[vtkusers] ChoosePixelFormat failed error

[Mark Roden]

Hi David,

Thanks for this.  It might be a painful process, it looks like java is
using a variety of threads that I'll have to untangle here.

Mark

On Wed, Feb 16, 2011 at 5:42 PM, David Gobbi <david.gobbi at gmail.com> wrote:
> It was very ad-hoc.  But the basic idea is this: wx had to create the window
> and call SetWindowId before VTK itself tried to create the window.
> But VTK had to be the first to paint the window (i.e. before wx did so).
> This was where the real annoyance was, because wx liked to clear the
> window to black at odd times (this would also result in an annoying
> flickering at times).  I suspect that Java is doing something similar, i.e.
> it probably paints the window before VTK sometimes.  Repaint requests
> usually originate within the windowing system (i.e. related to mouse
> movements or similar things) which is why the problem would appear
> at some times but not others.  If something triggers Java to repaint the
> window before VTK paints it, you have a problem.
>
> In Qt, the window painting is very predictable so people using Qt/VTK
> won't see this problem.  I'm sure that if someone looks deeply enough
> into Java, they can sort out the issue there, too.
>
>  - David
>
>
> On Wed, Feb 16, 2011 at 6:04 PM, Mark Roden <mmroden at gmail.com> wrote
>> I've seen the errors as well, but the fixes appear to be very platform
>> dependent (like loading libraries in windows in the right order during
>> linking, etc).
>>
>> When you were doing this in wxPython, what was the correct order, so I
>> can go ahead and check for that?  Maybe there's a way to force them to
>> play nice.
>>
>> Thanks,
>> Mark
>>
>> On Wed, Feb 16, 2011 at 4:52 PM, David Gobbi <david.gobbi at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> By the way, I did a quick google search, and people have been
>>> asking about this Java/PixelFormat problem for years and years.
>>> I didn't look around enough to see if anyone reported a fix.
>>>
>>> On Wed, Feb 16, 2011 at 5:42 PM, David Gobbi <david.gobbi at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>> Hi Mark,
>>>>
>>>> I've seen this sort of ChoosePixelFormat issue before, it seems
>>>> to occur sometimes when VTK is used together with a GUI toolkit,
>>>> and is even more likely when a wrapper-language is involved.
>>>>
>>>> As far as I understand it, when the VTK render window is
>>>> embedded within a GUI window (in your case, the Java
>>>> canvas/panel), the GUI sometimes generates a window that has
>>>> a pixel format that is incompatible with VTK, and then embeds
>>>> a vtkRenderWindow in that window.
>>>>
>>>> For VTK/wxPython, I remember having to do lots of tweaks in
>>>> order to get wx and VTK to play nice with each other.  My
>>>> debugging technique was to add print statements to the code
>>>> on both the GUI side and the VTK side when either one of them
>>>> made any calls related to setting up Windows, so that I could
>>>> make sure that everything was happening in the correct order.
>>>>
>>>> It seems like a waste now, since I never really used wx after
>>>> that.   Anyways, a similar technique could be used to sort out
>>>> what VTK/Java might be doing wrong.
>>>>
>>>>  - David
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> On Wed, Feb 16, 2011 at 4:38 PM, Mark Roden <mmroden at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>> Hi all,
>>>>>
>>>>> I have vtk 5.9 (git sync to head) wrapped in java, compiled in vs2008
>>>>> release mode.  Every three to five times I run my app (three
>>>>> imageviewer2 objects, one vtkSmartVolumeMapper to a 3D rendering), I
>>>>> get a ChoosePixelFormat error that crashes the program abruptly when
>>>>> running on Windows 7 64 bits.
>>>>>
>>>>> What's going on here?  If it's a driver bug, it's persistent across
>>>>> three different machines with three different graphics cards (one is a
>>>>> homebuilt machine, the other two are laptops).  Is there a way to
>>>>> debug this?  It's becoming a showstopping bug.
>>>>>
>>>>> Thanks,
>>>>> Mark
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>>>>
>>>
>>
>