Long point descriptions hang surface generation (LD2004)

[sinc]

This bug cost me half a day and a lot of headache. I finally tracked it down to a point with a particularly long description. I noticed that with the default point description field size of 32, the max allowed length of a point description is 22. Longer descriptions cause AutoCAD to go to la-la land when you try to build the surface. I was able to use point descriptions up to 30 characters in length when I created a test project with point description field size set to 44 instead of 32, but did no further testing.

Maybe I should note that it is OK to have points with long descriptions in your project, as long as they aren't in the surface you're trying to build.

I probably should note that I'm using Land Desktop 2004 under Windows XP.

[mjfarrell]

I'm thinking there is another problem with your data,
as I have never had any problem related to point descriptor
length.
Did you include other data in the terrain model, like break lines
or contours? Or perhaps you asked it to compute a very complex
watershed? Send me that point file and let me run a few test.
Or try exporting the only the point data with NO descriptors
and build the surface then and see if this improves the performance.
To be honest, I would rather see the data to run a few other tests as well.

[sinc]

I can get the error by creating a blank new project and importing the following points in PNEZD csv format:

543,826.966,119.973,6519.55,TEST
544,831.999,145.451,6519.82,TEST
545,895.734,74.773,6519.43,TEST
546,906.025,116.824,6520.16,XTEST 17+00.000 R 6500

Add the points to a point group, add the point group to a surface and build. No breaklines, boundaries, watersheds, anything.

I just tried another test, and was also able to trigger the bug by creating a new project and setting four random points in manual point creation mode at elevation 7200, giving the first three a description of "TEST" and the last one a description of 25 "X"'s.

I've now occassionally managed to get errors of the form:

FATAL ERROR: Unhandled Access Violation Writing 0x61767469 Exception at 7c01054bh

When this happens, AutoCAD crashes semi-gracefully (i.e., it offers to send an error report).

[mjfarrell]

I just imported the points as shown in your post, and built the surface
with no problems at all. The issue as stated is NOT the length of the descriptors.
At first I was skeptical of the special characters in the descriptors, only it proved to
not be a problem. You, might want to install Service patch 2 for 2004.