Ok, so I’ve just put up with these issues but, on the off chance there is actually any support for this software, I guess I’ll point out the issues and see. It is a shame that issues with the printers and software don’t have a clear reportable path to those that can actually produce a solution.
The issue is the software, not my installation, not my machine, not my network and not my setup in any way. I am a programmer, system administrator and systems architect. I’d even go so far as to decompile the code to be able to run it in debug mode, but it’s honestly not worth the effort. There are too many options on the horizon for me to not consider migrating.
Creality Print Versions (7.x, 7.2.x, 7.2.2.5483)
OS: Windows 11 Pro updated completely
Printer: K2 Plus, Hi, K1C all on latest firmware versions
First: When I close Creality Print, the process fails to exit, or takes up to 5 minutes to exit, holding on to 300-500MB of RAM with 0% CPU usage. Most of the time, I must kill the process. It’s kind of ridiculous that I’ve actually had to create a batch file/powershell script to kill the process because it happens dozens of times a day.
Second: The application is very wasteful with CPU affinity, consuming as many available CPU cores as available up to the point that it crashes and exits before it can completely load. They introduced the “Lite” mode in an attempt to prevent this, but setting up a shortcut that limits the CPU affinity to a defined set of CPUs prevents the crashing without having to cripple the view/rendering. This should be addressed by the coders of this application to prevent the application from consuming all CPUs. I’ve sent that information to their chat channels and it’s clearly fallen on deaf ears.
Finally: When opening .3MF files, most of which were built with other slicers for other printers, it is very common for Creality Print to fail to load the file with an error saying there is no geometry in the file. I can immediately load the file on Orca, Snapmaker Orca, Bambu Studio, whatever. It is ONLY CREALITY PRINT that fails to load the file. Further, I can create a new project, put some objects on the plate, then load the rogue *.3MF file and 25% of the time, it will then load. So, clearly there is no issue with the file, it is the Creality Print application failing.
As none of these issues are able to be repeated 100% of the time, it is difficult to provide exact steps for Creality to reproduce the issue. The logs are not effective because they don’t show any error even when files fail to load. There are no crash logs when the process fails to exit, because as far as the application is concerned, it exited just fine.
I also know I’m not alone, because I’ve seen plenty of people reporting the geometry failure and the failure of the process to exit. This is my attempt to bump this back up to the top to see if anything useful happens.