Dear Charlie,
thanks for the explanation! I just bought a license, since it is a really great software (...and trying to find settings that avoid a crash without the ability to save projects is cumbersome ;-))
I understand your reasoning, since I'm a software developer myself. Still, I would challenge it a little bit. Some projects where just not possible with hardware and software from 20 years ago. PixelCNC is a great example, where the image-based approach allows new things.
Maybe a possible solution could be to increase some limits with a factor that can be set by the user in the UI. The default is just "1" and wouldn't change anything for existing users. I have enough RAM, hard drive space and patience to wait - I'm happy to buy more RAM (even these days...) instead of reducing the quality of the generated paths.
If that is not possible, maybe another form of error handling could be realized. With a meaningful error message before the crash (or within the log), I would know which part caused the memory overflow. Also, checking the available memory before allocating it could abort the operation before crashing and would allow me to tweak settings. If it would help, I could provide you with my setup, I assume that you have more debug messages than I have.
Until then, I will try your suggested solutions.
Some questions about these: does the "toolpath simplification" run after completing the calculation? If so, I think changing these values maybe does not help, since the application already crashed.
Would you suggest to play with your mentioned values instead of dividing an images into smaller overlapping images?
Thanks and all the best,
Iven