SGI Desktop Special Edition 1.1

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Text File | 1995-11-13 | 21.9 KB | 595 lines

- 1 - 4. _K_n_o_w_n__P_r_o_b_l_e_m_s__a_n_d__W_o_r_k_a_r_o_u_n_d_s Here are the known problems in WebSpace Author 1.0, and ways to avoid or work around them. You should also know that there is a complete WebSpace home site, which has a page called "What's New". This site can be updated after we release this software to you, so it is a good place to look for late-breaking problems and workarounds. The URL is http://webspace.sgi.com/WebSpaceAuthor/index.html +o If WebSpace Author is not responding quickly, it may be because you have the Outline Viewer. The Outline Viewer can slow down operations in the main window because it monitors the scenegraph and might need to redraw after each operation, such as a selection, which modifies the scenegraph. If the Outline Viewer is slowing you down, close it by double-clicking on the "-" sign in the top left of the window border. +o WebSpace Author saves its files as ASCII Inventor 2.1 files when you choose "Save" or "Save As..." from the File menu. (Please see the documentation on the "Publish..." option if you want to generate strict VRML 1.0 files.) Saving as ASCII is inefficient and can make file reading and writing slow. However, WebSpace Author is able to read binary WebSpace Author files. To convert your WebSpace Author files to binary, type this: "ivcat -b myAsciiFile.pronto > myBinaryFile.pronto". You can still double-click on the resultant binary file and it will open WebSpace Author on that file. +o Instanced objects are not handled cleanly in all of the Editors. In some instances, the polygon reducer may incorrectly remove instanced shapes. The object manipulator (the box-like attachment to the selected object) may do strange things to your other instances when you manipulate a single instance. The workaround is to copy and paste objects instead of instancing them. You can still NAME the objects (which does a "DEF") but you cannot USE them via WSA's graphical menus. +o On Impact and RealityEngine, textured scenes may not draw their textures when you change viewers. This will happen if you switch from Walk to Examiner viewer or vice versa. The textures are not lost, they are simply - 2 - not drawn. This is the subject of an OpenGL bug TextureObject which will be fixed in a future OpenGL implementation. For now, if you run into this problem, you can disable the use of TextureObjects by setting the environment variable IV_NO_TEXTURE_OBJECT to 1, and restarting the application. This will cause the textures to be drawn correctly, but you may see a drop in rendering performance. +o On systems with XZ and Extreme graphics, textures may sometimes appear "ripped". This problem is most noticeable in scenes with two polygons that overlap where one polygon is textured and the other is not. A workaround is to add the following node at the top of the data file: Texture2 { image 1 1 1 0xff } This assigns a simple texture to every untextured object. This texture does not have any visual effect, but it will fix the problem since both polygons are now textured. In many cases, this fix will reduce rendering performance. +o A temporary file may be left in /tmp/.wsa* if you preview a file and WSA crashes. These files are removed automatically on reboot. (287771) +o If you delete all control points in the Shape Modeler, it is hard to create new objects. Choose "New" from the Edit menu to start a new object. (290825) +o The Level Of Detail editor returns to the first level when you do a Save from the main window. There is no workaround, but no data is lost. (291210) +o The Polygon Reducer always reduces objects in local coordinates, not global coordinates. This means that objects are decimated based on the size at which they were modelled, not the size at which they appear in the scene. Therefore if you take a battleship modelled at 1:1 scale, and shrink it down to be only 1 meter in length, put it in a room, and then polygon reduce everything in the room, the battleship may not decimate as you would expect. As a workaround, decimate individual objets first and then decimate the room as a whole. (294607) - 3 - +o Drawing may be momentarily slow the first time you move the scene after importing a new object. This is because Inventor caches drawing information, but doesn't build that cache until after it redraws a scene a second time. Once the a redraw are built, the interaction and drawing will be as fast as possible. To force a redraw without moving anything in the scene, simply resize the window, or iconify and deiconify it. (296748) +o The "Optimize Selection..." button on the Tools menu is grayed out when a nested nodekit is selected. You can only optimize a top-level nodekit: if you have an object selected and cannot Optimize it because the Optimizer is grayed out, choose "Select Parent" from the Select menu until it becomes available. +o WebSpaceAuthor cannot read files with textures pointing to remote URLs. You will get a read error if any of your textures are stored as links to "http://...." style URLs. As a workaround, copy those textures to the local system and link to them as files instead. #301871. +o If you have an object for which backface culling makes portions invisible (for instance, a closed room which you are looking at from the outside), you can still pick the invisible (culled) portions. This can make the snapping tool appear to float in space instead of snapping to the visible polygons. To avoid this, move inside the closed object. #301907. +o Objects with negative scales may cause strange behaviors when they are picked. Negative scales are not recommended. There is currently no workaround. (297089) +o If the LOD editor stops responding after you choose "Make Inline..." from the LOD editor menu, it is because the dialog to name the inline appears in the main view instead of the LOD editor. If the main window is not visible, pop up the main window by clicking on its title bar. (298816) +o Home views are not saved when switching viewers: if you switch from walk to examiner viewer or to one of the Working Views, the Home is set to the viewpoint at which you changed viewers. As a workaround, create a named Viewpoint instead of relying on the Go Home button in the viewer. (299733) - 4 - +o When the LOD editor is set into the "View LOD Transitions" mode, the picking of objects is not longer allowed. However, the arrow button stays active, and will highlight after being clicked on even though it is disabled and objects cannot be picked. To pick objects in the LOD editor, make sure you are not in the "View LOD Transitions" mode. (299666) +o In the Examiner Viewer, it is not possible to move beyond the centerpoint of the scene by using the Dolly thumbwheel. (The centerpoint of the scene is the point about which the scene rotates.) To get around this, switch to the Walk Viewer by hitting Ctrl-K and continue to use the Dolly thumbwheel to get closer. (300094) +o The Text and Shape Modelers do not exit when you exit from WebSpace Author. These are separate programs, so you can also launch them multiple times. You must close them separately. (300041) +o The Shape Modeler can be slow when the "Shape Style" is switched to "Splines". Use "Face Set" instead. You can switch back and forth between the two modes if you want to manipulate the object interactively. You may also want to use the Optimizer and/or the Polygon Reducer on the resultant Spline model, since there may be an overabundance of polygons in the generated surface. (301745) +o If you turn on "Show Cull Volumes" from the View menu, and you have multiple objects selected, the culling volume boxes for the secondary selections will be drawn on top of the selection box manipulator. This results in pink/gray color flashing between the two boxes. There is no change in the data, and the culling volumes and selections are both still accurate. Either deselect the objects you are interested in, or turn off "Show Cull Volumes". (303337) +o When you edit the text string in the Text Modeler after resizing the window or dollying in closer to the text, the window may resize and the viewing area may be reset. After adjusting the text string contents, resize the window and/or re-dolly closer to the text. (304821) +o The Seek button (the small crosshairs) on the right- hand side of the main window does not work when you are Viewing mode (the hand). Switch to Selection mode by clicking on the arrow or hitting the ESCape key and try - 5 - seeking again. +o Objects brought into the scene or into the Polygon Reducer may be lit darkly. This may be because the surface normals are inverted. Surface normals for objects can be flipped in the Polygon Reduction Editor by pushing the "Flip Surface Normals" button. (306836) +o When you interactively place an object and you click- drag to scale, the scaling may be unintuitive. This is because the centerpoint for the scaling is the midpoint of the top left edge of the top surface of the bounding box, not the center or the corner of the object. To reposition the object after scaling, use the Snap Target in conjunction with the "Move Selection to Snapping Target" menu entry. (307778) +o The Copy button in the Shape Modeler is always enabled, even if there is no shape to be copied. (308391) +o Some Texture Editor functions may not be undoable. As a workaround, you may want to periodically save your data files. (308716) +o Scenes which contain anchors which point to nonexistent viewpoints in the scene can be read, but the invalid anchors are not removed. To be a conscientious author, you should make sure to check that all your links are valid. An easy way to do this is to Publish the file, preview it in WebSpace, choose "Show Links" from the Options menu, and click on every link in the scene. A more deliberate way is to look at the list of links in the Publish dialog, find every link which starts with a # (meaning it is a viewpoint), and verify that each of those links corresponds to a named Viewpoint in the current file. (309075) +o It is possible to select an object which has textured subparts and have the subpart textures not show up in the texture editor window. Even though this is misleading (after all it should show my selection unchanged), the texture editor correctly shows the result you will get when you press the APPLY button. (309513) +o The "View Selection" function in the View menu can sometimes yield total blackness. Choose "Undo" to get back to the previous viewpoint, and move instead of selecting "View Selection". (309331) - 6 - +o If you open the Polygon Reduction tool on an object containing Inventor nodekits, you get a dialog suggesting you run the 'Optimize Selection' tool on the selection to get rid of the nodekits. If you dismiss the dialog and Optimize the selection to remove the nodekits, the error dialog comes up a second time. This is an artifact of the deselection and reselection of the optimized selection. Please dismiss and ignore the second dialog box if the selection appears in the Polygon Reduction tool's drawing area. (309719) +o If you import an object into WSA, apply a texture to it, and save the result out, you get the image field AND the filename field written out to the file. While this is somewhat inefficient, it is taken care of in the Publish step, when the texture is inlined and JPEG compressed automatically. (309712) +o The Polygon Reduction editor cannot reduce inlined files, and puts up a warning dialog if a selection containing an inline is selected. That warning dialog appears over the main window instead of over the Polygon Reducer if the Polygon Reducer is not already open. If the main window is not visible, pop up the main window by clicking on its title bar. (309552) +o Objects not created in the Shape Modeler cannot be edited in the Shape Modeler. They can be imported only for placement purposes. There is no workaround. (310397) +o If you open the Polygon Reducer and then select an object which is an Inline you will see an error dialog. If you then dismiss the entire Polygon Reducer by double-clicking on the top left corner "-" window border, the application will be unusable because the dialog box has grabbed all the input for the application, but it is now gone. If you do this, then double-click on the top left corner "-" window border in the main window, and when it asks you to save the file, save it. Reopen WSA and continue editing. (310282) +o The locate-highlighting of the line-edged boxes of the Manipulator can be inaccurate: moving the mouse a few pixels away from the edge of the wireframe box itself can still show it as selected. Trust the feedback you are seeing, even though the cursor may be over a different object or face. If you cannot pick another object or surface, try moving closer to the object and reselecting. (303551) - 7 - +o The Make Inline and Set Link tools are disabled if the selected object is a node kit, because the code to perform these operations dosn't handle them. (It assumes the selected object is a Separator.) +o Textures are fetched asynchronously after the base scene has loaded. This occurs even for local textures. There is no workaround except patience. (309526) +o When viewing the scene in the Outline Viewer, selection is fairly straightforward, with the exception of inline and LOD nodes. If you select the parent of an LOD node and open the LOD Editor, no range marks will appear. (This is because the node being modified is the Group or Separator above it. Duplicating the level would therefore create two children, each of which is an LOD node.) Selection at or under an LOD node is truncated at the LOD's parent because only the LOD Editor can modify an LOD node. If the user wishes to modify an existing LOD node, they can select the LOD node or below in the outline viewer. Although the selection gets truncated to the LOD node's parent in the main window and in the Outline Viewer, invoking the LOD Editor will edit the first LOD node in the picked path. Like LOD nodes, Inline nodes should not be modified directly. Thus all selections at or under an inline node are stopped at the Group or Separator above the Inline. However, the actual lowest-level object selected is stored, and the "Unmake Inline" option on the Tools menu will be enabled if the mouse was clicked over an Inline node. A side effect of this is that if you have multiple LODs under a single Separator, you cannot pick and manipulate the LODs independently of each other. If you need to do this, manually edit the file to add a Separator around xeach individual LOD node. (310364) +o If you create links to URLs that are directories and not files, you may see a warning when the Publish dialog checks your URLs. You can safely ignore that warning if you are sure it is valid to link to that directory. A case where this may be valid is when you are making a link to a directory containing a file called "index.html". This behavior is discouraged, however, because it may not be supported by all browsers. (310564) - 8 - +o The "Set" button in the Viewpoints editor is not undoable. There is no workaround other than to save your file before using the Set button, and then performing a "Reopen" from the File menu if you wish to get back to the state before the "Set" occurred. (310666) +o It is possible to type illegal characters in the "Make Inline..." dialog box. Publishing will may create invalid files in this case. You can edit the inline name even after typing Make Inline by selecting the inlined object again and choosing Make Inline again. Please type only characters which are legal UNIX filenames into this dialog box. (309762) +o If you open the LOD editor on an object which has only one level of detail and then use the Appearance editors from the LOD editor, it is possible that your changes may not be saved in the main scene. This is because the LOD editor caches the selection in order to speed its operations. Do not use the appearance editors in the LOD editor to edit objects which are not levels in a multi-level LOD node. (310511) +o The "Import As URL..." tool on the File menu does not allow you to interactively place the imported object. Instead, the object is automatically placed in the scene. If you do not see the object appear, then you can find it in one of two ways. Both workarounds assume that the object is still selected: the object will be selected immediately after import, so be careful not to deselect the newly imported object by selecting any other object. One method of finding the imported object is to choose "View Selection" from the View menu. Another is to place the Snapping Target where you would like the imported object to appear, and choose "Move Selection to Snapping Target" from the Edit menu. (309990) +o Performing redo on LOD nodes which have had levels created may dump core if the number of levels have been changed from one to two. The bug only occurs during redo, and only after a sequence of selection and deselection actions before and after the level addition. (310963) +o When counting triangles in the main window, the triangles under the currently rendered LOD will be added to the count. However, the count will not be marked dirty if the level changes due to a change in view, so attempting a recount will result in the same - 9 - number being displayed because the program thinks the count is still up to date. Performing some editing action which actuall marks the scene dirty will allow the triangles of the new level to be counted. (309183)