Surface Pen Lag/Click recognition problem

[Zmote]

Hi people,

I just bought Art Rage 4 and have updated it to 4.5.4(the latest available version). I'm using it in 64-bit mode, on a Windows 8.1, Surface Pro 3.

My problem is the following:

I can draw perfectly with my digitizer pen, no problems there. But as soon as I want to change tool settings, like Thinner density, pressure etc., my pen or artrage doesn't react to my pen's inputs anymore on the dialogue box. When I click on the canvas again, there appear little white circles on the spots I clicked with my pen just seconds ago.

I can't scroll down the dialogue box with my pen, can't select anything properly(it marks sometimes, but doesn't click it, when I move sliders, the slide movement happens only when I click on the canvas. It's like it's queueing my input order from the surface pen when I'm in those dialogue boxes(brush options, presets) and executes them when I leave the dialogue area.

I tried changing input options, precise, wintab, did try all combinations, didn't change much.

It's annoying and slows my workflow. I saw people using the Surface Pen on the Surface Pro 3 without any problems in ArtRage, so I wonder what's up with my setup.

Thanks for the help in advance.

PS: Here is a vid of the problem in action. I'm using a german version. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9nD7hi90AQc

[philippecmartin]

Hi,

I have the same configuration as you do but in English; but no issue (except for palm rejection but I learned to live with it)

I have my input device settings as "Use Realtime Stylus ON", "Wintab OFF", "Precise Tablet ON".

I have updated to the latest NTRIG drivers (Check out their webstite).

I hope that helps.

Regards,

Philippe

[Zmote]

Tried that, didn't work.

Any other suggestions?

By the way, the pen works fine with all the other apps. Photoshop, Sketchable etc. It's only those dialogue boxes of artrage that are a problem.

[philippecmartin]

Hi,

None except perhaps that I keep windows up to date on their latest patches.

... and, do restart Artrage after making the stylus config. modifications.

Regards,

Philippe

[Zmote]

Did all of those. Did restart, even the system. I'm up to date with the patches and updates as well.

I wonder if some setting in the device manager could have caused this. Or possibly could solve this.

[HannahRage]

Do you have any non-native drivers installed? (Such as a Wacom driver?) Also, can you send us the Pen settings in the Windows control panel? (a screenshot should be fine).

If you want to email use directly at [email protected] we can troubleshoot a bit more easily.

[Zmote]

85733

Here are the screenshots. I have no hurry, so if it's ok, I'll keep posting here.

I don't have any non-native drivers installed for the pen, it's the default pen that arrived with the surface pro 3. The same problem occurs with the n-trig drivers installed and uninstalled.

I have the Surface Hub installed, but I doubt that tool to be the cause of the problem.

[HannahRage]

Hmm, okay. Nothing's jumping out.

Can you try the following (any order)

1. Going back to the input settings and turning OFF both Wintab and RealTime Stylus, then restarting ArtRage (I know you said you tried everything, I just want to doublecheck this one).

This will remove pressure sensitivity, but it will help narrow down whether it's driver related in any way.


2. Uninstalling Surface Hub, as that does affect what happens with styluses (though it shouldn't be causing this issue).


3. Unticking "Beruehrungsfeedback - Bei Beruehrung des Bildschirms visuelles Feedback anzeigen"


There's definitely something on your system interfering. Do you have any background stuff running?

[Zmote]

Did try all of these, the issue still persists.
I re-installed the software and tried again, still, the same thing keeps happening.

Any other ideas? Anything I can show you that might help you solve the problem?

PS: I have ArtRage Touch installed, too. Any chance it might interfere?(For whatever reason...)

[HannahRage]

Okay, we're going to need to do some fairly involved troubleshooting; can you email us at [email protected]?

[smoque]

I'd like to be able to downgrade to Artage 4 if possible.
I'm on a Mac, os x Yosemite, and have the Cintiq 12WX.

I recently had to redo my hard rive, and the the only available Artrage was the 4.5.
Not only does my Artrage preferences on my Wacom Prefs disappear without warning while I'm working, but the Wacom itself lags so bad, the app is unusable.
No other app is having this problem.

[MattRage]

Could you get in touch with us at [email protected] and we can do some troubleshooting - 4.5 doesn't have any speed issues with a Cintiq that 4.0 wouldn't and it's likely that there's something on your system we can do to resolve the problem.

[herrkjeldsen]

Okay, we're going to need to do some fairly involved troubleshooting

Hi!
Did you get anywhere with this? I'm having the same issue, and hoping you perhaps found a solution :)

Edit: Strangely, it only affects dialog boxes and the floating windows, while the top menu bar, the color picker and the tool picker respond normally to the pen. And drawing works just fine as well.

[HannahRage]

Hi!
Did you get anywhere with this? I'm having the same issue, and hoping you perhaps found a solution :)

Edit: Strangely, it only affects dialog boxes and the floating windows, while the top menu bar, the color picker and the tool picker respond normally to the pen. And drawing works just fine as well.

We weren't able to finish troubleshooting, so we're not sure if we've solved it or not; if you'd like to contact us at [email protected] we'll be delighted to give you a list of things to try (Zmote, if you're still having this issue, please get back in touch!).

[herrkjeldsen]

Excellent, I will do that right now :)

[edit: Oh, and I sent it to support[at]artrage.com, as support[at]gmail.com probably wouldn't get where it needed to ;) ]

[HannahRage]

Excellent, I will do that right now :)

[edit: Oh, and I sent it to support[at]artrage.com, as support[at]gmail.com probably wouldn't get where it needed to ;) ]

*headdesk*

Well, I'm glad one of us is paying attention!

[Leeahd]

Has a solution been found for this problem? I'm on a Surface Pro 3 as well and it's been very difficult to work with Artrage this way

[HannahRage]

Has a solution been found for this problem? I'm on a Surface Pro 3 as well and it's been very difficult to work with Artrage this way

We're currently testing whether it's a third party driver that might be interfering with Realtime Stylus support. Can you check whether you have an Wintab drivers installed?

If you're not sure, or that doesn't fix things, drop us an email at [email protected] and we'll give you some troubleshooting suggestions (having another person to help confirm the problem would be great anyway, aside from helping you out :p )

[herrkjeldsen]

Has a solution been found for this problem? I'm on a Surface Pro 3 as well and it's been very difficult to work with Artrage this way

Hi Leeahd! We're emailing back and fourth testing some stuff :) We're looking at the RadialMenu right now. Do you incidentally have RadialMenu installed? If you have it as well, then that might be a commonality? I have uninstalled it on my machine, but that didn't seem to help though.

[Leeahd]

Hi Leeahd! We're emailing back and fourth testing some stuff :) We're looking at the RadialMenu right now. Do you incidentally have RadialMenu installed? If you have it as well, then that might be a commonality? I have uninstalled it on my machine, but that didn't seem to help though.

I do have it installed BUT I had the problem before I installed it :( (also I don't have it running automatically so most of the time it's off)

Also I do have wintab drivers but I uninstalled them and still have the problem. I re-installed them as I need it for a program and things are still the same. I did all the artrage preference configurations that were suggested. I haven't uninstalled surface hub yet, I'm a little reluctant because it sounds like that didn't help you with your problem.

[herrkjeldsen]

I do have it installed BUT I had the problem before I installed it :( (also I don't have it running automatically so most of the time it's off)

Also I do have wintab drivers but I uninstalled them and still have the problem. I re-installed them as I need it for a program and things are still the same. I did all the artrage preference configurations that were suggested. I haven't uninstalled surface hub yet, I'm a little reluctant because it sounds like that didn't help you with your problem.

Ok, so that is probably not the issue it seems. Yeah, I tried uninstalling the surface hub here as well, withoug any luck. Hopefully the artrage people have got something up their sleeve :)

[Delofasht]

I had an issue some time ago with the windows ink settings and my tablet not working properly because of it. . . I wonder if something about how the driver for the stylus is coded is causing a similar issue with your Surface Pro? Is there any setting for turning off windows ink while you are using ArtRage? I don't even know if that's possible on the Surface Pro as the most comparable thing I have is my laptop which is running Windows 8.1 and my Wacom tablet, different but similar hardware and tools.

Maybe that will help or at least get people thinking in a different way of fixing this.

[MattRage]

We're looking in to this currently - The Surface Pro 3 uses an nTrig driver and there isn't an option to stop it sending Windows Ink. So far we've been able to confirm one case where the device also had an additional nTrig Wintab driver installed (to allow apps that only support the older Wintab system to work) but removing it didn't seem to help. As we haven't been able to replicate the problem on a 'box standard' Surface Pro 3 it seems like something additional installed on the devices is doing this and the Wintab driver is the most likely suspect so we're going to see if we can break our own device here to work out what's going on!

[BushcraftOnFire]

...we're going to see if we can break our own device here to work out what's going on!

Dedication.. I Like that!! LOL!

[Leeahd]

We're looking in to this currently - The Surface Pro 3 uses an nTrig driver and there isn't an option to stop it sending Windows Ink. So far we've been able to confirm one case where the device also had an additional nTrig Wintab driver installed (to allow apps that only support the older Wintab system to work) but removing it didn't seem to help. As we haven't been able to replicate the problem on a 'box standard' Surface Pro 3 it seems like something additional installed on the devices is doing this and the Wintab driver is the most likely suspect so we're going to see if we can break our own device here to work out what's going on!

Any chance you were able to recreate the problem?

[MattRage]

We haven't been able to replicate the problem yet with the driver combination that we thought might be causing the problem. Our next step is to try installing the menu utility that we've seen a couple of people mention - It's a possibility that this is causing the problem but apparently turning it off isn't fixing it so I'm not holding my breath.

If that doesn't work I'm going to see if we can gather some full service lists from everyone having the problem so that we can look for common causes.

[Leeahd]

I noticed something interesting and wanted to see if anyone else experienced it and maybe it'd give incite into things. I open a scrap paper panel to use for mixing. when I go to paint in it sometimes it gives me a small mark, as if my normal brush was sized down to the praportioanl size of the little scrap paper. other times it makes a big mark as if I'm using the same brush on the canves and the scrap paper.
86467

[herrkjeldsen]

Yes, I have a similar behaviour here, although it seems that when painting on the scrap it remembers the pressure/size from the end of the last brush stroke on the canvas.

Screenshot is with every other stroke done on the scrap, drawn vertically downward. The width in the scrap looks to me to match (-ish) the lower part of the stroke on the canvas?
86468

[Leeahd]

herrkjeldsen

I see something on your screenshot that I want to ask you about but it's not artrage related and there is no PM. If you're ok with it, is there some way we can connect outside of here, by email or facebook or something? If you google or facebook my name you will find me. As a fellow surface owner if you're ok with it please contact me. If you're not, no problem, I understand and hopefuly we can figure this artrage/surface issue out

[markw]

Hi leeahd
Just in case you missed it (and its not some technical problem at your end) to send a PM to another forum user;
Once you are signed in to the AR forums, click on your user name or the 'My Profile' at the top right of any forum page. On the left of the page that then opens is a panel showing your user name & avatar under which are 3 options. The first of these will bring up the page allowing you to compose and send a PM to another user.
Further settings for the forum Private Messaging service can be found by clicking on "Forum Actions", again at the top of any forum page, and choosing 'General Settings'.
Hope this helps.

[Leeahd]

Has anyone had any forward movement with this issue? I tried a few things to no avail. The scratch paper does seam to remember the last stroke pressure and use that but the sliders I still need to do by touch.

[herrkjeldsen]

Any progress? Anything I can do? :)

[herrkjeldsen]

Sorry to bump. I'd love an progress update on the palette issue on the surface pro 3 :)

[HwyStar]

I'm on the fence about getting a Surface Pro 3 or a Macbook Pro with Intuos tablet and would like to know as well, if the Surface Pro issue will be resolved. The 10" iPad screen is just to small for my aging eyes. Works great but is to small. If Apple would just bring out the iPad Pro then I would be set for traveling!

[MattRage]

We've still not been able to replicate the problem regardless of which drivers we install, which means there's no solution in the works right now. If you are seeing the problem you may be able to help us find out what's going on if you can send us a full list of services running on your device. Because we know that the device works out of the box, it's likely that something else installed on the system is responsible for the issue. While we haven't been able to track down what, it's likely that a device driver (possibly installed to add support for apps that don't support the current standard) is responsible. If we can get a full list of what's running on the device (the Processes and Services lists from the Task Manager should suffice) we can at least do a comparison here and see if we can spot anything unusual.

If you're experiencing the problem, feel free to mail that list to [email protected] and we can take a look.

[HwyStar]

Thanks for the follow up Matt! Much appreciated.

[herrkjeldsen]

After reinstalling windows today (windows 10 though), it does indeed seem to work out of the box. I don't know what I have had installed that might have interfered on my previous installation, apart from wintab and radial menu. I have reinstalled wintab, and it is still working so far. I will probably be installing radial menu later, so we'll see if it perhaps causes some issue then :)

[herrkjeldsen]

All seems to be working for me with radial menu installed as well. Weird :) I am getting a crash here and there though, but that is probably not related.

[herrkjeldsen]

Guess I spoke too soon. Upon uninstalling and then reinstalling wintab (trying to get krita pressure sensitivity and rightclick to work), it appears that artrage has redeveloped the unresponsive palette issue.

Uninstalling wintab, radial menu and artrage, and then reinstalling artrage only does not seem to correct the issue either.

[MattRage]

Which wintab driver are you installing? I've used the nTrig driver without any problems. One other thing to note is that uninstalling ArtRage does not clear the preferences, resetting preferences via the prefs panel should revert the application to its original state. Because ArtRage doesn't do anything at a system level there's no reason that resetting prefs wouldn't reset all relevant tablet IO behaviour to exactly the same state it was when it was working so, while I don't like to sound like I'm trying to shift blame, it does sound like something in one of the other utilities you installed has left something resident after uninstall that is interfering with stylus input.

[herrkjeldsen]

Which wintab driver are you installing? I've used the nTrig driver without any problems. One other thing to note is that uninstalling ArtRage does not clear the preferences, resetting preferences via the prefs panel should revert the application to its original state. Because ArtRage doesn't do anything at a system level there's no reason that resetting prefs wouldn't reset all relevant tablet IO behaviour to exactly the same state it was when it was working so, while I don't like to sound like I'm trying to shift blame, it does sound like something in one of the other utilities you installed has left something resident after uninstall that is interfering with stylus input.

Hi Matt! Thanks for the preferences tip!

I'm using the Wintab 1.0.0.17 64-bit driver. Could that be the culprit? Do you perhaps have a link to the one you are using?

And it doesn't sounds like you are shifting blame at all :) I think you are probably right! I just can't figure out what is causing it :)

[MattRage]

We were also using 1.0.17. I see a note when searching that there's a 1.0.18 driver for Win10 but I haven't been able to locate it on Microsoft's pages yet (there's a link here: http://surfaceproartist.com/blog/2014/6/20/n-trigs-wintab-driver-update-now-available-for-download).

A selective restart might be a good way to go from here. Drop an email directly to me at [email protected] and we can go through that to see if we can identify what's causing the problem.

[herrkjeldsen]

I have just rolled back to the barebone windows 10 installation, and added artrage(works splendidly so far) and wintab 1.0.0.18. I'm going to avoid installing radial menu this time around, and see if it keeps working. And then attempt a reinstallation of radial menu some time down the road. If I see the error again, I will certainly take you up on the offer of mailing you :) Thanks again for your help so far!

[MattRage]

I installed the radial menu and took a look at it yesterday. I didn't get lag when using it, but I looked around their forums and I did see some things that make me think it might be intercepting gestures and key events, which could in theory interfere with RTS processing. I should add that this is entirely unsubstantiated, it's just a theory, but I wonder if there's an interaction between that and the RTS system that's somehow causing ArtRage to lag slightly on input. I'll poke around it a bit more and see if I can configure our Surface Pro to fail...

[herrkjeldsen]

That is great Matt! I really appreciate your persistence :)

I have no idea what RTS means, but I assume it is something important radialmenu shouldn't mess with :D Thanks again!

[HannahRage]

That is great Matt! I really appreciate your persistence :)

I have no idea what RTS means, but I assume it is something important radialmenu shouldn't mess with :D Thanks again!

RTS - RealTime Stylus - is one of the two main tablet driver types that are used with Windows. The other is Wintab. Basically, touchscreen devices usually use RTS and graphics tablets usually use Wintab. But sometimes wires get a bit crossed if one is corrupt, or Windows thinks the wrong one exists (which can be caused by other programs 'messing' with the signals, or by introducing unneeded extra drivers to confuse the issue), so you have to tell ArtRage to ignore whatever Windows is telling it/is being detected, and that it has to use the other one.

There's a bit more info under 'Input Device' in the manual: https://www.artrage.com/manuals/artrage-4/preferences/

[herrkjeldsen]

Thanks Hannah, I'm learning something new every day :)

Today the bug appeared again though, but I think perhaps I have found a clue. Since yesterday the only thing I altered on my surface was the setting for press and hold to right click under Pen and touch in the control panel. It seems that turning this feature off results in the issue where some panels won't responding to the pen? If I enable the right click by press and hold it starts working as expected again!

Is that perhaps duplicatable on your end?

[MattRage]

Okay - Checked this out and I can confirm that the problem appears here if we switch off press and hold for right click. This is surprising because Press and Hold for Right Click used to cause almost this exact issue when turned on and we advised turning it off. It looks like something in the OS changed.

We'll look in to it as we revise our input systems. Thanks for finding that!

[herrkjeldsen]

Hi, sorry to revive an old thread. Any progress on the unresponsive panels/right click to hold issue on the surface pro? The issue seems persistent with the latest update as well.