To LUGNET HomepageTo LUGNET News HomepageTo LUGNET Guide Homepage
 Help on Searching
 
Post new message to lugnet.cad.dev.macOpen lugnet.cad.dev.mac in your NNTP NewsreaderTo LUGNET News Traffic PageSign In (Members)
 CAD / Development / Macintosh / 797
796  |  798
Subject: 
Re: Need (working) program to generate instruction pictures
Newsgroups: 
lugnet.cad.dev.mac
Date: 
Sun, 4 Mar 2007 20:18:07 GMT
Viewed: 
5122 times
  
In lugnet.cad.dev.mac, Jim DeVona wrote:
In lugnet.cad.dev.mac, Christopher Masi wrote:
OK. I've set up a proper .MacOSX/environment.plist now, but I can't see that
it's made any difference. The [mis]behavior is the same. This and the video
information your provided supports my gut feeling that the problem is limited to
the display mechanism rather than any of the underlying LDraw stuff.

The the faster 17" and 20" iMacs use an ATi Radeon X1600 graphics
processor, and the 24" iMac uses a NVIDIA GeForce 7300 GT graphics
processor. The MacBook Pros use an ATI Mobility Radeon X1600 graphics
processor. I suspect that is why I don't have any display artifacts and
you do.

Ah, I didn't realize your machine is a MacBook Pro. I thought it was a plain
MacBook, like mine. Indeed there are considerable video differences between
these models that may explain the different experiences we've had. I think
that's useful to know.

I haven't followed all of this, but I suspect this is probably a driver
issue.  Ldglite is getting pretty old.  It's so old that when I wrote the
opengl bits the hardware (and software opengl) of the time was typically unable
to render the model fast enough to make double buffering practical.
So I chose to render in the front buffer.  That way you could at least see
something as the model was drawn.  Nowadays the hardware is much faster,
so everyone expects things to be rendered in double buffer mode, which
is reasonable.  Except the driver writers don't seem to even bother to test
front buffer rendering.  So it no longer works on many hardware opengl
implementions.  ATI drivers are especially bad, and not just on Macs.

You can try to force double buffering in ldglite with the -n2 or -n4
command line switches, but this may interact badly with some of the
other unusual obsolete old-school performance tricks I used (especially in
ledit mode).

Sorry about that.  I suppose I could build an offscreen only version of
ldglite for the Mac using only the osmesa software opengl implementation.
I think this is still in use by peeron and ldraw.org to render parts.  It
could also be used to render STEP image files without requiring any opengl
drivers or hardware.  Would that be useful?

Don



Message has 1 Reply:
  Re: Need (working) program to generate instruction pictures
 
(...) Good call. I ran it with -n4, and that makes things visible during rotation. The status bar and final appearance of the model (after you stop rotating, if your rotation style is different) don't get drawn until obscured by a menu, etc., so (...) (18 years ago, 4-Mar-07, to lugnet.cad.dev.mac)

Message is in Reply To:
  Re: Need (working) program to generate instruction pictures
 
(...) OK. I've set up a proper .MacOSX/environment.plist now, but I can't see that it's made any difference. The [mis]behavior is the same. This and the video information your provided supports my gut feeling that the problem is limited to the (...) (18 years ago, 4-Mar-07, to lugnet.cad.dev.mac)

12 Messages in This Thread:



Entire Thread on One Page:
Nested:  All | Brief | Compact | Dots
Linear:  All | Brief | Compact

This Message and its Replies on One Page:
Nested:  All | Brief | Compact | Dots
Linear:  All | Brief | Compact
    

Custom Search

©2005 LUGNET. All rights reserved. - hosted by steinbruch.info GbR