Not sure whats going on, but anytime I try to open the Help Browser, Houdini freezes and a message appears saying “Waiting for localhost” Strange thing is though, if I use the help when clicking on a node, I get no trouble.

Any ideas?

I have had this happen a number of times. Your best accessing the help etc from a separate browser and not launching a help browser window in Houdini.

If it does lock up cancel the local host process

Thanks - I'll try to avoid that button then!

Does it happen all the time? For me, sometimes its just a bit slow and I have to wait it out for a min or two.

I left it for 30 mins once (when I went for dinner) but it hadn't resolved itself. If I first start Houdini and try, it seems to work ok. Then after I've been working for a bit, then I get the locking up. I've not had any trouble with the node method of opening the help though, regardless of how long I've been using the system.

Which platform?

PC - Win Vista 64

Hey All-

I am in 9.5.175 on Linux and houdini will hang with this problem consistently when the default web browser is already open. If you close the default browser, firefox on my system, and open houdini, *most* of the time your file will open fine.

Also, if you open with your file in “Manual” mode it will not hang most of the time.

Obviously, we can turn off opening the help browser at startup.

yeah, in 9.5 there are some problems with the help browser. I have 9.5.180 under windows and the help still doesn't open, well, a windows opens, with no text, if you try to close it it crashes houdini. it happened in previous versions of 9.5 as well.

I'm very dissapointed with the 9.5 help. It does look somewhat better and that's it. All the functionality is worse than in 9.1. The example list is a mess, the whole system is slow and crashy, everything feels very fragile. There are layout bugs (especially on Linux) and the general usability of the system is very very low.
The help system in 9.1 was becoming quite good. What is the reason for switching to this inferior architecture? The OSX port?

Dragos

Try disabling any firewalls and/or antiviral software and blocks ports and see if that helps. I used to have Trendmicro PC-cillin on and Windows Firewall off, and Houdini 9.5 hanged while trying to get the doc server; disabling PC-cillin stopped the hanging.

IndyZoneCo
Try disabling any firewalls and/or antiviral software and blocks ports and see if that helps. I used to have Trendmicro PC-cillin on and Windows Firewall off, and Houdini 9.5 hanged while trying to get the doc server; disabling PC-cillin stopped the hanging.

I have the problem of the help browser locking up on windows 2 times out of 5 in all kinds of situations, launching in houdinis own help browser, starting with the system browser, system browser already running or not. No firewalls whatsoever running on the system, win xp 64. I love Houdini, but this is really as annoying as it gets.

Version? For a while there the help had issues, especially on windows….

Cheers,

J.C.

JColdrick
Version? For a while there the help had issues, especially on windows….

Cheers,

J.C.

I am currently on 9.5.169, but I had the problem ever since I used Houdini (9.0.???). It felt slightly better or worse at times, but that can well be due to the randomness of the problem.

Timm

I've run 9.5.216 on both windows and linux and it has no problem with the help. There's not much SESI can do about issues with the old releases, best advice is to upgrade and deal with any problems there. Help has undergone a lot of fixes since your release, to say nothing of the rest of Houdini!

Cheers,

J.C.

JColdrick
I've run 9.5.216 on both windows and linux and it has no problem with the help. There's not much SESI can do about issues with the old releases, best advice is to upgrade and deal with any problems there. Help has undergone a lot of fixes since your release, to say nothing of the rest of Houdini!

Cheers,

J.C.

Will try, thanks!

Timm

Hi

I got the exact same problem in OSX 9.5.170 appentice…

System Version: Mac OS X 10.5.4 (9E17)
Hardware: macbook pro 15" 2.5 GHz, 4GB 667 MHz ram, GeForce 8600M GT 512 MB

this bug is a pain in the ass when you are struggling to learn the app

by the way, this is my first post here :-)

qral

Hi qral, welcome to the forum! As JColdrick mentioned, please update to the latest version of Houdini, 9.5.216 sounds good enough. However, you're on OSX which means that it should always try to open the help page on your native browser (whichever one you use by default).

Thanks for the tip, I didnt know there was daily builds
now I have upgraded to 9.9.226 and the hanging problem in houdini seems to be solved, but I still have a problem in my browser (safari Version 3.1.2 (5525.20.1)) when i click the links in the help pages, the browser calls the local host, but it never receives the page?

qral

Try adding the local computername in the hosts file, after the default entry of localhost, as in:

127.0.0.1 localhost mycomputername

save the file, and relaunch Houdini.
I got faster startup of the help server after doing so…

In Windows this file is located in
C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc
It can be edited in notepad or the likes…

Similar files, regarding name lookup exists in OSX and Linux as well…


Maybe a long shot, but…