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-- DirkVeulemans - 07 Jul 2004

• OpenGL and strange behaviour of Kyma windows

OpenGL and strange behaviour of Kyma windows

Ok, this writing is a bit collecting and storing of what I found out. I had to struggle more than once with the problem of the Kyma running on Windows. You see Kyma starting up, but as soon as the different windows in the Kyma environment appear, things go wrong: windows stay blank, dragging windows is a problem, the content of windows is not refreshed anymore, etc. This problem appeared with my Win98-PC and with my WinXP laptop-PC.

I read on the Know-pages the advice from SSC to fetch new drivers for my VGA card because of imcompatibilities with OpenGL. Also lowering the hardware acceleration of the screen helps. Not being a nerd I just did so and it helped. After the 3th or 4th time however, I started to feel unsure that Kyma would work when I need it. I had to know more about the whole thing to be prepared.

When does the problem appear ?

This is not really clear to me but this is what I remember:

• (Win98 2ed) upgrading from Kyma 5 to Kyma X.
• (WinXP) once, only removing a user caused the problem (what does XP delete? in this case)
• (WinXP) recently it was caused (I think) by upgrading to MS mediaplayer 9.

Suggested solution (Symbolic Sound)
Installing/deinstalling software may change your display driver.

• Check the website of your graphics acclerator card to see whether there might be a new OpenGL driver for the card
• Try turning off some of the levels of graphics acceleration in the advanced section of the displays control panel
• Try different OpenGL settings (also in the advanced section of thd displays control panel)

Trying to understand this problem
First of all, what is OpenGL. You can read everything on http://www.opengl.org. To give a quick idea, I qoute "OpenGL is the premier environment for developing portable, interactive 2D and 3D graphics applications. Since its introduction in 1992, OpenGL has become the industry's most widely used and supported 2D and 3D graphics application programming interface (API), bringing thousands of applications to a wide variety of computer platforms." I understand OpenGL is an open standard somewhat like HTML. "APIs allow you to program without having intimate knowledge of the device or software to which you are sending commands. For example, the OpenGL API allows you to create 3D effects without actually knowing the innards of your video card." (another quote)

Rather than doing a long shot to explain, I write more when I better understand the whole thing ...

Advice!
In WinXP you should make a recovery point (look at the XP-help pages under systemrecovery) before installing or upgrading any software. If Kyma doesn't continue to work well after the installation/upgrade you can go back to the former state of your computer.

-- DirkVeulemans - 07 Jul 2004