Drawing errors w/o 3D accelerated graphics?

[alizhan]

I just grabbed 2.5 and installed it. I almost immediately went for the 3D mode (since I had never gotten that to work on my own with previous versions), and almost immediately ran into trouble.

Unfortunately, I don't have the exact message in front of me, but the gist is: "Cannot create texture; Needed Size: 2048x1024, Maximum Size: 1024x1024." This message is followed by a warning telling me that I don't have 3D accelerated graphics (which indeed I don't), and then a grayscale surface map. Disappointing, but not completely unexpected.

Then, after scrolling around a bit, salivating, TF suddenly locked up. No reponse from anything. I let it sit for a few minutes (since rendering the GL scene can take a minute or two on my machine), but TF never came back. I finally killed it with Task Manager (Win 2000, up-to-date). Again, TF does this on a somewhat regular basis anyway, so I wasn't too worried.

Unfortunately, when I reloaded, TF was not happy. The window comes up, and all the controls draw, but the map area never does. It simply retains the image of whatever was drawn there most recently (desktop, tool-tips, menus, etc.--just not the map). The program responds normally, and acts like it thinks its drawing (pauses in the same way for rendering), but nothing ever actually gets drawn. Toggling between the various 2D/3D modes and tilesets doesn't seem to help--in fact, nothing seems to help.

I have recreated part of this second problem on another machine: late-model P4 with 3D acceleration and gobs of memory. The moment I try to toggle back to 2D mode, the drawing area stops redrawing (and just collects garbage). On this machine, though, hitting the 3D button again will bring up a new 3D view, and toggling the state of the track list twice will finally cause it to show 2D plots again.

Any ideas? Also, is 3D acceleration basically required for TF to operate at this point (like with Roxio)?

Thanks. From what little I saw, the new version looks nice.

  -- Mark

[Krein]

Hi,

Sorry for the delay in response.  I've been out riding, and then I've had tons of "lost my code" emails to respond to.

The first thing to try is to update your video drivers, even if you don't have 3d accleration.  This might solve it.

3d acceleration is not required, even for 3d, and especially not for 2d regular operation.

If updating drivers does not help, please send us your TopoFusion.log file so we can take a look.  Thanks.

[alizhan]

Quote (Krein @ Mar. 01 2005,9:24)

The first thing to try is to update your video drivers, even if you don't have 3d accleration.  This might solve it.

Apparently that was the problem on the old system. It took a while to find new drivers for such an ancient graphics card, but once I installed them TF starting acting properly. I'll keep hunting for updated drivers for the newer machine.

One suggestion: if the maximum texture turns out smaller than the texture requested (e.g., req: 2048x1024, max: 1024x1024), it would be nice for TF to just use the maximum size available.

  -- Mark