Your Custom PASeqs needed for testing

[Synthetik]

Here's a way you can directly help us finish testing of upcoming Studio Artist v4 so you can get your hands on it sooner rather than later. We're currently running automated testing of large collections of PASeqs and other Presets to eliminate any remaining bugs. This is actually proving extremely useful to track down remaining problems. So, i'm asking you as users to help in this effort by emailing us your custom PASeqs and Presets to use for testing purposes. These will not be shared with anyone outside of Synthetik (unless you explicitly tell us you want us to do that). I understand that many people tend to be proprietary with their custom built presets, and we respect that. But providing us these files for our internal private testing will greatly help enable us to fix any lingering bugs, as opposed to you stumbling upon them after the release. You should zip compress the folders of presets and email them to techsupport AT synthetik DOT com . And if the presets use custom brush or movie files you need to provide us those as well in a Brush folder. Again, we want zip compressed folders, please do not email individual presets, they have to be zip compressed. Again, i cannot stress enough how useful this kind if testing is turning out to be, so i hope you will join in and help us finish up the final polishing for v4 by emailing us your custom PASeqs and other presets for our internal automated testing.

[liveart]

John just to clarify. We put the PASeqs into a single folder then compress the folder, or compress the PAS files and put the compressed files in to a single folder?

[Victor Ingrassia]

If i may jump in LiveArt... Yes, I sent paseq's to John by placing all the paseq's into an appropriately named folder (in my case I named it "VI_paseqs") and then cntrl+clicked the folder and selected "make archive". Then I attached that archive to an email to John.

BTW a small, but easy to overlook, point: When you are dragging and dropping paseq's into a folder... if that folder is on the same drive as the original paseq location, you will need to make sure you make duplicates for the new folder... otherwise you will be removing the paseqs from the original location (that's what mac's do... they make copies automatically only if you are dragging files to a different drive than the original location). So do an "option/drag n drop" and you'll see the "+" icon as you move the files you are dragging (meaning you are making copies to the new loc).

[Synthetik]

Put the PASeqs in a folder and then zip compress the folder. You probably already have them arranged in custom category or collections, so you can probably just zip compress those. Custom paint or other preset types are great for testing as well, so don't feel restricted to only sending in PASeqs.

We're using them in automated tests looking for any problems to try and fix those problems before the release when its easy to do so as opposed to afterwards when it's more difficult.

[Synthetik]

I'm going to continue to harp on this until v4 is released. I do appreciate the preset folders we have received from the few people who responded to this request, and they have lead us to uncovering and fixing some subtle and not so subtle remaining issues in v4. So i'm begging you all to send us your custom preset folders for our automated testing. Like i said, you all stand to gain when problems are fixed before a release as opposed to afterwards. And i assure you we will not release your custom presets to the general user population (unless you want us to do that, but i understand that most people tend to be rather proprietary about their custom presets and that's fine).

And if you have a few spare minutes and are looking for a challenge try creating some torture test PASeq presets that really test the program in unusual ways. We do this here at Synthetik but we all tend to have certain biases concerning how we use the program that might be very different from some of you which is why i'm always looking for test presets from outside of our normal group of testers and employees to stress test the app.

[Florence Artur]

Hi John,

Preset means just the file that is saved when choosing the File>Export>Paint action sequence export menu, right? I have a few that I saved recently in order to create movie files, they are nothing complicated but I can send them if it will help.

Florence

[Synthetik]

Yes, file : export : paint action sequence would export a Paint Action Sequence (PASeq) preset.

Most of the different studio artist operation modes have integral preset file types, including paint presets, image operation presets, texture synthesizer presets, vectorizer presets, and PASeq presets. Any of those preset file types are useful for our automated testing.

You can either use the appropriate manual export menu command, or you can control click on the editor panel and the appropriate export command will come up for whatever operation type you are currently editing. I tend to always use the contextural menu way to export since it's much faster an avoids making a mistake and saving an image processing preset when you are actually editing a paint synth preset.

Also, many people do not know that if you hold down the shift key and click on the current preset icon you will get a save preset dialog positioned in the current preset's folder. So this can be a useful shortcut to avoid a lot of manual file system navigation in the standard file dialog. V4 extends this by letting you use the command and shift hot keys together, using these when mousing down in the current preset icon places the standard file dialog at the top of the current preset file hierarchy.

The issue for us which has recently been discussed under a different forum topic is that there are so many different combinations of parameter options for all of the studio artist effects that testing them all is a daunting task. Another factor is that people, including myself and other beta testers tend to do certain things and totally ignore other areas of the program, while a different user might have a very different perspective and way of working. So getting a wide variety of presets from different people really helps us stress test the app.

Another more obscure technical issue for those of you who might care is that the old PPC chips were designed so that software programers could divide by zero and get the largest range number returned as the result. now this is a totally rational solution to dividing by 0, you should get infinity which on a limited precision computer would be the largest number available. And it was great for programing for maximum speed because you could avoid manual checks on variables to see if they were 0 and just do the division. Doing the manual check actually takes longer than doing the math in many situations. Now intel in their infinite wisdom still make chips that crash when you do this divide by 0. We spent a lot of time cleaning this up in a million places in the old studio artist PPC code very early on in the intel native port, but it still crops up from time to time, in fact we fixed an obscure issue associated with this earlier this week from automated testing from user provided presets we recently received from putting up this forum post, so again it points out to me how you just can't do too much testing, and getting a wide variety of preset types from different users is a great approach to doing this.

[Synthetik]

Many thanks to those of you who came through so far with folders of presets for our automated testing. These contributions have actually proven to be very valuable, we uncovered a few unknown bugs over the last few days that appear to now be fixed with the testing this weekend so far (fingers crossed, the auto-testing proceed as i type).

Part of the issue is that there are so many permutations and combinations of things that can be done in Studio Artist, especially when you get into working with Paint Action Sequences that it's very hard for us to test for every possible contingency, which is why your personal custom presets are so very valuable to add to our test suites.

For example, we uncovered a bug that only happened with time particle paint actions that contained certain path start restrictions in groups of PASeqs that did not set the canvas to white before running, something it never would have occurred to me to test for. And another rather obscure but major issue associated with running the program continuously for multiple days at a time, not a normal situation in the past but something quite feasible and desirable thing with the new gallery show features.

Once again it drives home to me how you just can't do too much testing, so anyone who hasn't contributed or who likes to put together PASeq torture tests and has some free time, feel free to continue to submit your personal preset contributions for our automated testing.

[Joel Nisson]

Hi John,

Attached are two zip files with my custom Paint Synth and PASeq presets in them. A few of them are just modifications of the SA standard presets. I have no proprietary interest them so you are free to do with them as you please.

If I can be of any further assistance, or if you still want beta testers for Ver. 4, I would be happy to help.

--Joel Nisson

JDN Paint Synth PRESETS.zip

JDN PASeq PRESETS.zip

[Synthetik]

Thanks for sharing your work, i know there will be a lot of other users who appreciate that. I was just having a conversation the other day with a long time Studio Artist user and we were lamenting the fact that there was not more preset sharing going on between users.

[Synthetik]

As far as the further assistance comment, i'd still love to have more torture test PASeqs to dump into the auto test system we're running here. Torture test can be defined as trying to run through testing as many different facets of the program as possible in a single PASeq or setting up weird or unusual combinations that test out of the ordinary things. So any of you out there with the time and interest in constructing devious or comprehensive test PASeqs feel free to send them in as they are really valuable contributions.

I think all of us, myself included, tend to get stuck or comfortable in certain grooves and totally ignore other aspects of the program. So the real trick to testing is to try and break out of those grooves and try new things. . What's nice about the preset examples we've been getting from the general user population is that they have introduced new situations into the tests we were not tasking into account, so we quickly uncovered some lurking code bugs that had never come to light in any of our existing tests.

My general experience with developing v4 is that whenever i setout to do a project or experiment i have never tried before i end up finding some weird issue that is broken or needs fixing. That's why i'm always trying to come up with new experiments or ways of working or specific projects to try out. So the real trick to testing is not to do the things you do everyday, you do them everyday so you know they work, perhaps that's even why you feel drawn to doing them. The trick is to set out and do new things that stress the program in new ways, perhaps ways we never even thought people would try.

As a status update, I've been running gallery show continuously for 4 days now on the entire PASeq test suite and it's still running, so things are starting to look pretty good. That said, i've also been running a memory profiler on it the whole time and it's obvious to me there is some minor lingering memory leak issue(s) going on somewhere in the jumble of test cases being passed through the auto test system i'd like to figure out and fix. So we still have some detective work to do. And your custom presets might be the ones that help us figure out and fix those problems.