Direct X Caverot - test version available

[Paul Fretwell]

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

I tried both of these. Clicking the right mouse button while holding down
the left mouse button causes an instant switch between plan and elevation (I
only have a 2 button mouse). Using P and L on the keyboard causes an
animated rotation between the two views.

>>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).

Yes, the numbers appear in the top left corner of the screen.

>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'.

Ctrl-L causes the cave to vanish from the screen, but the scale bar and
compass controls remain. Pressing Ctrl-L a second time causes the cave to
reappear. I have also noticed that if you switch to another application and
then back to dxcaverot then you are faced with an entirely blank screen
until you do something to cause the display to redraw.

The help page does appear at 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'.

I appear to have DLLs named msdx*.dll and an .inf file which implies I have
Microsoft DirectDrawEx installed, which I assume is the only part of DirectX
used by the program?

>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.

Yes, it was when I ran it from the command line and saw this message that I
realised why it was apparently doing nothing. You never see the command line
output when you run it straight from the GUI.

Footleg