Since this demo of Oasis is also part beta, I would appreciate it if you tell me of any bugs you find. Please email me what happened, your system configuration, and what steps I should go through to reproduce the error on my machine. My email address is clifton@cse.ucsc.edu
To save us both some time, here are the bugs I currently know of, so you don't have to bother telling me about these:
First of all, these are NOT bugs, but intentional limitations of the demo (I didn't want to do all this work for free, you know):
Ñ Only 6 objects may be placed in a scene. (In the real version, unlimited objects are permitted.) (Don't worry, 6 objects can be plenty - the mask in the splash screen was made with only 6 objects)
Ñ Renderings take place only at 320x240 resolution, no matter what dimensions are set in the Render dialog.
Ñ There are no animation controls. (Animation is fully built into Oasis but disabled in the demo. All transformation parameters listed under "Animated Items" can be animated over time in the full version.)
OK, I'm not perfect - here are genuine bugs:
Ñ If you assign a shader to an object and later delete the shader, the program will crash during rendering. Solution (for now): be sure to always save a scene before rendering. If it crashes, then the next time you open the file, the obect will be assigned a default shader and it won't crash.
Ñ The same problem happens if you assign a parent to an object and then delete the parent. For now, be careful about deleting parents - first detach the child. Also, if you save, close, and reopen the file, the orphaned child problem gets fixed.
Ñ On large, complex scenes Oasis may run out of memory, possibly during rendering (especially for large images). If Oasis crashes on a large scene or rendering, try giving it more memory. (Don't worry, this is a relatively rare problem)
Ñ There is a problem opening Oasis pictures in Photoshop 2.5.1. They open fine in Photoshop 2.1 and every other program I've tried (I don't know about Photoshop 3.0). If you're using 2.5.1, try opening the image in another program and either copying/pasting it into Photoshop or
re-saving the image in another program. (Photoshop is the only place I've seen this problem - so I don't know if it's my fault or theirs.)
Most of these bugs occur very rarely, and maybe never if you plan your scene out before starting (which is a good idea, in any case).
Other trouble-shooting:
Some people have run across this problem with another program of mine: If you get the message "ObjectSupportLib not found" when you run Oasis, you need to install the ObjectSupportLib file on your system. This file was included on the system disk(s) that came with your PowerMac and you apparently don't have it installed anymore. Copy it to your extensions folder and re-run Oasis.
