QUESTION:

I can only see part of my ECOTECT model when viewing it in OpenGL. I notice this feature of the software is marked as "experimental" -- what is wrong with this display function in ECOTECT that is causing this problem ?

ANSWER:

Firstly there isn't anything intrinsically wrong with ECOTECT’s OpenGL display function. However, it does remain as experimental as some of the shadow casting on complex (usually imported) geometries can be incorrectly rendered by OpenGL -- so we do want users to err on the side of caution if in doubt.

Regarding the issue you describe - if your OpenGL view looks like the cut-off one shown in the animation above, first try resizing the OpenGL window. In most cases this reinitialises the display canvas and the full image will be shown - you usually only ever need to do this once.

However, on some machines resizing the window makes no difference, the image remains small. Having investigated this on a couple of our own machines, we believe this has nothing to do with ECOTECT, but rather the graphics card (swapping cards fixed it immediately). It appears to be due to limited memory on the card unable to allocate a full screen with all the buffers and depth planes required by ECOTECT.

For solutions and ways around this issue it is best that you look at the System Requirements page in the ECOTECT help file as there is a whole section on OpenGL 3D Hardware Issues.

Just quickly though, the best option to take next is making sure you have the latest drivers for your graphics card -- that can make a huge difference to your computers OpenGL performance, even if the graphics card is old and perhaps not fully OpenGL compliant.

Secondly, we would suggest varying the hardware acceleration used by your graphics card, as described in detail in the above help page.