New to Digital Cartography? Software General Information

[Redrobes]

I agree with all that said there. I started writing my app as a campaign world mapper first and added the VTT bit second. If all you ever do is battle map fights then its not useful to have zoom - well some are like ranged weapons or flying battles etc but most hand to hand stuff can be done at a fixed battle scale.

What I wanted was a system where you could have many many DMs all mapping bits of a world and bring it all together - a lot like the CWBP, which is why I try to support it as much as I am able. I would like to go into a city and pick any house and go in and get the map - a proper map that makes sense instead of a random one.

Trevor is right in saying that you lose something having the map in a custom format. If all the mappers and VTTs used a common format then it would not be the case and I think we would agree that having it in that format would then be better. Its the lack of interchangeability thats the problem. Since PNGs are being used almost exclusively now for the image format then that is something that can be agreed is the good format for a tokens nowadays. Its actually extremely difficult to come up with a common format however. We could all use XML and extend it in the ways required by each app but I don't think even then that it would be capable to doing what we want. I keep my layout icon files as text so you can read them and maybe write a script to convert if required but I doubt anyone would.

Having the map in a custom format that allows for reuse of the images does save a lot of memory tho. I have asked before and was told that DF does this and like MT, I do it too. I was told that DF wraps all its used images into the map file. I keep mine separate and I don't know what MT does. If you looking at a map with a lot of reuse then it gets very small indeed. I have some music score which is so tiny its unbelievable. Its actually smaller than the vector file PDF of the same music and about the same res too and then of course a second page of score would be proportionally less again given the extra reuse. Also in the same vein, the RAM used while looking at the map is a lot smaller too since the map 'image' is held as a series of variable resolution parts and we don't burn RAM with layers holding a lot of blank areas. Pro's and Con's always - its just that some people don't see that there are some cons with their one big piece of software.

[Redrobes]

Dormouse, I have no idea why your system is running that so slowly. For the top line to print that it would suggest that the app is asking if your card driver supports OpenGL and its saying it does. Then it goes off and asks if it supports a list of required features and its not complained that any are missing. So as far as its concerned it has linked to the ATI card driver and has handed off all drawing to it. So for it to go so slow implies that the ATI driver is not running OpenGL correctly.

If you go to the desktop, right click, for the Display Properties, Settings, Advanced, Troubleshoot. There is a slider to control hardware acceleration. Yank it all the way to the left for None. Ok that and try the demo again. I tried it and got this...

Your graphics card is not capable of accelerating this OpenGL
    application. The program will still run, though very slow
    depending on how fast your CPU is. If you are expecting that
    your card should have accellerated OpenGL then check that
    the driver is installed properly. Certain older cards may
    claim to accelerate some OpenGL but this program is requiring
    features not supported by it. Look at www.viewingdale.com
    to see if there are any special notes about this card

OpenGL is successfully running this application using the Windows
    software renderer.

Frames rendered: 864

Frames per second: 28.8

Your system is of moderate speed and will run ViewingDale though
    you will notice some slow down on complex scenes.

You would benefit greatly from adding a graphics card that accelerated
    OpenGL when running ViewingDale.

So this is using the software renderer which on my machine is about 15x slower than hardware rendering, but even then, its not 4fps. I am wondering if you did this that it would actually speed it up in your case !

Dont forget to slide the troubleshooting bar back to the right !

I would suggest updating the driver but thats up to you and its a good idea to take a system restore point before doing it (http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/u...emrestore.mspx) . I am sure that you would find other apps like Blender, Sketchup and so on would run a lot better if your OpenGL was functional.

[dormouse]

Dormouse, I have no idea why your system is running that so slowly.

SOLVED! (I think)

I would suggest updating the driver

I did that. Difference nil or minimal.

I always thought that the issue was likely to be a conflict with something else running on my machine. I'd not noticed any other application running slower than it should so I have no idea if anything other than VD was or might have been affected. Your Test App was really helpful in testing as I suspended/unloaded various processes etc.

Turned out (I think) that the culprit was CircleDock. Unfortunately, it's something I have open and use all of the time. I shall report the issue, but unfortunately again the developer seems to have been taken over by real life a few months ago. Anyway, I have reinstalled VD and will have a look; I'm willing to spend some time without CircleDock, every now and then at least

[Redrobes]

SOLVED!

Wow, cool. I have no idea what this does so ill look it up. Why do you think its conflicting then ?

[Redrobes]

...culprit was CircleDock. Unfortunately, it's something I have open and use all of the time. I shall report the issue, but unfortunately again the developer seems to have been taken over by real life a few months ago. Anyway, I have reinstalled VD and will have a look; I'm willing to spend some time without CircleDock, every now and then at least

You have a very large RAM card so it ought to be able to store textures for big icons and have enough RAM to keep several screens going with 3D accel. The only thing I can think of is that circledock is continuously loading textures and rendering all the time and burning all the power. My main app goes idle when it stops moving and updating and it defers to other apps a lot too so its likely to come off worst in a duke out for resources. The test app should hog it a bit more tho for the 30 secs but I am not making any significant hard effort to take over the machine for the 30 secs - the expectation is that the machine is idle when you run it.

[dormouse]

Having the map in a custom format that allows for reuse of the images does save a lot of memory tho. I have asked before and was told that DF does this and like MT, I do it too. I was told that DF wraps all its used images into the map file. I keep mine separate and I don't know what MT does.

I see that. For a VTT, it's much more efficient to keep images separate because they might be used in different maps. For a pure mapmaker, the advantage of wrapping everything in the map is that it becomes totally portable between users (not that I noticed many users of DF exchanging maps