Tag Archives: troubleshooting

Checking the environment of a running program

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Sometimes when you’re troubleshooting, it’s a good idea to check the environment in which Softimage is running.
You can check specific environment variables in the script editor like this:

import os
print os.getenv( "XSI_USERHOME" )
print os.getenv( "TEMP" )

or like this:

print XSIUtils.Environment("XSI_BINDIR")

But I would typically use Process Explorer to see the full environment:
ProcessExplorer_Environment
or Process Monitor (in Process Monitor, you just have to find the Process Start operation for XSI.exe and double-click it).
ProcessMonitor_Environment

Rescuing corrupted scenes

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Here’s a few things you can try when you need to rescue a scene (or model) that crashes Softimage when you try to load it.

Setting up Softimage before you merge in a corrupted scene:

Troubleshooting 101: runonce.bat

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Basic troubleshooting for when you cannot start Softimage, or you get strange errors at startup, or you cannot perform basic tasks such as creating primitives or duplicating objects. Or for fixing Softimage after you run a registry cleaner.

Run runonce.bat to re-register the Softimage DLLs and SPDL files (SPDL files describe the parameters of objects and operators in Softimage).

runonce.bat does a lot of what happens during installation and it is a lot faster than removing and then reinstalling Softimage.

runonce.bat mentions on xsibase, si-community, the AREA, and the XSI list

The case of the scene that wouldn’t play back

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or how I learned to love binary search…


In this case, a customer uploaded a scene that always crashed at a certain point in the playback.

After poking around the scene for awhile, I deleted a model and that fixed the crash. The only problem was that the model contained a thousand (1000) objects, so deleting the model wasn’t really a solution. So my next step was to isolate the problem use a “divide and conquer” approach. Sort of like a binary search:

  • delete half of the objects (eg objects 1 to 500)
  • play back
    • if crash, then the problem is one of the objects in the second half (501 to 1000)
    • else the problem is one of the objects in the first half (1 to 500)
  • Repeat as required… at most 10 times (1000,500,250,125,62,31,16,8,4,2,1)

In the end, I narrowed it down to a single mesh object. We weren’t able to save that mesh (it had to be deleted and then recreated), but we did save the scene.

wikipedia:

A binary search halves the number of items to check with each iteration, so locating an item (or determining its absence) takes logarithmic time. A binary search is a dichotomic divide and conquer search algorithm.

Dividing and conquering the problem space: