Running Wilbur on the Macintosh

[su_liam]

For those of you who, like me, prefer to do their work in mac os, I've found a new option.

Wilbur is a very nice heightfield editing program for Windows. Being free adds a whole additional level of goodness. At least for the user...

I ran the program through Wineskin, which as you might surmise is a particular implementation of Wine on the mac. The downloaded Wineskin Winery allows you to create double-clickable "skins" for windows applications.

Wilbur was probably the hardest problem for me to get running. The installer worked fine once I set up the Wineskin Screen Options to Use Mac Driver. X11 doesn't seem to start right for me.

Once Wilbur is installed, though, it doesn't run. vcomp100.dll not found.

I've tried using winecfg in the Tools tab to start using Windows 8, and the program runs fine, but I can't save files. I've also tried installing the Visual C++ Redistributable Components, but the installed vcomp100 doesn't work.

Instead, download a copy of the vcomp100.dll here(use the zip file). Open the Wineskin package containing Wilbur and copy the dll to drive_c/windows/system32. You now have an Uncle Bob!

Everything seems to work well except for the 3D Preview Window. Apparently, opengl isn't supported... The failure is graceful, though, the program doesn't crash or anything!

So far, the speed is decent, comparable to Bootcamp or faster. On my six year old, not top-of-the-line when I got it MacBook, Wilbur on Wine can run an 8k x 4k heightfield slowly, but without crashing. On Bootcamp, with Windows XP, Wilbur promptly crashed with an hf of that size. I have no idea how fast or slow it might have been. For an hf of 2k x 1k, speed is reasonable and still reliable.

For further information, I posted a much longer-winded instruction set on my terrible blog here.

[waldronate]

It's odd that the 3D preview window doesn't work but that the main window does: they both use OpenGL.

[su_liam]

Okay. A bit more information.
3D Preview seems to work. Still can't resize the window, and if I check the Perspective box, things get strange.
With Perspective checked, I can, with a bit of careful fiddling, get a strip of the terrain to show up on screen. The mouse controls are fiddly(this is true without the perspective box, but considerably less so) and really confusing. Rather than rotating, translating and zooming the view, they seem to just make the ribbon of terrain writhe about in unpredictable ways.

In the past, I've never had any luck getting Wilbur to work in Wine, and now it's running pretty nicely. All the reviews I've seen described Wilbur on Wine as being a bit better than Garbage. Currently, I'd rate it a bit less than perfect.

That's a major improvement, and the program is now quite useful on my Mac. I think that rates a smile.

Even if the 3D Preview was completely non-functional, I'd give this "port" at least a Bronze, probably a Silver.

Oh, by the way, since I got you here Waldronate. The BT saves upside down(flipped vertically). This is true pretty much across the board for me whether I'm opening in SAGA, QGIS(mac and PC), or converting with GDAL. Probably should have mentioned it some time ago, but...

EDIT: One feature request I'd have(well I have many, but most of them are obvious and difficult like Layers), would be to have the option to save BTs without UTM params, preferably with a latlong/geographic/"unprojected" option. Perhaps in preferences or, somewhat peculiarly, in Geoid Parameters.
Thank you for looking in on this.

[waldronate]

If I ever get another version released, I'll get those BT changes in there. Don't hold your breath, though; the Wilbur code base is in pretty sorry shape at the moment and it's going to take a while to get things put back together again. One of these years I'll just switch to GDAL for the majority of the file I/O and solve a lot of problems...

[waldronate]

I guess this is a good a year as any to get an update out. I've added version 1.81 of Wilbur to the web site at software if you'd like to give it a spin. I converted it to use MFC 10 instead of the previous assortment of bits and pieces. It has fixes for the BT things you mentioned and has a few other goodies as well (the V2 shader that I used in http://www.cartographersguild.com/ma...e-octonia.html is one example).

[su_liam]

Well, I went and grabbed Wilbur 1.81. I was able to install and run it in Wineskin, though I had to add the vcomp100 dll as before, and I had to run down the mfc100.dll from the same place I grabbed the vcc components.

I haven't given it a real thorough workout yet(I didn't even try out the 3d preview!), but the interface mostly looks good.
That v2 shader looks promising, but I'm still trying to figure out what makes it tick.

Give me a few days to run through this puppy.
That said, always really excited by a new Wilbur release. I'm really not a sycophant, I just play one on the internet.

[waldronate]

It seems that the cheapo installer that comes with VS2010 doesn't include the redistributables. I should probably include a note. I should probably get also a real installer program some day, but that sounds hard. The UI in this version uses less custom components and more straight VS2010 things, so it might work better. The OpenGL preview is still the same custom code, though, so it may still have the same problems there.

The V2 shader was what I arrived at by being lazy. The default should look suspiciously similar to certain shading styles on maps hereabouts.

[su_liam]

I wonder if the V2 shader couldn't be modified to use the absolute value of the latitude. Then it would be more usable for global maps. A spherical noise option would rock! Also, is there any way to tone down the polar icecaps? They seem to extend down to about the 30th parallel...

Did you ever notice how some jerks can turn your laziness into extra work?

Sadly, my attempts to simulate the arid band around the STHZ ran into the problem of medium altitude deserts at the equator. Hmm?

[waldronate]

I'll take your suggestions under consideration if I have time to get around to working on Wilbur again. The basic computation is to map 0-90 latitude to the 0-1 range of the color list and then modulate that basic color index by the other feature of the shader (fraction offset, fraction of altitude, fraction of slope, fraction of noise noise) to get the final index into the color list. That basic color is then modulated by (normal dot light) to get the final shaded image. To turn off the altitude adjustment, set that component to 0. To see the raw, unadjusted color, set everything to 0. The units are a little bit weird, and I'm pretty sure that I have at least one constant scale factor upside-down (pi/180 instead of 180/pi).

The defaults are some that I picked after just a few hours of fiddling. There are no doubt much better settings that could be used. Your job, should you choose to accept it, is to find such settings... Many, many such settings...

[Runninghead]

I've got Wilbur 1.85 running on my Mac now and I'm working on a tutorial walkthrough.
Should have it done and uploaded in a few days.
Will be handy for 2016 users looking to get 32Bit 1.85 on to a Mac running El Capitan+

After this I hope to create a simple (beginners) guide to getting started using Wilbur 1.85 too.