Forum: Vue


Subject: Vue 4 Mac OS X early adopter

nathany opened this issue on Jan 18, 2002 ยท 17 posts


nathany posted Fri, 18 January 2002 at 9:15 PM

So my copy of Vue 4 arrived today on a Hybrid Win/Mac CD - impressive! I played with the demo on a Duron 700 system but I got this copy I got to set it up on my iBook. Initially it seemed a fair bit slower for the OpenGL previews. But as it turns out, the background thread GL stuff works on the ATI Rage chipset where as I had to disable it on the nVidia GeForce MX in my PC. It kind of weirded me out to have a low quality version appear followed by a high quality one later - and seemed to make things less responsive (the background thread is sucking up CPU to draw a detailed version while I'm onto the next thing). So I turned that off and it seems better now. However, there are some problems in this version (4.04) - which I guess is what I get for being an early adopter. Several keys aren't working as advertised. Nudge does not work at all. I was having a problem where Command/Option/etc.-click-dragging the main view would just make a selection rectangle instead of moving the camera around. Now with the background thread off (I think that's the only difference) Ctrl-dragging seems to work but the other keys make the main view blank (pure white) and still don't seem to work. I have yet to hook up my mouse which may be a suitable work around for some of the above (since I can just use the right mouse button instead of Command-clicking). The interface has the Aqua look, but it is somewhat non-standard from an Apple UI guidelines point of view. The Application menu doesn't have the standard About and Preferences options, which are under File/Options and Help/About instead. The file/save dialog has no easy way to jump to the user's home folder and I had some trouble where after creating a folder it was showing the contents of the wrong folder when clicking it. Also, the *.vue files you save have no association by extension or creator ID, so double clicking them pops up a choose application dialog. After going through this process, Vue didn't parse out the command line arguments and open the file. Overall it's still Vue4 and works mostly like the PC version, but it still needs some more work. Obviously a tad rushed to release it during MacWorld - which is not the end of the world so long as a patch is released in the near future. Attached: Kickstart graphic rendered in 3 minutes and 41 seconds on a G3 500 iBook.