From: John Stone (johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu)
Date: Thu Mar 18 2004 - 11:02:10 CST

Jeroen,
  I've encountered this strange behavior a few times in the
NCSA CAVE as well. I believe it is caused by some sort of race
condition at startup. If you restart the program, it will often
come up fine.

I haven't ever had time to track it down, but it would
seem that the problem is that some of the color tables in VMD are
not fully initialized by the time the CAVE some of the slave rendering
processes have to draw the first time. In your case it sounds like
the front wall "won the race" and started up before the data structures
were completed. Since the problem is persistent, it would seem that
its a problem with one of the data structures that's copied from the
master process rather than one of the ones that the slaves manage for
themselves. In any case, for now, the only advice I have is to re-run the
program in hope that the abberant behavior is infrequent.

Since NCSA's CAVE facilities are being eliminated or replaced with a
PC cluster based system running different software, I probably won't be
able to maintain the CAVE features in VMD much longer. Its possible that
I'll be able to make VMD work better with FreeVR over the coming year, but
that's low on the priority list compared to the many other things that need
work in support of new science.

Thanks,
  John Stone
  vmd_at_ks.uiuc.edu

On Thu, Mar 18, 2004 at 07:28:34AM +0100, Jeroen Akershoek wrote:
> Hello,
>
> We're running VMD in a CAVE environment on an Onyx4, and I got the most peculiar thing yesterday.
> Our front wall was in black and white (shades of grey), while the rest was in colour. The stereo was fine, but it just lacked colour. I've noticed some lighting problems in the CAVE with previous versions before, but never came across this one. I was wondering if this is a known bug or not?
>
> Regards
> Jeroen
>
> --
> Jeroen Akershoek
> SARA Computing and Network Services
> tel: +31 20 5923000 fax: +31 20 6683167
>
> Te audire non possum. Musa sapientum fixa est in auris

-- 
NIH Resource for Macromolecular Modeling and Bioinformatics
Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology
University of Illinois, 405 N. Mathews Ave, Urbana, IL 61801
Email: johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu                 Phone: 217-244-3349              
  WWW: http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/~johns/      Fax: 217-244-6078