New Mac - cannot handle Opentoonz??

[M W]

Hi,

So I've been working with Opentoonz for about 18 months - an education project with some humorous characters, which have all been created without too much of a problem on my aged (10 year old)  Mac Book Pro. 

This new scene is an animated orchestra, occasionally involving up to 12+ characters on the screen at one time. 

In the end I was forced to isolate the characters down to less than three on the screen as the computer was SO laggy and unworkable. 

And even after that I was forced to buy the new Mac Mini with the M1 chip and 8gig of RAM. (The 16gig wasn't available) as it was just not doable. 

As you'd expect the Mini is light years ahead in terms of performance, I can have all 12 characters on the screen at once, and while a tad laggy - it copes quite well. 

However, the system shuts down every 45 mins or so with a message: "Your system has run out of application memory" .. . ! 

Now, after a bit of research I've started to work with the Activity Monitor displayed (as recommended) so I can see the RAM filling up. There's a little realtime coloured graph running that goes from green  to yellow etc when it reaches the 8gig limit. Yes, it fills up quickly.

Here are the questions. 

1. The scene uses around 65 levels, mostly of vector illustrations with a few rasters thrown in. No FX. Not all of them are in use at the same time, maybe 30 at most. 

Is this a large project by normal standards? 

Is it to be expected that ANY computer would struggle with it's RAM memory working with this many characters/levels? Obviously, 16 gig would have been better but it wasn't an option. 

2. If it isn't a lot of info to process, then is my Mac potentially bugged or underperforming? 

I was lead to believe that this machine is almost the best thing on the market right now for such projects - should I really be shutting down and restarting Opentooz every 20 mins to reset the RAM memory? Shouldn't the "AWESOME" M1 chip be able to cope? (I know it's RAM we're actually talking about, but the chip should help, right?)

The help/support pages all refer to having an empty HD and shutting down all other programs whilst running the "thirsty" one - ie Opentoonz. 

Well, the HD is empty of everything except Opentoonz and I have no other progs running at the same time. The machine is fresh out of the box.

3. My 10 year old MacBook Pro that I used before also had 8 gig RAM, an i7 chip and Nvidia graphics - in its day it was top of the line and tbh it performed miraculously up until the OS upgrade (of course, go figure. . . It's almost as if the upgraded OS sabotaged the machine so I was forced to buy a new one....hm...) 

But, it was remarkable, and although old - never once gave me the warning message. Admittedly, I wasn't pushing it as hard as the Mini - but I was pushing it to extreme limits given what it could do. I never had a RAM issue. 

To conclude. 

Has anyone else experienced this with a MAC? 

What is considered "really pushing the system to its limits" in terms of amount of levels, info processed etc. within Opentooz? Is there anyone successfully running 100+ levels all at the same time with no RAM issues - or is it a known thing that the program just eats away at RAM? 

Many thanks for taking the time. 

Mark. 

[Artisteacher]

I'm also a mac user, but my M1 mac does have 16gb instead of 8. I think some of OT's code is too old or perhaps poorly written - particularly around threading. This minimizes how much a better graphics card actually helps.

Vector levels hold a lot of data - so they are the most strenuous on the system. I've never tried to have 65 in a single scene. When using vector levels, make sure to minimize sketchy lines and never "paint in" a fill area with the brush. Those can both lead to too many control points which causes significant lag or etc...

If I were going to use so many vector levels, I would make sure all my lines are as efficient as possible - with no unnecessary control points. Using the Geometric tool's polyline mode (very close to a vector pen tool), gives the most control (though the version in OT's fork Tahoma2D is better since it does work exactly like a pen tool).

A couple other things that might help:

• Right-click in the Browser Room's scene cast and "Remove unused levels" from the scene
• Instead of restarting, try saving and then "Clear the Cache Folder" from the File menu
• Re-evaluate the length of your scenes - perhaps more scenes that are shorter might help

[M W]

Thanks so much for the excellent reply.

 I will do as advised. I hadn't thought of clearing the cache instead of a reboot. And the tips about the drawing are great.

I think the project is very big by any computer's standards - and keeping the scenes shorter is also key. Unfortunately, as these longer ones are animated to a musical score it has to fit to a set time 3 - 4 mins. But whatevs. 

Thx!