SGI: Computer Graphics

OK, I've packaged the stuff more sanely, upgraded to a new version of
wings, and put together a web page about it. See:
http://jdboyd.net/wings/
and let me know if I left out anything important.

Sorry, tar.bz2s rather than tardists.

There are two known bugs specific to the Irix version. They are mentioned on that web page. One of them is a major pain when it happens, but the other isn't that big of a deal.

Thanks!

woah, finally. will try this out very soon. muchos gracias.

since you mentioned the crash bug on your webpage: i once compiled it myself but it kept crashing X all the time at even the most basic operations. curious to see how your build behaves on my system.

you might check if the wings team (specifically dan) knows anything about what might cause the crashes.

you might check if the wings team (specifically dan) knows anything about what might cause the crashes.

I'm going to have to try emailing them. The wings message board refuses to let me post. I've been trying.

Anyway, I did a lot last night trying to work on this crashing bug. I've realized two things. It is a much worse bug than I suspected, but it is so far completely repeatable.

It mostly effects operations on faces. For the most part, operations on vertexs, edges, and objects work fine. I haven't finished trying everything, but I've tried most things. A write-up of what does and doesn't crash it will be posted to my website ( http://www.jdboyd.net/wings/ ) later today. I haven't finished testing every operation, and I especially haven't tested yet whether an operation that locks it up when selected from a menu also locks it up when called via a hotkey.

In the mean time, the operations that crash it can be worked around, but doing so is slow and annoying. For instant, extrude face of all types consistantly locks up wings and the desk top. Extrude edges works just fine though, and you can then use the vertex on the extruded edges to build the missing face. Despite being able to work around the problems, I would classify Wings on Irix, at this point, as unusable.

yep, i tested wings on my box before reading your reply and boom - it crashed my machine after 5 seconds of actually using it. a simple face inset did the trick.
seems like it's the exact same behaviour that i experienced back then when i built it myself. at that time i believed that it was caused by my outdated irix/compiler/library-environment and didn't investigate further.

btw. home machine specs:
indigo2 max impact, R10k@195, 256 mb ram, irix 6.5.12

if wings crashes, i'm forced to press reset since the vulcan grip brings me only to a dead login screen where mouse and keyboard do not repond.

yep, i tested wings on my box before reading your reply and boom - it crashed my machine after 5 seconds of actually using it. a simple face inset did the trick.

The short summary of my findings about crashs is that many of the face operations (other than move/scale/rotate) cause crashes, but very few of the other classes of operations cause crashs (but there are a few that do).

BTW, the only bug when one is running wings on linux with the display piped to Irix is the icons. And it doesn't take much of a machine for this to work decently. Any P2 with 128megs of ram, and a decent ethernet card (not the Realteks, but preferably something like 3Com, Intel, or Dec Tulip based, because Realteks eat a lot of CPU power) should be fine for piping the display over. A machine like this should cost you less than $100.

At this point, I'm wondering what happens if I run wings on Irix, but pipe the display over to linux. When I next have time at home I shall have to try this.

A big problem with me working on this is that I mostly use my Octane for real work, and only turn to work on wings as a diversion. If I have to close all of my real work first before spending 20 minutes on wings because of the desktop locking up, it is a major annoyance to have to reopen all the files, emacs windows, shells and other tools. I have a feeling I'm not going to make large amounts of progress on this until I get an additional machine to use for testing.

for me wings would be an ideal modelling sidekick that i long wished to have on irix. of course that means that it has to run on the sgi box and that i can rely on it in a way that i don't have to fear that all my work will be lost just because of a wings crash.

still, i'm interested into your progress and have just posted in the wings forums in your thread over there. maybe we can get this solved. as dan mentioned, esdl doesn't even operate yet on a 64 bit os...

ive just downloaded this to play with on my O2...

has any progress been made with the randon locking up???

none that i'm aware of. some time ago, i tried wings on Vpro, hoping that it would make the difference but the crashes still occured.

MattPayne wrote: :) ive just downloaded this to play with on my O2...

has any progress been made with the randon locking up??? :)

So are you saying it effects O2 as well? I didn't have my O2 yet when I last had time to work on it.

Oh, and for me it wasn't random. It was always specific menu items that caused trouble. I don't recall if using keystrokes for those actions instead of the menus helped. I've documented the functionalities that trigger the problem here: http://jdboyd.net/wings/bug.html

The big problem for me working on this is that I don't know erlang, and I'm not a major Irix expert. Since I last worked on it, I've picked up a little (very small) amount of erlang. Hopefully enough to be able to start instrumenting the code near the actions that cause trouble. I've also learned about a tool called Ogldebug.

Moving on from here, I think the first step would be to see if the keystrokes prevent crashing. The second step might be to use ogldebug to see if it finds any errors. I figure that most likely only an OpenGL or X11 related bug would cause the machine to misbehave in the way it does. Someone should verify that.

To be clear, I'm still interested in getting this fixed up. However, I still don't have the time to devote to it. I'm hoping that in the near future, I will have a spare machine set up to dedicate to working on wings, which would help (by not requiring me to have to repeatedly reset my main workstation that I tend to keep other work open on).

Also, at this point, it may be wisest to build the latest version of erlang and the latest version of wings. Hopefully the latest erlang will still be easy to build on Irix.

If other people want to work on it, I have the time to coordinate, but not much more. Work has me in major crunch mode from now until likely May.

ive not been able to install it yet... I untared the archive and the executable wouldnt work for me... i forget the error that came up, but ill have another look tomorrow - tbh im not sure if i installed it properly, im not used to installing without swmgr...

MattPayne wrote: ive not been able to install it yet... I untared the archive and the executable wouldnt work for me... i forget the error that came up, but ill have another look tomorrow - tbh im not sure if i installed it properly, im not used to installing without swmgr... :(

Find what the error is and post what version of Irix you are using. I built it on Irix 6.5.20f with a SGI Freeware (don't recall version, but can look it up) GCC. This probably means you need to install the GCC libraries from SGI Freeware.

I know others have had no trouble installing it. Of course, they still ran into trouble using it.

All this interest might motivate me to return to this project.

I've finished my build of erlang, the erl-sdl interface and wings yesterday with freeware-gcc, and will try it out today on my O2.

There are some funny gnu-isms in the erlang makefiles (read: they are non-POSIX) and building ssl and java interfaces took some time to get it right.

Let's see what will work...

dexter1 wrote: I've finished my build of erlang, the erl-sdl interface and wings yesterday with freeware-gcc, and will try it out today on my O2.

There are some funny gnu-isms in the erlang makefiles (read: they are non-POSIX) and building ssl and java interfaces took some time to get it right.

Let's see what will work...

Java and SSL? Those are erlang features not needed by Wings, right? I think I skipped them previously.

True, but since i was going to put these in nekoware, might as well do it proper...

If I try to run wings on my Indy with XZ (X set to truecolor) eshell aborts saying there are no opengl drivers and no suitable opengl modes were found...

Dump written 2005-1-15_23-52
Window: "<Unknown Window Name>"
Crashed in:
{"No suitable OpenGL mode found (are OpenGL drivers installed?)",
[{wings_init,video_mode_failure,0},{wings_init,init,0},{wings,init,1}]}

but...

olorin 10% /usr/gfx/gfxinfo
Graphics board 0 is "GR2" graphics.
Managed (":0.0") 1280x1024
4 GEs, 1 RE, 24 bitplanes, 4 auxplanes, 4 cidplanes, Z-buffer
GR2 revision 4, VB2.0
HQ2.1 rev A, GE7 rev B, RE3.1 rev A, VC1 rev B, MC rev C
unknown, assuming 19" monitor

sounds very reasonable; doesn't it ?


any ideas?

gandalf wrote: If I try to run wings on my Indy with XZ (X set to truecolor) eshell aborts saying there are no opengl drivers and no suitable opengl modes were found...

Dump written 2005-1-15_23-52
Window: "<Unknown Window Name>"
Crashed in:
{"No suitable OpenGL mode found (are OpenGL drivers installed?)",
[{wings_init,video_mode_failure,0},{wings_init,init,0},{wings,init,1}]}

but...

olorin 10% /usr/gfx/gfxinfo
Graphics board 0 is "GR2" graphics.
Managed (":0.0") 1280x1024
4 GEs, 1 RE, 24 bitplanes, 4 auxplanes, 4 cidplanes, Z-buffer
GR2 revision 4, VB2.0
HQ2.1 rev A, GE7 rev B, RE3.1 rev A, VC1 rev B, MC rev C
unknown, assuming 19" monitor

OK. First, what version of Irix are you running? I used 6.5.20f, and I am by far not an expert on how to make sure it will run on any 6.5.

Second, would you mind posting your glxinfo?

Otherwise, I'll have to add that to the list of things to look into. I have an Indy XZ, and Indigo2 with some pre-Extreme graphics at home, so I'll have to set them up at some point.

I would really like to see wings working on any machine that can run 6.5 if possible for a reasonable amount of work. It is such a cool program, and to me it recalls the SGI heyday, even if it is a fairly new program.

ok... it looks as though i havent installed it properly on my O2 - when i click on the ......./bin/wings icon, nothing happens...

I decoempressed the file untill i had a folder structure, and then tried running the executable... is there something else i needed to do? and where was the SDL dep found... i looked through the freeware libs but it wasnt in the 's' section.....

jdboyd wrote:
OK. First, what version of Irix are you running? I used 6.5.20f, and I am by far not an expert on how to make sure it will run on any 6.5.

Second, would you mind posting your glxinfo?

Otherwise, I'll have to add that to the list of things to look into. I have an Indy XZ, and Indigo2 with some pre-Extreme graphics at home, so I'll have to set them up at some point.

I would really like to see wings working on any machine that can run 6.5 if possible for a reasonable amount of work. It is such a cool program, and to me it recalls the SGI heyday, even if it is a fairly new program.

IRIX olorin 6.5 6.5.5m 07151432 IP22

display: :0.0
server glx vendor string: SGI
server glx version string: 1.2 Irix 6.5
server glx extensions (GLX_):
EXT_import_context, EXT_visual_info, EXT_visual_rating, SGI_swap_control,
SGI_video_sync, SGIX_fbconfig, SGIX_swap_group.
client glx version 1.1
client glx extensions (GLX_):
EXT_import_context, EXT_visual_info, EXT_visual_rating, SGI_swap_control,
SGI_video_sync, SGIX_fbconfig, SGIX_swap_group.
OpenGL vendor string: SGI
OpenGL renderer string: GR3-Elan
OpenGL version string: 1.1 Irix 6.5
OpenGL extensions (GL_):
EXT_abgr, EXT_blend_color, EXT_blend_logic_op, EXT_blend_minmax,
EXT_blend_subtract, EXT_convolution, EXT_copy_texture, EXT_histogram,
EXT_packed_pixels, EXT_polygon_offset, EXT_subtexture, EXT_texture,
EXT_texture3D, EXT_texture_object, EXT_vertex_array, SGI_color_matrix,
SGI_color_table, SGI_texture_color_table, SGIS_texture_filter4,
SGIX_texture_scale_bias, SGIX_subdiv_patch.
glu version: 1.2 Irix 6.5
glu extensions (GLU_):
EXT_abgr, EXT_nurbs_tessellator, EXT_object_space_tess, EXT_packed_pixels,
EXT_texture, SGI_filter4_parameters.

visual x bf lv rg d st r g b a ax dp st accum buffs ms
id dep cl sp sz l ci b ro sz sz sz sz bf th cl r g b a ns b
-----------------------------------------------------------------
0x20 2 pc y 2 2 c . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
0x21 2 pc y 2 1 c . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
0x22 4 pc y 4 1 c . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
0x23 4 pc . 4 . c y . . . . . . 20 4 . . . . . .
0x24 4 tc . 4 . r y . 1 2 1 . . 20 4 16 16 16 16 . .
0x25 8 pc . 8 . c . . . . . . . 20 4 . . . . . .
0x27 8 tc . 8 . r . . 3 3 2 . . 20 4 16 16 16 16 . .
0x28 12 pc . 12 . c y . . . . . . 24 . . . . . . .
0x29 12 pc . 12 . c y . . . . . . 20 4 . . . . . .
0x2a 12 pc . 12 . c . . . . . . . 24 . . . . . . .
0x2b 12 pc . 12 . c . . . . . . . 20 4 . . . . . .
0x2c 12 tc . 12 . r y . 4 4 4 . . 24 . 16 16 16 16 . .
0x2d 12 tc . 12 . r y . 4 4 4 . . 20 4 16 16 16 16 . .
0x2e 24 tc . 24 . r . . 8 8 8 . . 24 . 16 16 16 16 . .
0x2f 24 tc . 24 . r . . 8 8 8 . . 20 4 16 16 16 16 . .
0x31 24 tc . 24 . r . . 8 8 8 . . . . 16 16 16 16 . .

I have wings up and running on my O2 at work with 6.5.25m. There is some work to be done with erlang/esdl and wings compile itself, but it pretty much compiles ok, provided you use gcc(freeware 3.3). Apparently erlang doesn't like being compiled with mipspro...
Next stop is my I2 R10K High Impact and 6.5.22m.
Am currently bogged down in validity testing erlang with the test suites. I should be getting something by the end of the week. Oh and i can reproduce the current errors with wings: selecting lighting hangs the program. and selecting popup menus freezes X
Maybe today i have some time to pull this through cvd...