just downloaded Vizard Lite - crashes upon startup...

[bernie]

Hi there,
I just downloaded the current version of Vizard lite, registered it, but now when I'm trying to start vizard it shows me the Vizard startup logo and and then 2s later directly the Microsoft crash report (something like "Vizard.exe encountered a problem and had to be terminated").
Any ideas/suggestions?

I tried uninstalling and reinstalling Vizard, but no luck.
I'm using Windows XP (and Vizard 2.5 ran a year ago on the same laptop without problems...)

Thanks,
Bernie

[Jeff]

sorry we have not responded to this yet. farshizzo, do have any idea what might be going on here?

[bernie]

Any ideas/suggestions what to do/try? I tried all I could think of... and buying a software that doesn't run is a bit frustrating...

[tobin]

This is certainly not a problem we're aware of as it would be unacceptable to leave such a bug in release software. My first suspicion, however, is anti-virus software is disrupting Vizard's launch. Have you disabled all anti-virus tools and tested then?

While a ton of changes and improvements have gone into making Vizard R3, nearly all these are in winviz.exe (the render engine) and its support modules. Vizard.exe (our development environment) has not changed substantially since 2.5, so the fact the Vizard.exe bombs out indicates that there is something fundamentally special about your laptop at the OS level to me (e.g., anti-virus).

[bernie]

I tried all kinds of things including disabling firewall & virus scanner etc. and stopping just about any program that can be stopped without killing windows - but no success.
The only thing that finally kind of worked (i.e., allows me to start vizard at all and run programs) was to change the compatibility level for Vizard.exe (right-click on Vizard.exe, under compatibility, select "execute with 256 colors".)
Not a good workaround, as this means everything has only 8bit color while running Vizard, but at least a start...
Any ideas/suggestions what might be the issue?

When running a vizard program, I get the following warning, maybe this helps to figure out what is going on...
Producer::VisualChooser: unable to setup a valid visual with WGL extensions, switching to compatibility mode


I know my laptop is a few years old, but it normally handles more than 256 colors ;-)
Any help would be highly appreciated!

Thanks,
Bernie

[bernie]

By the way, my computer is a sony Z1rmp notebook, with an ATI mobility radeon 16MB graphics card.
I just fond a description of a somewhat similar problem at http://www.worldviz.com/forum/archive/index.php?t-1374.html
does this mean that my graphics card is just too old to run vizard 3.0 and no longer supported?

[mspusch]

you are right, this is most likely an issue relating to your graphics card
or graphics drivers or graphics memory.
we have in general found ATI cards to be more problematic than nVidia based cards, and specifically laptop graphics cards are more restricted in functionality.

one thing you can try (sometimes helps with nVidia, don't know about ATI) is to play around with different version of the graphics card drivers.

it's possible that Vizard3.xx uses some newer features for it's scene graph that were not supported with your old card/driver. sometimes updating the driver or trying a different graphics driver helps.

clearly that's all experimental and might just be a waste of your time. if you have the budget, purchasing a laptop with nVidia graphics (or even newer onboard graphics) will solve your problems.