Millisecond Forums

Those messages come from your system's DirectX environment (which Inquisit as well as other applications use to render stuff to screen etc.) -- Inquisit just passes them along. All in all they suggest that something is preventing Inquisit from gaining control over rendering, or more precisely, that some other process is stealing control from Inquisit. What that may be, I do not know. I would (a) re-start the system, (b) update graphics drivers and DirectX and (c) shutdown any unnecessary background processes and applications which may interfere with / hook into the display system (e.g Skype).

There's a slim, theoretical chance that something in your old scripts (subtle error or the like) is to blame, but I cannot speak to that without an actual example.

You can find a list of Direct2D error codes at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/dd370979%28v=vs.85%29.aspx.

thanks for your quick reply, Dave.  I've ruled out the graphics driver because i have updated graphics drivers on both computers i've run the code on, the two machines have different video cards, and I get the same error messages on both computers for the same lines of code.  I'll look into updating DirectX next and then report back.  thanks again for the great support.

Hmm, can you share a bit of runnable example code that triggers the issue on your system(s)? If it's something in those scripts, I should be able to reproduce this on other machines, too. Any additional details are also appreciated (OS version, etc.).

Hi DAve.

Well, I've ruled out updates to DirectX and tried my best to turn off all other processes that might be competing for screen time so to speak.  So i'm attaching my code that was developed in Inquisit 3 and still runs fine on computers loaded with that version.  I'm having troubles with the upload file feature in that I can't seem to upload more than one file and i can't upload a zipped folder either.  so, for the time being, I've only uploaded the code. Can I email a zipped folder to you that includes the stimuli?  I'm using Windows 7 Enterprise 64 bit on one computer on which i get the DirectX error messages and Windows 7 Enterprise 32 bit on the other computer on which I get the same messages.   thanks

FYI.. half the time the experiment runs and I get the directX error messages, about 1/4 of the time the program just crashes and Inquisit shuts down.  the problems seem to occur when files from a list of items (either GIF or wav files) are selected for either video elements or soound elements. 

#1: Could you please put all the files in a ZIP or RAR archive, upload that somewhere (e.g Dropbox) and post the download link. Email is not a particularly good way to share many / big files.

#2: Another angle to investigate are codec issues (missing / broken) given that the errors seem to be tied to particular files. FWIW, does the script run in Inquisit 3 *on the same machine*?

yes, the code runs fine with Inquisit 3 on the same computers. 

Also, if it is indeed about those files: What happens if you take one or two or them a write a simplistic script (not the full thing) to display them?

I don't think it is the indiviual GIF or WAV files that cause the problem, because I deleted those individual files on the line of code noted in the error message.  When I then reran the code, the same error messages appeared and referenced the same line of code, which now had a different GIF or WAV file. I've uploaded the folder with all files zipped to xfiles, but xfiles requies me to enter an email address to send the link to anyone outside of our university.  Do you mind sharing that?