Re: geomview-sun

[daeron]

> Hi,
> 	I just got a copy of geomview for the sun, it looks fine,
> but its a little strange not having quite the same interface as in
> the sgi version. I prefer selecting panels, from a menu. Key board short
> cuts don't seem to work in the main window and the colors selection.
> Is it possible to replace object? When running across a network,
> running on a sun and displaying on an iris 24 bit planes I get the
> message 'Failed to allocate all the colors etc.' and I certainly 
> don't get full colors, there may be something I can do with the X interface
> here?
>
 
Hi Rich,

   Yes, these are all known bugs/features. Keyboard short cuts do work, but
only when the camera window has keyboard focus. It may be possible to have
the panels take keyboard input in the future, just like the sgi version.

  There is currently no interface element that allows replacement of objects.
If there were to be one, it would most likely take the form of a pull-down
option menu on the "Open File" panel.

  As for the "failing to allocate colors" problem, this bug is described in
the README-beta, included with the distribution:

> Geomview uses the shared colormap rather than a private colormap. The result
> is that it sometimes cannot allocate the colors it wants which makes scene
> renderings look strange. Usually you can work around this by killing off
> other colormap hungry applications before starting geomview.

The shared colormap is usually (and expected by Geomview to be) 8 bits. On the
SGI, this 8 bit colormap is often more heavily used by applications than on
other machines. 4Dwm (the sgi window manager) alone seems to take up over 40
color cells(!) out of the 256 available. Geomview requires at least 216 (6x6x6)
free cells to work with (plus several for the user interface). On the other
hand, if Geomview used a private colormap, whenever the camera window got focus
there would be "colormap flashing". This just highlights some of the general
stupidity of the X window system.

Future versions of X geomview should look to see if there is a 24 bit colormap
available and use that if possible.
> 
> 	Apologies if you all ready know about all these errors. What
> I really wanted to know was how did you construct the panels, is there
> any thing nice like FORMS or just straight X/motif programming. Could
> I have a look at a bit of the source code to see how its done?
> 
> 	Bye for now
> 
> 		Rich

The panels are implemented with X/motif but designed using "mib" (motif
interface builder) a little program I whipped up with drag and drop
capabilities similar to the NeXT interface builder. The source for X geomview
is on the Geometry Center file system in /u/gcg/ngrap/src/bin/geomview/x11
and the source for mib is in /u/gcg/ngrap/src/bin/mib. The mib library (which
is basically a wrapper around motif) is in /u/gcg/ngrap/src/lib/mib.

Hope this helps. Feel free to forward any other questions you have about the
X version of Geomview to me.

best wishes,

Daeron
daeron at geom.umn.edu