Xion Community

WARNING:
This is a Beta Build. That means it has fixes and features that are NEW. It is also possible it has bugs that are NEW! If you are looking for stability, please don't expect this build to be perfectly stable. It may have issues. If on the other hand you are happy to try this build out and post any bugs back in this thread, then please do!

Download Installer Version:
r2 Studios Server -> http://www.r2.com.au/downloads/files/beta/qa-xion_v1.0b93.exe
OR
Xion Server -> http://xion.r2.com.au/download/beta/qa-xion_v1.0b93.exe

Changelist:

• Reduce the amount of visible ram usage to something more appropriate by reducing the working set
  
• Fix open button keeping down state after command executed

If you find bugs specifically related to this build, please post them here instead of the Bug reporting forum. Any feedback positive or negative should also go in here, no new threads. This way all feedback, etc related to this build will be in the one place.


ABOUT THIS BUILD:

Ok, fixed the minor bug reported by ALAS and added a small 'feature' to reduce the working set of Xion.

This is for all those people out there who say 'foobar' or 'Winamp' uses many megabytes less memory than Xion! Well, they don't always! Mostly its because they minimized the foobar or Winamp window and Windows reduced the working set. You can see this working in all previous Xion builds (in 2000/XP/2003), by opening the playlist and Task Manager and minimizing the playlist window while watching Task Manager Ram usage.

Unfortunately Task Manager reports the Ram usage as the application usage PLUS all the windows modules that are loaded. Anyway there's plenty of information out there about that.

What I've done, is that every time a skin loads, Xion will now request that windows reduces its working set. The same occurs the first time you launch Xion. As a quick way to reduce the Ram usage of Xion, just refresh the skin

Now with the Default skin loaded, and after refreshing the skin, I get Task Manager reporting 2.2mb of Ram (6mb paged).

Anyway, something to put Xion more in line with the other media players when people say it uses more memory when in fact it actually uses about the same, its just that they've minimized their other media players

Oh also note, this will only work on 2000/XP/2003/Vista, etc

Enjoy!

Cliff

is there a downside to a reduced working set? If ram usage isn't particularly an issue I mean.

xonenine

xonenine Wrote:is there a downside to a reduced working set? If ram usage isn't particularly an issue I mean.

xonenine

Well the working set isn't reduced per say. I simply call it to refresh the working set. This is exactly what Windows does when you minimize an application.

You may notice a slowdown the first time you use things, but since Xion doesn't use that much memory in the first place, you probably won't notice it. See how you go and run the build. Most likely you won't even realise anything has changed, other than Task Manager listing less ram usage

Here's the description from Microsoft: "If both dwMinimumWorkingSetSize and dwMaximumWorkingSetSize have the value (SIZE_T)-1, the function temporarily trims the working set of the specified process to zero. This essentially swaps the process out of physical RAM memory."

Anyway it should be fine as Windows does this anyway when you minimize an application.

In the end if you don't notice anything anyway, then there should be no harm done

Cliff

Hey, this is really nice. My memory usage has gone down to a third of what it used to be in the previous version (more or less). That's noticeably less than winamp and foobar for me.

I take it support for Windows 95/98/ME is now being dropped at last?
awe i really wanted to use it in 98 lol

don't forget to remove it from the home, download pages and anywhere else its noted

I guess we can chill the Champagne! No bug from me!

Great work Cliff! Thanks for that!

SLoB Wrote:I take it support for Windows 95/98/ME is now being dropped at last?
awe i really wanted to use it in 98 lol

don't forget to remove it from the home, download pages and anywhere else its noted

Not at all, Xion should still run on these OSs. Its just this 'feature' won't be visible

Cliff

i was joking, who in their right mind these days uses those OSs? altho 3.1 should be even faster still lol

SLoB Wrote:i was joking, who in their right mind these days uses those OSs? altho 3.1 should be even faster still lol

According to my weblogs for the Xion site, at least 13817 requests came from windows 98...

Cliff

Not a single crash for me or any issues at all even with the anims and skinning. Between switching to Photoshop 8 and this version of xion, it couldn't feel more stable than this. Even though things I created in PSP worked, it really seems that using the right prog to skin is/was alot of the problem.

BTW, after I saw a couple of the animations in action, I have to ask an idiot question. The animations here seem to be as good (or can be as good), and as switchable and configurable as visualisations. So what is the difference?

thanks,
xonenine

Cliff Cawley Wrote:

SLoB Wrote:i was joking, who in their right mind these days uses those OSs? altho 3.1 should be even faster still lol

According to my weblogs for the Xion site, at least 13817 requests came from windows 98...

Cliff

To what ratio though?

xonenine Wrote:Not a single crash for me or any issues at all even with the anims and skinning. Between switching to Photoshop 8 and this version of xion, it couldn't feel more stable than this. Even though things I created in PSP worked, it really seems that using the right prog to skin is/was alot of the problem.

Sweet, thats great to hear, thanks for letting me know!

xonenine Wrote:BTW, after I saw a couple of the animations in action, I have to ask an idiot question. The animations here seem to be as good (or can be as good), and as switchable and configurable as visualisations. So what is the difference?

Visualizations can be anything including rendered in 3d. The current visualization plugin that is included is very very basic and simple. Future plugins will probably support fullscreen as well as full rotating 3d, motion blur, etc.

The animation visualisations are there so that you don't need to be a coder to make them. You may not be able to make them as awesome as a coder can, however you can do a pretty damn good job. Just another great feature of Xion

Cliff

Krakken Wrote:

Cliff Cawley Wrote:

SLoB Wrote:i was joking, who in their right mind these days uses those OSs? altho 3.1 should be even faster still lol

According to my weblogs for the Xion site, at least 13817 requests came from windows 98...

Cliff

To what ratio though?

Well, so far this month, 937,382 requests

So that's like 1.4%

Cliff

Okay not sure if this has been mentioned previously or if it is something there is already a fix for. Sorry still new to this. But I figured this was the best place to post it in case it is a problem with this build.

I had previously added a bunch of music directories to my xion playlist but had not actually saved the playlist but it still opened by default when I opened xion.

Earlier today I had a song sent to me by a friend and after saving it on the desktop decided that since I already had xion open I would just drag and drop the song onto it.
I was unaware that this would clear the playlist I was already using

After realizing this I readded all of my directories to xion and saved the playlist. When I saved the playlist I noticed it dropped the number of files that were in it. I started a new playlist and redid this with the same directories which equaled 5364 songs. I saved this playlist under a different name switched to the original playlist and then switched back to the new one. When coming back to the new playlist it had dropped from 5364 songs to 2167 songs.

zakai1369 Wrote:Earlier today I had a song sent to me by a friend and after saving it on the desktop decided that since I already had xion open I would just drag and drop the song onto it.
I was unaware that this would clear the playlist I was already using ]

It depends where you dragged it to. If you dragged it on the rest of the songs in the list, it should have added to the list. If you dragged onto the Xion skin window, it will have cleared the list.

zakai1369 Wrote:After realizing this I readded all of my directories to xion and saved the playlist. When I saved the playlist I noticed it dropped the number of files that were in it. I started a new playlist and redid this with the same directories which equaled 5364 songs. I saved this playlist under a different name switched to the original playlist and then switched back to the new one. When coming back to the new playlist it had dropped from 5364 songs to 2167 songs.

How do you mean it dropped? Are you going by the number that it shows while adding? This number is ALL files that it finds in the directories you're adding. As it goes through it verified if they are the correct format (i.e mp3) and then won't add them if they're not. Perhaps this is where its confusing?

Cliff