any more stable. It's possible you have an imported file that's partially corrupted. (If you're importing a movie file, that would be my primary suspect. After that, maybe an audio file.) If a corrupted item turns out to be the problem, trying getting a clean copy from the source. Sometimes just opening and resaving the file in a compatible program can do the trick.

I haven't seen crashes like what you're describing in many years of using Moho, but one of these two was usually the cause.

Hope you figure this out.

There is a movie file in the scene... as well as a few audio files. (I do the entire soundtrack in Garageband, then import the AIFF into Moho as a single audio track. I know Moho has some nifty audio abilities, but I've been doing it this way for a while and I'm kind of used to it.)

I'll try deleting the movie file (it's not critical, once I transfer to iMovie it'll be removed and placed between the animated scenes separately).

Funny, I haven't had this problem for weeks, then - whammo, all the time. Thanks for the hints, I'll see if it affects anything.

[Nicohk92]

It crashes every 20mn or so for me.

I'm on a Macbook pro with Catalina

Just playing around with Library particle layers. No imported files at all.

Very annoying also as it causes me to save as and copy and paste my file name to the recovered file each time.

Here's an example of crash report:

Crashed Thread: 0 Dispatch queue: com.apple.main-thread

Exception Type: EXC_BAD_ACCESS (SIGSEGV)
Exception Codes: EXC_I386_GPFLT
Exception Note: EXC_CORPSE_NOTIFY

Termination Signal: Segmentation fault: 11
Termination Reason: Namespace SIGNAL, Code 0xb
Terminating Process: exc handler [7476]

[handobro]

Just sticking my oar in. 13.5 crashing a lot for me also, doesn't seem to be any consistent reason. It's been unstable ever since the last update. Also running Catalina on a MacBook Pro.

[Daxel]

I'm not having any crashes. On top of other old tricks I do like disabling auto-save, checking for negative keyframes and for corrupted references, now we know that undocking the style panel can solve many crashes, so I recomend trying that too. You don't need to close it, just undock it.
It looks like Mac OS users may have more crashes so they could have specific bugs, I don't know.

[Karl Toon]

Just thought I'd add to this Frequent Crashing post as I too am having at least 1 or 2 per hour. The most recent was when I created a switch layer, and prior to that was when I imported a jpg image. There seems to be no real rhyme nor reason to it. It's really annoying though. I'm on Windows 11, just so you Mac people don't think you are getting all the fun. Problem since install of 13.5.2; was quite stable prior to that.

[Daxel]

Just thought I'd add to this Frequent Crashing post as I too am having at least 1 or 2 per hour. The most recent was when I created a switch layer, and prior to that was when I imported a jpg image. There seems to be no real rhyme nor reason to it. It's really annoying though. I'm on Windows 11, just so you Mac people don't think you are getting all the fun. Problem since install of 13.5.2; was quite stable prior to that.

Do you work with your style panel undocked?

[Lost Marble]

I attempted to recreate these failures with Patch or just Vectors layers. I had some random fails during clicking around with lots of vector layers, but not consistent/repeatable enough to demonstrate.

However, whilst working with Patches - I tried to add a new one at one stage and Moho crashed. I then boiled that down to the following repeatable fail:

1. Create new document
2. Add a Shape
3. Select Shape (with Select Shape tool)
4. Ensure Style panel is docked & active
5. Attempt to add a new Patch* layer
6. Moho crashes

* note: Also tried adding Group, Bone, Note, Text - which sometimes also failed. Patch was however the most reliable!

Again I could not repeat the failures in other Moho versions, nor with the Style panel hidden or undocked.

Aha, that's it! Sometimes figuring out how to reproduce a bug is much harder than fixing the bug. SimplSam, I owe you one! This leads me directly to the cause of the crash, and a fix will be coming in the next update. Thank you!

By the way, the root cause of the crash doesn't seem to be new to 13.5.2. It looks like it's been there for a long time. But the nature of memory corruption is that sometimes a program can do something bad that can slip through the cracks or not actually trigger a crash until sometime later. It could be that an unrelated change in 13.5.2 made Moho's memory layout less resilient to this actual error.

[Greenlaw]

...a fix will be coming in the next update. Thank you!

Yay! Thank YOU!

[Lukas]

[...]By the way, the root cause of the crash doesn't seem to be new to 13.5.2. It looks like it's been there for a long time. But the nature of memory corruption is that sometimes a program can do something bad that can slip through the cracks or not actually trigger a crash until sometime later. It could be that an unrelated change in 13.5.2 made Moho's memory layout less resilient to this actual error.

Ooooh, I am very curious if this fixes any of the unexplainable crashes we've been having that I never really got to reproduce or could even pin-point. The error seems similar.

[Lost Marble]

Ooooh, I am very curious if this fixes any of the unexplainable crashes we've been having that I never really got to reproduce or could even pin-point. The error seems similar.

I'm hopeful that this could fix a lot of unexplained crashes. Basically, the Style window had some bad code that assumed a vector layer was always the selected layer. It was doing something very incorrect (or still is in the current builds) by treating every layer as a vector layer. So anytime you switched to a non-vector layer, this incorrect code was running. It's been there for many years, and somehow most of the time didn't cause a crash. But it's wrong.

I run diagnostic code to check for these kinds of things when I'm debugging, which sometimes identifies errors that I can fix in new features before they ever go public. But this one somehow slipped through.

[Lukas]

That sounds very promising!