Inconvenient placement, zooming, and shutting down

Both my instructor and I have noticed that when dropping an object into the scene, no matter where it is dropped, it is placed in the center; Alice then zooms into it and zooms out. This is very inconvenient because the object sometimes gets placed below various other ones and it can be hard to get at.

In addition, Alice randomly shuts itself down without warning. I hadn't put too much stress on the program -- I was in the second world since opening the program (I'd closed the other one) and only had four objects in it and no script.

I've been using Alice 2.2 for the class. I was using 2.0 previously for a week or so and hadn't had these problems, but I'm not entirely sure if this is a coincidence or not.

These problems don't happen on the school computers; only on our personal computers, it seems.

Does anybody know what the issue might be, and perhaps how to fix it?

in the version i'm using, it will put the object at 0, 0, 0 and zoom if you click the class and click "add instance to world", but if you drag it in, it usually shows the bounding box where my cursor is and drops it there. I might not be using beta, but i'm pretty sure i'm using 2.2

Do you know how and when alice was added to your school's computers? that might have something to do with it. You've probably already checked and/or knew all of this, but it's worth a try. hope it helps

Oh -- I don't know whether I'm using beta or not.

I've just sent an e-mail to the professor asking about when it was installed on the computers, so we'll see.

[x2495iiii]

You know I used to have that problem as well. it mysteriously vanished for some reason. I don't know if it was something I did to my computer or what, but it never shuts down randomly anymore.

As for object placement, you can actually move the bounding box of the object most anywhere visible with the mouse and the shortcut keys (hold shift to move up and down, ctrl to turn, shift+ctrl to tumble). The lateral movement sometimes becomes inverted, but in general I find the object placement effective enough.

Originally Posted by DumDum203

in the version i'm using, it will put the object at 0, 0, 0 and zoom if you click the class and click "add instance to world", but if you drag it in, it usually shows the bounding box where my cursor is and drops it there. I might not be using beta, but i'm pretty sure i'm using 2.2

Do you know how and when alice was added to your school's computers? that might have something to do with it. You've probably already checked and/or knew all of this, but it's worth a try. hope it helps

The person that I guess does all the installation sent me this message:

"I downloaded Alice from the link you provided on 9/15 according to the folder date on my drive. The date on Alice.exe is 7/22/09."

Originally Posted by x2495iiii

You know I used to have that problem as well. it mysteriously vanished for some reason. I don't know if it was something I did to my computer or what, but it never shuts down randomly anymore.

As for object placement, you can actually move the bounding box of the object most anywhere visible with the mouse and the shortcut keys (hold shift to move up and down, ctrl to turn, shift+ctrl to tumble). The lateral movement sometimes becomes inverted, but in general I find the object placement effective enough.

I hope this problem randomly vanishes as well, then. I installed 2.0 on a different computer and that one runs fine, so maybe I'll just work with that. I don't know what to tell my professor, though.

[x2495iiii]

One thing you could check is if there are any other applications running. When I used to have the problem, I noticed that running things in the background while Alice ran seemed to lead to lots of random shutdowns. You could also check to make sure you have the latest version of Alice 2.2 (it should have a date of 9/1/2008 in the little startup window).

Originally Posted by x2495iiii

One thing you could check is if there are any other applications running. When I used to have the problem, I noticed that running things in the background while Alice ran seemed to lead to lots of random shutdowns. You could also check to make sure you have the latest version of Alice 2.2 (it should have a date of 9/1/2008 in the little startup window).

Oh! Thank you. I will check the version... although on the school computers, where it works fine, it's dated 8/1/09. o_O

I'll let my professor know.