[GRASS-dev] Re: [GRASS-user] GRASS6.3 on Windows

[Paul Kelly]

On Mon, 20 Aug 2007, Moritz Lennert wrote:

> On Wed, August 8, 2007 20:49, Paul Kelly wrote:
>> On Tue, 7 Aug 2007, Glynn Clements wrote:
>
>>> I've added an nviz.bat script for use on Windows; I've also fixed the
>>> Makefile to ensure that the binary gets the .exe extension.
>>
>> That's excellent - I can confirm that it works again for me too. Somehow I
>> thought there was something else - I tried reverting to the way it was
>> before but couldn't get it working again. But didn't think of adding a
>> separate script start for Windows.
>>
>> I found another issue with the use of the cat command in part of an NVIZ
>> Tcl script which I've also fixed, and it seems to be working well now.
>> Grepping for "exec" in the other scripts I see a few more hackish-looking
>> things that will need to be fixed to get all the NVIZ functionality
>> working on Windows though.
>>
>
> Just checked out latest CVS and recompiled, and now I get the following
> when I try to launch nviz from the menu (File -> 3D Rendering -> NVIZ):
>
> child killed: SIGABRT
>    while executing
> "exec -- $program --tcltk"
>    (procedure "run_ui" line 6)
>    invoked from within
> "run_ui $cmd"
>    (procedure "execute" line 3)
>    invoked from within
> "execute nviz "
>    (menu invoke)
>
>
> When I display the spearfish DEM in a display window and then click on the
> nviz button of that window, nothing happens. No error messages, nothing
> except for a brief appearance of r.info.exe in the Windows task manager.

Hello Moritz,
Works for me starting it both those ways, and also from command-line. I 
even tried make distclean and compiling from scratch in case there was 
something I'd manually fixed that kept it working on my system. So I don't 
know what could be up with yours. Maybe you have an old nviz.exe lying 
around in your PATH somewhere that is getting picked up when the GUI runs 
"nviz", instead of Glynn's new nviz.bat?

A couple of side-notes though:
1) In general the GUI is terrible at catching and reporting errors from 
modules it calls in the background and this leads to cryptic error 
messages or nothing happening all over the place. IMHO it is a really 
pervasive problem that definitely needs fixed in the next GUI. Hopefully 
it already is there (ISTR discussions about every call to a GRASS module 
going through some other function where the error trapping could 
presumably be added, to avoid code repetition).

2) When the displayed layers start up in NVIZ the colour of the displayed 
vector map isn't preserved. I'm guessing this is because it can't be 
specified on the command-line, but perhaps the code that starts NVIZ using 
the displayed layers should write a temporary NVIZ state file and then 
start NVIZ with that file? I've no idea how complicated that would be to 
do though. E.g. might be better only focussing on it in the new GUI.

I would love the functionality of NVIZ (most of which is implemented using 
the gsurf library AIUI), to be available from the command-line as well as 
through the Tcl/Tk interface. Would be cool to be able to generate 3-D 
images with specified observer location and attitude and so on from a 
shell script (or scripting language of your choice), rather than having to 
do it with Tcl scripting in NVIZ.

Paul