[CalG]

Hi all, is there a way to disable to Arenas tab in Kai? every build I have tried is hanging at some point when browsing the arenas. When I browse using only the Games tab everything works perfectly.

I am trying to set it up for my little brother but its proving to be difficult with all the hangs, once its hung it hangs the machine every time it boots up unless you remove it from the network.

If I could make it so the Arenas tab wasn't active all my problems would go away.

Thanks for any advice.

[hicaow]

its freezing because of the icons being downloaded .. its a well known issue.. read this to fix ..

or better yet, let me just post this part of that thread which is the actual "fix" just in case so there is no confusion:


OK after not being able to find any answers, I did some basic testing and here is my 2cents worth regarding some of the problems going on with this freezing situation. First you cant just FTP over the avatarCache/arenaCache from the computer for a couple of reasons. For one, many of the file names are too long and they break the XBox's FATX partition character limit of 42 characters. Second (and more important), XBMC (or more precisely the Xlink part) doesnt even use that same naming. XBMC Xlink connects to the Xlink client, downloads the icons but converts icon names to some type of Hex value type based name (Im guessing in part to overcome the FATX limitations). For example the icon for "arena_xbox_first person shooter_halo 2.jpg" is renamed and saved as "avatar-a37c9a3.jpg" when XBMC downloads the icons. I dont see how FTPing over "arena_xbox_first person shooter_halo 2.jpg" or any other icon from c:\Program Files\XLink Kai Evolution VII\avatarCache would ever work because those names are not hex based as XBMC Xlink uses.

The problem with newer XBMC builds is that somewhere along the path of downloading and renaming the icons, Xlink is freezing due to a bug or two. I dont believe this issue is related to too long a file name being downloaded and converted because you can take a very large icon name like "arena_xbox_first person shooter_greg hastings tournament paintball maxd.jpg" or its Xbox Xlink name "avatar-56d7746d.jpg" and delete it from the thumbnail directory and the Xbox will have no trouble downloading the icon without freezing the next time it is started. This would seem to me like too long a file name being downloaded and converted is not the problem. The problem seems to occur when the Xbox is trying to download and convert several icons at once that it doesnt already have in its thumbnail directory.

To prevent freezing you need to have all the icons already renamed by XBMC Xlink in the XlinkKai thumbnail directory. You could do this by downloading an old XBMC version that didnt have the freezing bug (In my case I used the July 23rd 2007 T3CH release) and go through all the Xlink arenas which will then download the icons to the XlinkKai folder at /XBMC/UserData/Thumbnails/Programs/XLinkKai/ You could then take this XlinkKai folder save it and make sure you transfer it over to any new XBMC release that has the freezing bug. I have made a zip file already containing all these renamed thumbnails for anyone that doesnt want the hassle of going through all the XBox arenas themselves to download the icons because it can take a while. I hope this helps everyone.


Extract to /XBMC/UserData/Thumbnails/Programs/XLinkKai/
http://www.zshare.net/download/800937235684bb/

PS If you have background animation enabled you may still get some freezing. To disable background animation click the start button on your joypad and goto personal settings, customize theme and check the disable BG Animation box.

[CalG]

Thanks for the reply, sadly I have already sorted this. The link above gives you 332 icons, after looking around I ended up with 548, I hope they have now all downloaded. Sadly it's still locking up

[hicaow]

theirs also this ..

If you disable Kai Notifications in the Settings/Programs section it is said to help / fix the issue.

that's weird that it still freezes for you , are you sure you have the icons in the correct folder ? .. i can re-produce this issue / fix it just by deleting and replacing the icons ..

you also don't need all the icons as it will only download the ones you go in to , ie xbox / fps etc .. the PSP etc.. ones don't matter as you should go in there anyway.

you don't NEED to use XBMC to use kai ..

[hicaow]

as you should go in

shouldn't go in ..

no edit hurts sometimes :]

[CalG]

Thanks for the reply, sadly no matter what I do the problem still exists. I am personally running the Kai engine on my PC and have no problems, was just trying to sort out an easy way for my brother.