Okay, this little tutorial is really about Max 7's new crash recovery features, but first I want to show you how to reliably crash Max!
I already can hear some of you yelling out “Just Open 50 Video Files!!!”, but I want something that’s reliable across systems - and easy to do.
The simplest way to crash Max is to use a special message to the Max system - max crash. To do this create an empty message box. Start the message you type into it with a semi-colon (;). The semicolon is what identifies it as a message to Max). Next add a space and type max crash. Save and lock the patch, then click on the message box, Max will die immediately with this beautiful little dialog:
Once you’ve seen things crash, it’s time to check the crash recovery function. If you restart Max, you will see the following dialog:
If you select “Restore”, the Max environment will rebuild itself into a state near where you were at when it crashed. This mechanism is based on the "Undo History" generated during patching - so it is always working in the background, writing your moves to disk. Because it is integrated with my patching activity, it remains in sync with the work I've done. This has already saved me an enormous amount of time, and I hope that it helps you as well.
It would be really useful to know how to extract useful information from that "beautiful little dialog" :) Often the patchers I have crashing problems with are too big or too full of 3POs to send to support. Either that or the crash causing conditions are too nebulous to write a decent fault report (eg lots of incoming data sometimes causes a crash - but which part of the patch is it that's choking?). So the only thing left that I can think of is to look at the crash logs, but I have no real idea how to extract useful information from them. Is there a possible article (or series of..) in that? Or is it actually not that easy to interpret the crash reports?
@mattyo thanks Mattyo, that's useful. Obviously from the example given in that article, I can't tell if there will be sufficient info to track down an offending max object or process, but I'm guessing from what you say in your message that there _will be max/patch specific info in the crash report when max goes belly up. Yes?
Is there a way to recover after accidentally said 'No' to the recovery question? It's just a txt i was working on, but some hours... and forgot about it.
