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

Hi John, well when dxdiag.exe shows an error in its tests, it definitely means that something is messed up with DirectX.

Maybe it has crashed or something, try doing a shutdown and restart of windows and see if it works ok after that.

- Michael

Michael,
This nVidia is a 350M from Dell. It says that it should support Direct3D, but the only features revolve around DirectDraw, DirectSound, DirectMusic and DirectPlay. All of the options for DirectX are greyed out. I've installed the latest drivers and gone through the troubleshooting tools. It says that everything is fine, but no luck with the DirectX options. I'll keep on trying and get back to you when all is right with the world.

Ricardo - keeping the faith

Hi Ricardo, sorry it's still not working for you. That card is definitely supposed to support Direct3D, in fact it should be a pretty good card to run it.

But failures in dxdiag.exe definitely mean something is messed up on your system...

Maybe it is possible that something is messed up in DirectX itself rather than in the video driver... If that is the case it is possible that installing the new version of DirectX will tune it up: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=2DA43D38-DB71-4C1B-BC6A-9B6652CD92A3&displaylang=en

- Michael

Michael,
I've tried it all. I'll call Dell and see if there is some switch or hardware issue with the card that I have. Maybe we saved a whole 10 bucks on IT's budget with the configuration we have. I'll keep watching the boards to find the solution or post it when I have one.

Ricardo