NXT-G 2.0 Weirdness (errors, disappearing program etc)

[paulharv66]

My son is running into all kinds of odd behavior in the software.

When he builds up a fairly large program (consisting mainly of switches) he starts running into errors like;
- he moves or tries to add a block and gets "Cannot find terminal hotpoint in wire" (apparently a known bug)
- the whole program suddenly deletes - literally - the workspace becomes blank - he has to Ctrl-Z to get it back
- the workspace suddenly narrows and he can't see the whole program.
- dragging blocks is extremely slow

It's quite unworkable at the moment.

We restarted the pc and have no other programs running.
System is HP dv9700 17" laptop,
Windows Vista
Intel Core 2 Duo CPU - 2.00 GHz
3 GB RAM
32 bit

Do other people experience this? Is there a solution?

Cheers,

Paul

[mattallen37]

Even on my computer with:

Win7 64-bit
quad-core 2.5gHz
8GB RAM
ATI RADEON graphics card

it gets boggy with medium sized programs, often within 30 minutes.

The best solution is to start using NXC

Edit: and I forgot to mention that I have almost that exact laptop (and wouldn't even consider trying to run NXT-G on it).

[paulharv66]

I see! So it's pretty lame software then, really!
Well thanks - that's very helpful.
NXC - will have to start researching that!

[mattallen37]

Yeah, I guess so. It's one of those things I call a virus with some benefits, and many side effects.

If you decide to go with NXC, I suggest you ask your questions here on these forums (lots of support).

[h-g-t]

I found NXT-G frustratingly slow at times but never had a program vanish.

There are some good pointers for using it here - http://www.teamhassenplug.org/NXT/NXTGTips/

The most important one is patience! When you drag a block from one place to another, this is not like moving shapes in a drawing program. In the background, NXT-G is amending and recompiling the changes to the machine code, data links, etc created by the move. You have to give it time to carry out these aadjustments.

It is possibly not the best language but some really large and sophisticated programs have been created with it.

Having said that, I never regretted finally taking the plunge and trying the Bricx Control Center and NXC.

Maybe it was easier because I had already dabbled in programming with Fortran and Basic, but I would never go back to NXT-G