simtk.org

Hello,

I'm hoping I can get some advice on a persistent OpenSim visualizer issue. The issue is that, once a model is loaded, it never appears in the visualizer. The model will be open and active in the Navigator, but the visualizer just 'zooms in' to the floor, and no model ever appears in the visualizer. No errors result, the model just simply never appears. This problem has been documented in a variety of places that we've seen on the bug tracker and forums, but none of the fixed suggested in the forums seem to help us.

In our lab, it seems to be stochastic. I use OpenSim on my Dell Laptop (old Dell XPS 13). This problem comes up from time to time, but its not always present (it happens maybe 30-40% of the time). Often it feels like unplugging any external monitor and restarting the laptop fixes it. On the other hand, most of my lab computers (all Dell Towers), seem to have the issue. We're currently installing it on a bunch of Dell Desktops to see which work. Right now 2/3 have this issue. The most recent is a newly acquired Dell Precision Tower 7810 (Intel Xeon E5-2609; 96 GB ram, AMD FirePro W8100 graphics card), and this problem still occurs. However on another Dell Precision Tower 7910, it works just fine.

All of the computers have administrator privileges, and running the software as admin makes no difference.

When I was having this issue with OpenSim 4.0, I was given this link: http://localhost:90/threejs/editor/index.html

Which would open the visualizer in a browser window, but that no longer seems to work for me. I'm not sure if its just because its a newer version of open sim, or something else. I've been installing 4.5 on recent computers, my laptop runs 4.4, but I've had this issue since OpenSim 4.0.

Any advice would be appreciated! As would any work-around. The threejs link worked great when I was using 4.0. Is there any similar link to get the visualizer to open in a browser?

Thank you,

Nathan Thompson

Hi Nathan,

Please open an issue on github or file a bug report so we can dig deeper into the issues/differences between machines/environments that work and others that don't.

Not sure if these issues are model specific but I'd try models with built in geometry rather than with mesh files (e.g. an easy one is to try visualize trc file from the distribution) and see if it works consistently. If these always work then it's likely a Geometry search path issue trying to locate the mesh files, if not we can dig deeper.

We changed the port number due to conflicts with other applications so you may now use
http://localhost:8002/threejs/editor/index.html
to visualize in the browser as a backdoor as of version 4.5 though no guarantee that this will be maintained going forward.

Hope this helps,
-Ayman

Hi Ayman,

Great, thank you so much for the workaround, that should give us a good working position until we figure out the rest.

This is the bug tracker link, correct?: https://simtk.org/tracker/?atid=322&gro ... unc=browse

Over the next week as we install it on a bunch of computers, Ill keep track of the computer specs it does and doesnt work on, and submit a hopefully comprehensive bug report. One thing that we have ruled out though is the path issue and model complexity. When this issue comes up, loading any other models does not fix it. We've tried with all of the models included with OpenSim and they will all behave the same way, just showing a close up of the floor, with no model visually displayed, even though the model is loaded. We also triple checked that all the paths are correct, and to that point, we get no error or warning messages suggesting that a geometry wasnt found. It really just loads the model, but displays nothing.

What kind of specs would be useful for you to list in the bug report.

Thanks again,

Nathan

Hi Ayman,

We'll we've identified the issue. If OpenSim was opened on a computer connected to our university's (ethernet) network, we had the visualizer issue. If the computer was not connected to the ethernet, then it loaded fine. Also if it was loaded without being connected to ethernet, and then was subsequently connected, then the visualizer continued to work.

So we are now at least back to operational on all our computers! But I wanted to ask a follow up because I'd like our tech guys to follow up on this on our end, any ideas what could possibly be the culprit? I suspect its a firewall issue on our end, but I'm curious if you have any idea what the interaction could be? The workaround like (threejs) works regardless of if you are on the network or not.

Thanks again,

Nathan