Originally posted by heath28mYou have unnatural luck. Ask anyone and collect some data, then you will have evidence that contradicts your supposition.
Well going on the idea that most users buy their pc in the package and A seven year old system that was top of the line at the time is what I was referring too..and I never had one actually crash a system .. but upon lock-up the minidump process was preparing..
Never forget:
One counterexample = disproof
N examples = nothing
In most cases even an infinite number of examples means nothing (problems can be continuous).
What is likely happening is that you are mostly restricting yourself to "no code" components, and since evallib is the source of a great many of the crashes (especially during code editing when it is continuously compiling) you have a reduced probablity of crash. Unfortunately evallib code is needed for non-trivial presets, so we have the choice of /increased/ stability, or simple and boring (for us to make at least...) presets.
Presets are /not/ the cause. There are no facilities in AVS that /should/ let you make it crash, if that were the case then I would agree with you that it is the preset authors fault. Since you can use AVS well within the constraints of "what it is supposed to do", and have it still crash, it is AVS fault.
Also you made the suggestion that few, if any, AVS artists consider what the target system is. This is a major consideration for everyone. If you had some rough conception of the sort of things that we manage in AVS presets you would probably amazed that they run at the framerates they do...
I draw the line at 10fps on my system in a particular window size (~500x400). I do this because presets which I made before on a 400Mhz machine run at that framerate on my 3Ghz machine in that window size. This works out reasonably well. The only time I have broken this with recently was with Starfighter Redux, which struggles to get ~9.5fps in that window. Don't forget though that preset features the highest polygon model seen in AVS, with more processing per triangle then any model I have seen in AVS (PAK may have done something with more lights somewhere... I can't remember exactly).
I will accept that this is probably unacceptable for the casual viewer... but for my target audience its fine.
