i just downloaded moi and i can't use it because it says unable to create direct3d9 device does anyone know how to fix this? i already tried downloading the latest version of directx

Hi, this means that your video card doesn't support some of the features that MoI uses. This can be a problem with a few types of older video cards.

Can you tell me what type of video card you have? You can find this out in Windows under Control Panel / Display / Settings tab - it should say the name in the Display: section.

Sometimes it is possible to update the driver for the video card to solve this. If I can find out what video card you have I may be able to give you some more information.

- Michael

i have a nvidia geforce 6100

Hmm, well that is not an old video card, that one is supposed to work.

You may have some problem with your Direct3D installation.

When you start MoI, can you please hold down the ctrl key and left-click on the "MoI" title in the upper-right corner of the screen (nearby the minimize, restore, and close buttons). This will bring up a debug menu, please choose the "Show log" menu item there, then select the log text and copy it with ctrl+C and paste it into a message here. The log should contain information on which specific Direct3D function is not working properly, and that might give me more of a clue on what is going wrong.

Another thing you can try is to run DxDiag.exe from Start/Run. Under the "Display" tab there is a button for "Test Direct3D" - pushing that will conduct some basic tests to see if Direct3D is functioning.

- Michael

i got it to work i just had to download a new driver. Thanks for the help

Hi, wonderful app you have here Michael. I am testing it on my tablet PC (Toshiba M200) and I am impressed by the ergonomy.

I up this thread because I have the same problem from time to time (wiew screen goes white and shows "unable to create Direct3D9 device"). It happens when resizing the window or sometimes even just when choosing a tool on the menu. Sometimes switching between "split" view and another view just repare the screen but not always.

At last I think I understood part of the apparently random behaviour: it seems partially linked to your vectorial interface (impressive feature by the way) because of a lack of pixel accuracy.

I explain : for example when the UI size is set at the original 11 or tweaked at 10 on my sxga screen no problem when selecting a tool.
But when the UI size is tweaked at 9 and I click the circle tool it leads to direct3D bug
Why ? I realized that with this settings clicking the circle tool makes the left panel size increase by one pixel and that's just enough to blow direct3D.
It also explains why in windowed mode it bugs sometimes but not all the times : according to the screen resolution or window size (and UI size) there is some pixel inaccuracy that leads somewhere to errors.

Well I guess that my system is certainly guilty but I am not very hot to update any driver out of absolute necessity and anyway it is worth pointing these precisions to you.

My tablet PC : Toshiba M200, 512 Mo (needs an upgrade !), XP tablet PC 2005 SP2, SXGA, geforceFX GO5200 32 Mo

Hu, weird. Since I checked the Moi log and launched DxDiag.exe the problem doesn't occur anymore but I had to open and close and switch screens a few times before all went good. Now no more problems. Strange, really.

Hi Brovic, thanks for reporting this issue.

The next time you trigger it, can you please maximize the window, then hold down the ctrl key and click on the "MoI" label in the upper-right corner, to the left of the minimize/maximize/close buttons? This will bring up a debug menu, please pick the "Show log" entry, select the log text, ctrl+c, then ctrl+v into a reply here. This should help tell me what specific Direct3D function is failing.

My guess is that it is related to running out of video memory when changing the viewport window size.

When the size of the viewports changes, MoI has to re-allocate a new back buffer for rendering. This comes from video memory which is a limited resource. MoI is supposed to be releasing the old memory first , but perhaps something is going wrong there, I will check that out a bit. But it is also possible that your driver is not doing a good job of managing the memory and is magnifying the problem. So a driver update wouldn't be a bad idea.

This is not a very typical problem - this is the first time I've heard of this problem where it comes and goes.

Anyway, if you can let me know what that log says it might help narrow it down somewhat.

One part I'm not too clear on - does this only happen in a session when you are actively manipulating the UI size? What happens if you set the UI size to 9, then shut down MoI and start up a new session and don't mess with the UI size, does it work at size 9 then or do you also see the problem in a new session where you leave the UI size alone?

- Michael

Thank you for the support Michael.

You may be right with the memory problems. When running Mplayer to see steph3D tutorial at the same time than Moi I have again the same problems.
With Mplayer closed Moi works like a charm.

The log shows a repetion of those lines:

.\Direct3D.cpp 583: CreateSwapChain failed hr = -2005532292
.\Direct3D.cpp 305: CreateDepthStencilSurface failed hr = -2005532292

I will check for system upgrades. The resizing of the screen is still somewhere I think the trigger of the bug.
I hope that the physical 32Mo limit of the M200 is not the only reason as it's a common machine and most tablets have rather restricted 3D acceleration hardware.

Yup, those errors are in the step of creating the back buffers for the new viewport size, and the specific error is the code for D3DERR_OUTOFVIDEOMEMORY.

I will take a look and see if I can be a bit more frugal with the video memory, it is possible that I'm not freeing the old surfaces as soon as I could.

- Michael

Oh, another thing - in the settings for your video driver there is usually some kind of option available for turning anti-aliasing on, like 2x, 4x, 6x, etc... If you have this forced on in the driver, it will definitely consume a lot more memory so that's worth checking.

Thank you but the settings are already at the lowest. It's a shame to have a SXGA(1400x1050) screen with only a 32mo graphic board (impressive resolution on a 12" anyway).

Hi Brovic, after some careful examination, it appears that there is a problem where MoI had 2 buffers open at the same time for a moment after resizing - the original buffer wouldn't be totally cleared until after the new one was already allocated which caused a bit of a spike in memory usage.

In most situations this was not enough to cause a problem, I've tested here on a couple of 32-meg boards (GeForce2 and an ancient ATI Rage 128) and never saw this problem, but your higher resolution screen pushes the limit more.

I've tweaked things to remove this double-simultaneous-allocation which should reduce peak video memory use by a fair chunk. Can you please download this version: http://moi3d.com/beta/vidmem_fix.zip, unzip that and update the old moi_lib.dll with the new one. Does this one seem to work better for you?

In addition to not having 2 simultaneous buffers open, it also makes an attempt at flushing resources and resetting things if it runs out of video memory which might also help out.

In general MoI is designed to be pretty conservative of video memory, so I hope that after this tune up it will work for you.

- Michael

Wow, nice support !
I updated the dll and now I have no problems running moi in both landscape and portrait mode (I used to have more problems in portrait mode even when running moi alone).
I can even run mplayer at the same time as moi in landscape mode without problem although the "bug" remains when running both in portrait mode. I wonder why as portrait and landscape mode are supposed to use the same amount of memory (well, same amount of pixels)?

Anyway it is now fully functionnal as is. I will look for system updates to see if that solves the remaining glitches.

Hi Brovic, that's great news.

I seem to remember that some hardware implements portrait/landscape switch by having a kind of extra mirroring-type stage in the graphics pipeline. I think it was something to do with fooling stuff that wasn't originally designed to swap stuff around, I can't quite remember the details. But that's what you're probably seeing there.

With that low memory video, you'll just have to be somewhat conservative about running more than one video hungry application at the same time.

But that's actually a pretty good card other than the low memory. Now that there isn't a spike in memory usage, I would think it should run pretty well. MoI is designed to stream most stuff to the card on demand so it doesn't take too much open video memory after its base setup for it to run normally.

Thanks for reporting this issue!

- Michael

Michael,
I just installed MoI feb-9-2007 beta and no problems with the install. I get the above referenced error and get the following from the error log:
.\Direct3D.cpp 149: GetDeviceCaps failed, Adapter = 0 hr = -2005530518
.\Direct3D.cpp 580: CreateDevice failed hr = -2005530518

I have an nVIDIA Quadro FX with 512 MB of memory working on dual monitors with 1920 by 1200 on one (laptop) and 1680 by 1050 on the other (flat screen). The system and monitor are both Dell.

Any suggestions?

I believe that this is an indication that something has gone wrong with your video driver install or configuration somehow.

The name of this error code is "D3DERR_NOTAVAILABLE" - I've done some searches on "GetDeviceCaps D3DERR_NOTAVAILABLE" and I've seen some mention of this error related to various games.

One thing to try is go to Start / Run and run "dxdiag.exe". There should be "Display 1" and "Display 2" tabs in there, each of which has a "Test Direct3D" button on it - give those a try and see if the tests are successful or not.

I've also seen one place where one person was able to fix their configuration by using dxdiag.exe, and pushing the "Disable" button next to Direct3D Acceleration in that same tab, then exiting dxdiag.exe, then starting dxdiag.exe and re-enabling it. Apparently this may fix some problem in the driver configuration, so that is worth a try.

The other thing that you might try is updating to the newest version of your card's video driver.

Please let me know if any of these solves your problem.

- Michael

I did a little more research into the laptop video card and come to discover that the video card is incapable of using Direct3D. The option is greyed out in the dxdiag.exe dialog box. The software looks great, but it looks like I'm out of luck. I'll try it on my home machine. Thanks for all the help.

It's an nVidia Quadro FX? It is supposed to support Direct3D... Every model listed here: http://www.nvidia.com/object/IO_11761.html mentions DirectX 9 support.

Unless you found out you have some different video card, you probably have some installation problem with your video drivers. If something has gone wrong with the drivers install, it can make Windows/DirectX think that you have no hardware video acceleration. Updating to the newer drivers may clear it up.

- Michael

Michael, I started to redo your tutorial on the Japanese bath, I clicked on MOI, and the program opened up with this message:Unable to create direct 3d9 device. Its never done it before! I enclose error messages from dxdiag.exe and MOI error.log.
Thanks
John