Custom Cakes Not Saving/Loading Correctly

[Neil]

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Hello. I’m hoping someone can help me understand a problem I’m having and how to avoid it. I have various custom cakes made from custom effects. Most of my cakes are fine, but a few always get mangled after reloading them. The effect simulations function fine while the show is open, but if I save everything, close and re-open the show, the cakes load incorrectly. They have all the angles set to 0°, sometimes the timing is messed up, and/or sometimes they revert to a single shot of a default VDL effect and/or have other attributes messed up, but I’m not sure exactly why. It’s always the same combinations of effects that cause the problems and everything is consistently reproduceable from the point of creating the cake(s), so it seems to be a problem with these specific effects. The individual effect sims are all still fine outside of the cake formation and I can recombine them into a cake, which works fine, until I save, close, reopen again, and then the cake is back to the same broken state again.

 

I don’t fully understand how the VDL and custom simulation syntax works with each other, but my initial guess is that at some point while adjusting effect parameters, something introduced some junk data into the syntax that I don’t actually have 1:1 control over from the effect UI (edge case of inputs, values, race condition, etc?), and throughout creating these various effects and copy/pasting certain sections of effect data among different sims, I’ve littered some of my sims with this junk that works fine to save and load as an individual effect, until I try to combine specific combinations of these “broken” effects into a cake and load it into Finale 3D, and then something in the syntax becomes a problem and everything falls apart from there.

 

Is this remotely plausible or does anyone have any other ideas?

Does it seem reasonable to salvage my current sims or should I discard any that are having problems and start over with them? Any tips on the first place to start looking for the problem within the effects data?

The obvious solution would be to start from scratch with new sims, but I have so much time and effort invested in what I have so far that I would really rather know what the problem is so I can avoid it, if possible.

[DrewFinale]

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Welcome to the Finale 3D forum and thanks for the very articulate post. I’m 99% certain that I know the cause of the problem you’re having, but to be sure, I’d like to have you send over a minimal test case (MTC). You mentioned that the problem is reproducible, which is ideal. For the MTC, just add the custom effects that result in a broken cake to the timeline but don’t combine them into cake. Send the FIN file with the custom effects to support@finale3d.com. When I get the show file, I’ll select the effects on the timeline, combine them as a cake, and then reopen the show to reproduce the issue.

 

Assuming my hunch is correct, the problem is a deficiency on our end, in combination with the character limit of the VDL field. It’s not your fault, and you absolutely do not need to start over. The long explanation is that we’ve recently been working on a slew of improvements to the custom effect editor. One of the temporary side effects is that length of the strings of characters that represent custom effects have grown much too long. Therefore, when you combine multiple custom effects into a cake, you can exceed the length limitation of the VDL field. The solution is for us to bring custom effect compression up to date, we just haven’t quite gotten to it yet. There’s really no good work around for you to employ at the moment. We understand this is a hindrance, we’ll get it resolved as quickly as possible.

[Neil]

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Thanks for the warm welcome and especially for the detailed reply! As soon as I read “character limit”, I felt a little like an idiot for not recognizing that as a very reasonable explanation for the issues I was seeing (albeit, I hadn’t even looked at the raw VDL data at all yet, but my quick mental debugging had already cornered the problem to something in this realm of issues, yet a character limit never crossed my mind, even though it should have been the most obvious. My brain just jumped way past that, ha). Learning about this known character limit issue makes me pretty confident that’s the issue as well, even without knowing more about the system. I should probably add that I’m a software developer so feel free to be as technical as you want. As a funny coincidence, a while before I looked at your response, I finally looked at the full VDL field text from a random effect just out of curiosity and my first thought was “Wow, this is a lot of text. Why aren’t they using some better compression or better encoding for this? Huh, maybe these super long strings are a pretty new problem from recent additions or something. Yeah, they’re surely already thinking about and working on this.”

 

I appreciate the response and valuable information, but you really don’t need to waste your time messing with my effects unless you want to for your own curiosity. I’ll send a show with a couple known-problematic ones your way anyway (feel free to completely ignore it if you want), but I’ll just work around the problem. I’m just happy to see that there is a likely answer for this and that someone knows what it is, ha. The effects causing the issues have all been complex effects, some unnecessarily inefficient on purpose (ie. using 2–4 launches in a single effect, with 1–3 breaks on each, etc) just to test and familiarize myself with the range and limits of the system.

 

I’m relatively new to the whole Finale 3D world (large pyro shows in general), so I didn’t realize that I’ve come in right after so many significant improvements, but a lot of things make perfect sense now. It’s exciting to see the progress and I’m very interested to see what the future of Finale 3D looks like. Thanks again, Drew!

[DrewFinale]

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Got the MTC show file, thank you. The length of the VDL after combining your custom sims into a cake is over 24,000 characters – that’s definitely the problem. There’s really no workaround, hang in there for a new release that improves the custom sim compression. For context, we in the middle of a massive project to improve effects, and new effects, and significantly level up supplier catalogs. The project is running behind schedule but we’re pushing as hard as possible to get to goal.

 

P.S. You can customize your display name on the forum from your Profile page.

[Walker Pyrotechnics]

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Did this ever get fixed? I am attempting to create a cake with very specific timing, and I believe I am having the same issue as was posted over a year ago. My broken cake simulation is perfect, but once I combine as a cake the effect is not correct at all.

Thanks!

[Neil]

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The length limit is still an issue. If you have your individual effects created and the problem only happens when combining them into a cake, one (sort of) work-around is to keep 2 versions of the problematic cake — one version that is just the individual effects/tubes arranged on the timeline, but grouped together as a group (so it’s represented with a single handle/marker on the timeline like a cake), and then another, less accurate version that actually works as a cake just to use as a placeholder when you finally export your script. This can be tedious with multiple cakes but it does offer a way to have a more accurate sim for visual use and planning (even if the sim is way too complex to store with current VDL limits), then another sim to swap in when you export the script.

[DrewFinale]

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Neil — it’s true that the character limit for the VDL field in the Effects window has not changed. But we did make other meaningful improvements to address this issue. Specificity, we improved the compression of the custom sim “blob text” significantly, and we added a warning this is displayed when combining effects if the resulting effect will exceed the length limit.

 

Here are the notes from the July 27, 2023 (2023.07.27) full release:

 

68. Effects: Improved the size of custom sim blob text, reducing them to about 60% of their former size

 

71. Effects: Added a check in the ‘Combine as cake’ and ‘Combine as chain’ functions for whether VDL is too large, more than 16384 characters, and display error message to user if so.

 

Walker Pyrotechnics — If you combine effects to create a cake and don’t get an error message, then that means the VDL length is not the issue. But if your cake doesn’t look like you expected, then something else must be going on. If you can send me a show file with the single shots that you would like to combine into a cake arranged on the timeline, I would be happy to troubleshoot the issue.

[Neil]

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“68. Effects: Improved the size of custom sim blob text, reducing them to about 60% of their former size”

 

“71. Effects: Added a check in the ‘Combine as cake’ and ‘Combine as chain’ functions for whether VDL is too large, more than 16384 characters, and display error message to user if so.”

 

 

Oh, nice! I knew about the 68 update but somehow missed the error message update. I stopped making such complex effects, so apparently haven’t hit the limit since then but that’s good to know. I recently had problems combining some old effects and the results were similar to problems caused by VDL length limits but it must have been something else. I ignored it and moved on, but if I run into it again, I’ll check into it to document and report.

[Author]

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