[Bug] Pencil quits when moving first frame

While I was trying to move all of my frames using the “Alt Left Mouse Drag” shortcut, I found that Pencil suddenly quit and I got the default Mac error message saying that ‘Pencil has quit unexpectedly’.

After some testing I found that Pencil quits when I try to click and drag to move the first frame of a strip.

This happens in the Bitmap and Vector layers, but not the Camera layer.

My OS is Mac OSX El Capitan, I’m on a MacBook Air, and I’m using the nightly build of Pencil released on Jan 14th.

Steps to reproduce bug:

  1. Open Pencil2D Jan 14th nightly build

  2. Left Mouse Button click and drag the default first frame in the Bitmap or Vector strip; Pencil should quit

Apple offered an error report but it was very lengthy and I wasn’t sure which parts would be useful.

I enjoyed using this build otherwise; the different-coloured onion skins are so useful and everything is much more streamlined. So thank you to the devs.

Hope this helps

@neeby Thank you for your contribution! This is totally happening with Jan 15 2016 Nightly Build as well on Windows 7.

Before one couldn’t move the first frame either, but at least it didn’t crash. If you’re ok with it I’ll quote your observations and report them for both mac & windows builds in our Github page (which is what devs review the most). I think this is one of those critical bugs that are cross-platform, so it should be addressed as soon as possible.

However I think we also need to define if we really want that first frame to move (if it’s even possible without re-writing everything.) What I mean with this is, for example Anime Studio has a frame “0” which is used for storing the default pose for it’s puppet-like characters. In Flash people used to have a “reference” first frame so they could easily go and animate their characters and the scenario without changing too much the volumes.

So I wonder if we should encourage that kind of use, or just allow the frame to be changed at will.

Well spotted! It is because the first frame can’t be null.

I will fix that and create a new first frame if it has been moved.

Ok, I fixed it and it is in my latest pull request. We can now move the first frame. A new empty key frame is created at frame 1.

You’ll have to wait for the next nightly build or build from my branch.

Thanks very much!

Matt has merged my Pull Request, you can try the code by building the main project!