Embedded documents are very unstable when editing/painting inside them and when closing the main document

[Frozen Death Knight]

I have recently been trying to implement embedded documents into my workflow inside Affinity just like I used to when I used Photoshop regularly as a way to improve performance of my projects. Although I have managed to figure out a workaround to add an embedded layer into my documents so I can start using them to optimise my document performance, I am now starting to notice some big problems with this workflow that prevent it from being viable. Here are the main problems:

1) Any edit done to the embedded layer will automatically update to the main document. This might not sound too bad at first, but with the document sizes I am currently working at, this is a massive headache because it makes it so that the switching quickly between documents is really, really slow. On multiple occassions I have had Affinity freeze for several seconds because the main document has to update every time I switch from the embedded layers. Sometimes it even permanently freezes the entire software and I lose ALL progress I have done inside that document with nothing saved (you can't even save inside the embedded document, which makes this problem even worse).  

2) You can't save inside of the embedded document, as mentioned previously. To me this is a problem, since the current live editing of the embedded layer preview is very, very taxing for my PC and I would vastly prefer it if the main document only updated itself when you saved your progress inside the embedded layer. This would make working with tons of embedded documents a lot more feasible and make sure that performance is consistent across the board.

3) Closing the main document while the embedded document is open freezes Affinity. Been trying it multiple times and I keep getting very consistent results here.

4) Performance is overall quite unstable when I edit an embedded layer for longer sessions. For instance, when I paint I often get random lag spikes and freezes, which is most likely caused by the live editing in the main document. Even with just one layer in the embedded documents the performance can nosedive in an instant, even when you aren't doing anything special.

Here's a video of some of the problems I mentioned.

This feature really needs the option to disable the live editing of the main document and allow you to save your progress inside of your embedded document which then updates the main document with the changes. Until this happens the feature simply creates more performance problems than it is actually supposed to solve.

[Gabe]

Hi @Frozen Death Knight,

Sorry for the delayed reply.

The live editing of embedded files is by design.

The only bug here would be the not responding state when you close the main document. Any chance you can try the latest beta and see if it's any better? When you close the main doc, the embedded one should auto-close too. 

[Frozen Death Knight]

5 hours ago, Gabe said:

Hi @Frozen Death Knight,

Sorry for the delayed reply.

The live editing of embedded files is by design.

The only bug here would be the not responding state when you close the main document. Any chance you can try the latest beta and see if it's any better? When you close the main doc, the embedded one should auto-close too. 

The live editing is a nice feature to have for some I suppose, but on my end this is a big problem since it makes my desired workflow pretty unstable. Back when I used Photoshop I didn't have to deal with lag spikes and freezes when switching between documents since updates to the main document only happened when I saved the smart object document. When I try to do the same in Affinity I can lose a lot of work because switching between the embedded and main documents can lead to perma-freezes. If I can't access the main document without freezes to save my progress, all of it will be gone.

I hope you at least consider an alternate way of allowing the user to save from the embedded document so that potentially hours of work don't get lost because of one crash. Also, please allow an option to disable automatic updates to the main document so performance is more reliable.

The latest Betas are very unstable for me with near immediate crashes, so there is no way for me to try this I'm afraid. Will have to wait till a more stable one comes out before I attempt such a thing.

[Frozen Death Knight]

@Gabe Okay, so apparently a new Beta came out yesterday and actually did fix the crashes I was experiencing, so I am able to test this now. Just assumed it was still unstable because the only change mentioned was unrelated to the crashes, but hey, it works.

Anyway, I have done some testing and my conclusion is that closing the main document still crashes Affinity in the Beta version. So yeah, still a problem I'm afraid.