save as much as possible to disk, keep ram free

The old version of windows pencil2D I have used for several months now.
As you know the program crashes as it has memory problems, it does not release the used memory and eventually crashes. This happens with copy / pasting parts of an animation and then moving it. This happens a lot with version 0.5.4. So after copy and paste a few things I start saving and backup it. If you see pieces of animation going away like magic, that is an indication that pencil2d is about to crash.

My suggestion for the new program would be:
I would add an option to choose between “keep every frame in the RAM” or “save as much as possible to disk, and cache X frames before and after the animation”. This will keep the memory usage very low and still make the program fast enough.

@chihwahli Hey, thank you for taking the time to letting us know about this behaviour. I noticed this as well last year and made a full blown report on the developer forum at Github. I have already proposed that we require a playback caching system, so your proposal is welcome as well.

As a side note, I’d like to suggest you try to use the latest development build, which so far has had it’s stability been improved substantially. I made a short animation with about 20 layers spanning about 150 frames working around 6 hours on average on each sitting, and Pencil2D only crashed once and it wasn’t even because of the file.

You can download it here: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/0BxdcdOiOmg-CcWhLazdKR1oydHM#list

I made a FAQ entry as well to help prevent these kinds of wipes, I’d suggest you read it as well since it’s more of a pro look at how to work. Even if you don’t use Pencil2D most of the time you ought to work like that in a production environment.

www.pencil2d.org/pencil2d/faq/#corruptfiles

Thanks again for taking the time to comment!