Direct X Caverot - test version available

[Olly Betts]

In message <3533D28EB4C57A438BBA4EE3B101ACC0094DE1@Pegasus.synopsys.co.uk>, Pau
l Fretwell writes:
>Seeing as nobody has posted results for NT yet, I've just given it a go.

Thanks for checking it.

>I couldn't find any sample data on the Survex website, but I found a file
>(loser.3d) on the OpenGL Caverot site which I used. 

I've put a large (480K) 3d file in:

http://www.survex.com/software/test/3dsample.zip

>It appears to work fine. I am not too familiar with Caverot, so I only tried
>viewing the cave by moving the mouse and switching between plan and
>elevation views.

Did you switch between plan and elevation with mouse or keyboard?  The mouse
works, but does the keyboard?

>I am not sure what the vertical line down the left side of
>the screen is indicating.

That's a scalebar.

>It decreases in length from the top of the screen
>until it is only half the height of the screen as I zoom out, then jumps
>back to full screen height again.

That sounds right.  There should be a length beside it (e.g. 100m).  As you
zoom, it grows/shrinks until it can halve/double in length (to 50m or 200m).

If the length isn't there, perhaps text isn't working, or is appearing in
the wrong place.  If you turn on labels (Ctrl-L) when the cave isn't
rotating, do they appear?  Does the help page come up on start-up, and when
you press 'H'.

>Other than that the whole display is very
>smooth (running on a Pentium III 600 with 128MB Ram at work).

That's good.

>I am running NT4 with SP4 and I have not knowingly installed DirectX! There
>is certainly no direct X icon on the control panel and a search for
>'DIRECT*' on the hard disk finds no matching DirectX files.

Microsoft OSes aren't my area of expertise, but I think the DLL might be
called something like `DX*.DLL'.

It would be interesting if someone could test on Windows 95, Windows 2000,
and Windows Millenium Edition (or is that the same as 2000?)

>Incidentally, if you try running the Direct X Caverot test version in a
>directory on it's own then nothing appears to happen at all. You need to put
>it in the same directory as the other Survex files. I launched it by
>dragging the data file onto the executable in Windows Explorer.

Oh yes, I should have said that - it needs to be able to find the ".msg"
files.  I wonder if that's Josep's problem...

If you run it from the command line, it should complain that it can't find
the messages file (and does for me under wine):

Can't open message file 'en' using path 'C:\x\'

If you create a file association, then you may not see this message - it
really ought to come up in a message box.

Cheers,
Olly