ArtRage 4 hangs when using stylus

[Pamiiruq]

I'm using ArtRage 4.0.6 on Windows 8.1 with my Surface Pro 2. Everything works relatively perfectly except when I try to use the stylus to interact with the UI in any fashion, except in cases of picking a tool or color.

What happens is if I open a window like the preferences dialog, or tool settings, or even click "Check now" when asking whether to check for updates, if I use the stylus to do this, the application's CPU utilization will spike to close to 30% and the whole program will hang for several seconds. Eventually it will settle back to normal, but the action I made with the stylus may or may not be registered (not sure what criteria makes it register or not).

I took a screenshot during one of these occurrences. In it you can see the program using 29% CPU time and Windows indicates it is "Not responding".

What I did for this screenshot was open the tool settings dialog and then use my stylus to attempt to drag it somewhere else on the screen. The only things I can do with the stylus without the program hanging up is, as I said, selecting a tool or color, or drawing on the canvas.

This is a relatively recent behavior, I believe. If I recall correctly, it only started up sometime within the past few versions.

I don't experience this behavior anywhere else within Windows, so I think it is a bug with ArtRage. I've tried uninstalling and then reinstalling it but it made no difference.

Has anyone else reported this behavior? Is there anything that I can do to fix it, or is it out of my hands and a bug in the program?

[HannahRage]

Okay, this is probably a driver issue.

Troubleshooting Step One:

Go to
> Edit
> ArtRage Preferences
> Input Device
> Turn WinTab OFF and RealTime Stylus ON
> Restart ArtRage and see what happens

If this does not fix it, try turning off the Windows Ink option, You will find this in the driver set up under the Mapping tab, or the Calibration Tab, depending on driver version.

If this does not help, come back and tell us or drop us an email at [email protected] (if it does fix it, tell us that too!)

[Pamiiruq]

Okay, this is probably a driver issue.

Troubleshooting Step One:

Go to
> Edit
> ArtRage Preferences
> Input Device
> Turn WinTab OFF and RealTime Stylus ON
> Restart ArtRage and see what happens

If this does not fix it, try turning off the Windows Ink option, You will find this in the driver set up under the Mapping tab, or the Calibration Tab, depending on driver version.

If this does not help, come back and tell us or drop us an email at [email] (if it does fix it, tell us that too!)

Disabling WinTab didn't fix it.

Also, I don't see any options relating to Windows Ink. I looked through the Windows pen settings and even the stylus properties in the Device Manager but there weren't any options like that to change. Am I missing something?

[MattRage]

Sounds like a driver problem but it's interesting that turning off Wintab support didn't change it. Could you get in touch with us via [email protected] and we can go through some troubleshooting steps to see if we can find out why you're having this problem (we can't replicate it here).

[Pamiiruq]

Sounds like a driver problem but it's interesting that turning off Wintab support didn't change it. Could you get in touch with us via [email] and we can go through some troubleshooting steps to see if we can find out why you're having this problem (we can't replicate it here).

I sent an email. It is from the same account I registered with. Thanks!

[Pamiiruq]

Through some extended debugging on my end with Matt over email (they couldn't reproduce the issue on their end) we discovered that the hangs were related to my disabling "tab and hold to right-click" in Windows' Pen control panel:


I had it disabled, and for whatever reason this caused my hangs to occur. I did not disable it for finger input so I presume that's why it worked perfectly fine.

I re-enabled the option and the problem went away. Matt said he'd make a note of it and investigate why this interacted with ArtRage as I described above. But at least I got it working again for the moment!

Thanks for your help and patience!