• Not enough memory: Quit the program, open Knot’s Get Info window in the Finder, and give Knot more memory. If you’re running on a machine with 4 megabytes of RAM, it may help to actually decrease Knot’s allocation to about 2000K. (This gives the rest of the computer more room to breathe.) If neither of these tactics work, try drawing smaller pictures, or open up the Memory control panel and turn virtual memory on. You can also try restarting with all the extensions turned off: hold down the shift key as the computer starts up.
• It just beeps a lot and won’t draw anything: You’ve mistyped or left out a number somewhere. Choose Find Typos from the Edit menu, and that will, naturally enough, find the typos. Keep finding and fixing until there are no more left.
• Strands appear as only tiny dots in the very center of the picture: Increase the strands’ diameters; try changing the strands’ radii to 150; turn off the ‘Fit’ item in the Environment Window.
• Strands mysteriously refuse to appear in movies: Knot needs more memory but is too bashful to tell you. Give the program more memory (with the Finder’s Get Info command) or turn on Virtual Memory (with the Memory control panel). You could also make the drawing smaller.
• Can’t make movies: Knot relies on the QuickTime system extension to make its movies. If you don’t have it installed, you can edit Knot documents but you cannot actually render the movies. QuickTime can be downloaded from http://www.apple.com; it also comes free with new Macintoshes, and with some multimedia programs.
• The frame rate is wrong in the Movie Compression Options dialog box: This is a bug, but you can safely ignore it. Knot does not use the that frame rate information.
• Your movie, with the ‘Loop’ option chosen, does not loop smoothly: Go to the Animation Window and check the number-of-spins display. If it’s not an integer (there’s something besides zero after the decimal point) then it should be. Change the spin rate to make that happen.
• Long animations with dozens of keyframes and thousands of movie frames don’t work properly - early keyframes repeat, and late one's don't seem to get used.
This is a known bug, and a repair is coming. In the meantime, there is a tedious workaround.
In essence, you can split the animation up into N smaller pieces that the program will not gag on. Take your knot document, reduce the "frames to draw" by a factor of N, and create N copies of the document. Then remove most keyframes from them - this is the tedious part - leaving only a short sequence in each one. Make sure to overlap the end keyframe of each document with the first keyframe of the next:
doc A: 1 2 3 4 5
doc B: 5 6 7 8 9 10
doc C: 10 11 12 13 14 15
doc D: 15 16 17 18 19 20
Now render each movie separately, and use any movie editor to splice them together. These short movies will abut properly with no duplicated frames.
• Movies play back jerkily.
Your computer is too puny to to play back all the frames at the proper speed. There are some things you can to to fix this:
- Use the Movie’s Size control in the Animation window to reduce the size of the movie. It’ll be smaller, but it will play back better.
- Reduce the frame rate.
- Be sure you're using movie compression. A good choice is Video, 80%. You can choose this in the dialog box that appears after you click “Go”. Cinepak is good too, except that it creates movies very slowly. If you don't use any compression, the movie file is vastly larger and slower than otherwise.
- Ideally, play your movie back with the monitor's color depth set the same as the movie’s. Use your Monitors control panel to make this adjustment. (Video-compressed movies have ‘16-bit color’.)
- If virtual memory is on, turn it off.
- Play your movies on the fastest computer you can lay hands on.
• Drawing suddenly becomes slow for no particular reason: Have you started using a gobo? Gobos take time to do.
• Mysterious failure when trying to make a movie: the program probably wants more memory.
• Trouble with the Preferences file: Rare, but you may be trying to run Knot from a locked disk. Try copying the program to a different disk, and running it from there.
• Previews don’t work: It could be that there’s not enough memory: try the fixes listed for that above. Also, try copying a strand and then pasting it.
• Drawing fails after it’s finished: It may be that Knot thought it had enough space on the disk to draw its picture when it began, but during drawing some other program ate up disk space, until there wasn’t enough for the picture. Try running Knot alone, or free up more space on your disk.
• Can’t select more than one strand at a time: This version of Knot can’t do that at all. Maybe in the next version.
What’s new in version 3.5?
Version 3.5
March 1996
• The program is now ‘fat’ - meaning that on Power Macintosh machines it will run native at about 2 to 3.3 times the speed of the previous version.
• Added a wetness slider; now strands can be more than just wet or dry, they can be moist.
• Fixed bugs. Gone are the “error while deleting cache” message, mystery crashes in animations containing glowing strands, and pearly glowing strands that are too-dim at high resolution.
Version 3.4.1
February 1996
• Fixed a bug in 3.3 – strands would sometimes appear flat and rough, usually in animations.
• Added a new background called Twizzles.
Version 3.3
January 1996
• High resolution - you can draw knots at 144 dots per inch.
• Gobo lighting effects.
• Side-by-side stereograms.
• The ability to use the green channel in red/blue sterograms.
• Speed.
• Fixed a bug that could make Knot crash when a document was
double-clicked in the Finder.
• Fixed a bug that made wet strands look wrong in animations.
It works with all your documents from older versions of Knot too.
Version 3.2
November 1995
This release fixes a problem with the 3-D pictures, which were far too dim in 3.1. There are also some cosmetic improvements.
Version 3.1
November 1995
This release adds speed, and presents new options for strands that look wet and have variable iridescence. Each light can range from harsh to soft, and the program offers faster substance previews and drawing. The backgrounds are also smoother - check ‘Endpapers’.
Version 3.0
September 1995
This release adds animation with motion tests and stereograms, multiple colored lights, and strands that can be bigger, glowing, segmented, buckled, and divided into spheres. You can generate masks that aid compositing knots onto your own backgrounds. There are new, more colorful backgrounds, animated previews, a way to automatically create entire animations, and smoother-moving tilt controllers. Drawing speed has increased again, and you can specify what paint programs will open your knot graphics and movies.
Version 2.1
January 1995
This release increased drawing speed about 20%, added a new backdrop, fixed some display bugs and a memory problem, as well as a problem with the ‘blank’ backdrop’s color, which would sometimes be incorrect. The TIFF file problem in version 2.0 is fixed too.
Version 2.0
January 1995
The first release with controls to let the user change the modeling and rendering of knots. Knots are no longer hardcoded, but are editable and can be saved as documents. This release is shareware.
Sometimes 2.0 would create unreadable TIFF files.
Version 1.0
September 1994
The first public release. This version draws a single, unchangeable knot.
Future Versions
…Will have ribbons, which are an advanced form of strands; 3D file exportation in the DXF format; 288 dpi resolution; and some anti-aliasing. There are no plans to make Knot work under Windows, or on SGI machines.
Also on the planning board: a built-in viewer for the finished pictures; a larger preview window; direct output to icons and Quicktime VR; textured and flaming strands; and batch drawing,
What else is there to know?
If you register the program, I’ll send you the Flaming Pear Omnibus Disk, full of more example knots, power-user documentation, assorted software goodies, and fun. If you’ve designed a knot that you’d like to be in the package, you can e-mail it to me at lloyd@kagi.com. I’ll also send you a code word to banish those reminders and the 30-day timeout: see the About Knot… item under the apple menu for details.
There’s a Knot page on the Web at http://ccn.cs.dal.ca/~aa731/knot.html. It has news, downloadable knots, and links to related sites.
You can also mail me your questions, comments, and complaints. If you have difficulty running Knot on your computer, I’d like to know about that: please describe the problem, your machine, how much memory it has, which version of the Mac OS you’re using, and if you can, all your active control panels, extensions, and startup items – that’s a lot of detail, but subtle conflicts can arise among these and cause problems.
Programmers interested in getting pieces of source code can write me; those wanting to know about Kee Nethery’s Kagi Shareware service can write him at kee@kagi.com.
