image conversion fails?

First, this looks really cool. Hopefully the servers will be a little less loaded tomorrow so I can actually see it in action.

My problem (I think):
I open the web mapping window, and select something (eg. NASA Animated Earth Server->Galileo Earth Views->Overlay Composited with Background Image).
Then I click the Still Image button.
The progress bar shows downloading, and then a conversion step. During the conversion, a DOS window pops up very briefly, which says something failed with a DirectX tile conversion.
I expect to then see the image overlaid on "my" Earth, but that doesn't happen. What's going wrong here? What can I do to grab the contents of the DOS box so I can give you more detailed information about the failure?

Thanks,
Tim

After mucking around some more, I discovered that when I run dxtex in the Utils directory, I get the following error:
Unable to create Direct3D Device. Please make sure your desktop color depth is 16 or 32 bit.

The color depth is already set, but Googling turns up that this is a fairly common problem. The real problem is that dxtex is trying to open a RES device, while my DirectX only gives me a HAL device. (I have no idea what these terms mean.) Apparently, with the right song and dance of reinstalling video drivers and DirectX, it can be fixed. I haven't managed yet though.

Tim

I *still* haven't made this work. I have discovered that this conversion is necessary for all graphical data downloaded, including regular satellite data. So right now I just have a program that shows the big blue marble in a very nice way.

More research suggests that the RES device is software only, so I don't get why it doesn't work for me. Maybe WinME just doesn't support it? Some stuff I found (like http://tinyurl.com/5s39v ) suggests that it is trivial to recompile the program using D3DDEVTYPE HAL instead of D3DDEVTYPE REF which it currently uses. I don't have Windows development tools installed so I can't try it, but if somebody can give this a try I'd really appreciate it. If you do, let me know: nuisance .at. casualhacker .dot. net

Tim

[cmaxwell]

Originally posted by Tim Newsome@Sep 25 2004, 03:45 PM
I *still* haven't made this work. I have discovered that this conversion is necessary for all graphical data downloaded, including regular satellite data. So right now I just have a program that shows the big blue marble in a very nice way.

More research suggests that the RES device is software only, so I don't get why it doesn't work for me. Maybe WinME just doesn't support it? Some stuff I found (like http://tinyurl.com/5s39v ) suggests that it is trivial to recompile the program using D3DDEVTYPE HAL instead of D3DDEVTYPE REF which it currently uses. I don't have Windows development tools installed so I can't try it, but if somebody can give this a try I'd really appreciate it. If you do, let me know: nuisance .at. casualhacker .dot. net

Tim

Quoted post

This was a problem until we included the DEBUG versions of the DirectX runtime inside the directory where the conversion tool was. We haven't run into this problem since. Could you please tell me what your hardware and OS version is, as well as if you let the installation program do the install of directx.

Originally posted by cmaxwell@Sep 25 2004, 04:09 PM
This was a problem until we included the DEBUG versions of the DirectX runtime inside the directory where the conversion tool was. We haven't run into this problem since. Could you please tell me what your hardware and OS version is, as well as if you let the installation program do the install of directx.

Quoted post

System info from dxdiag:
OS: Microsoft Windows ME (4.90, Build 3000)
System Manufacturer: Gateway
System Model: KEYSTONE
Processor: AMD Athlon™ Processor, MMX, 3DNow, ~1.4GHz
DirectX Version: DirectX 9.0c (4.09.0000.0904)

The video card is a (built-in) S3 Pro Savage, with 16Mb of RAM.

At first I used the DirectX version that came with Worldwind. I've tried 9.0b, 9.0b SDK, and 9.0c. I've tried video drivers from Gateway's website, S3's website, and Windows Update. I haven't been very methodical, but I've tried a bunch of combination. All to no avail.

For a while I was thinking it may just be something this hardware can't do, but by the sound of it it's all in software. That is confirmed by trying to run Worldwind on a machine that doesn't have a 3D accelerator at all. The main app won't start, but dxtex runs just fine.

If there's anything else I can do to help you solve this issue, let me know. I really want to play with this program. :-)

Tim

[WhiteKnight77]

The S3 Pro Savage is integrated video and most likely will not run this. Is the program refusing to start or are you not seeing anything?

IIRC the S3 Pro Savage is not a DX9 part and may have problems running a DX9 program.

I have the exact same problem, a DOS windows pop up with the following error:

D3DRefDev: ERROR: Color Surface not found
Failed to create D3D device.

Specs:

OS: Windows Millenium Edition
Processor: Intel® Pentium® 4 CPU 1.70GHz
Video Card: nVidia Corporation NV28 [GeForce4 Ti 4200 AGP 8x] (rev a1)

I installed directx directly from the world wind installer.
Could this be an WinME issue?

[cmaxwell]

I would guess that it's most likely a Windows ME issue. We actually haven't tested on this platform as we don't have access to this operating system (too unsecure for our System Admins). I'm making a log of these issues and we'll see what we can do to address them. So the program starts and you see the Blue Marble, it's just that the image conversion utility is failing?

Yes. The program starts and I see the Blue Marble. No problem with that. But when I try to zoom and the program starts downloading data, it fails when it tries to do the image conversion.

Then, I must switch to winXP I guess.

Originally posted by cmaxwell@Sep 26 2004, 10:59 AM
I would guess that it's most likely a Windows ME issue. We actually haven't tested on this platform as we don't have access to this operating system (too unsecure for our System Admins). I'm making a log of these issues and we'll see what we can do to address them. So the program starts and you see the Blue Marble, it's just that the image conversion utility is failing?

Quoted post

Correct. The program starts, I can zoom around the blue marble. Place names look good. Borders work. It's just image conversion that works. From what I've read (http://tinyurl.com/5s39v is pretty good) it's because those tools (assuming you're using the default DirectX SDK samples) try to reserve a RES space which (apparently) WinME doesn't support.

Tim