Time for a test of GT if your up for it.

[ArtF]

Hi All:

    Time for a test!. This project turned out to be much larger than
I had anticipated. GM had grown over time to be more complex than I
had thought. GT turned into a many headed beast and has dominated my
time for over 8 months of fairly dedicated recoding. This recode started
because I really wasnt happy with two things in GM, firstly its resolution
was limited by the licensed library I used for creating solids. I was limited
to about 2000 vertices in a solid, and spokes ate into that. It made large
numbers of teeth very bad in solids. ( Output in DXF and such was always good.).

    Secondly GM had issues in its overall complexity getting so great in the display
engine that adding requested features was getting very hard to do without
breaking previous ones. Gearotic Thoughts was more of a necessity to allow any
growth over time, but as I say it became evident this will take awhile. I have
coded my own solids routines so I wont face the limitations of the past, ( at
least the limitations I face will be my own. :) ). I will also be coding my
own GCode simulation routines and 3d Gcode routines. Thats the future.

    In this version you cannot load GM projects, that will reappear next week.

  GT is now a modular creation program. All its objects are of one type with
many variations. GT doesnt really know if its loading a buddha or a gear, but
it figures it out because a buddha doesnt have extra information like meshing
data and gear types..

  GT, will at the moment create circular gear types, Pulleys and Sprockets. It
can output them as STL's and as printed paper copies. The tools tab allows you
to select the types of objects you wish to create. I suspect youll get the hang
of it pretty quickly. I wont release a video or instructions, as Id like your
opinion on how intuitive it is. Many operations can be reached in multiple ways
to make it easier to operate.

  The Dev version of the software on the webpage has just been updated so you get
the new GT just by downloading and installing.. GM has not changed. While GT can be
used , this isnt a release of it, it works GREAT on my computer, but I need to know
what kind of display issues or crashes you may get. Youll find the Options selection
of the main menu will allow you to sepcify many options in terms of colour and display.
( Menu items are the top left button..).


  So have fun with it, let me know what you think, what it looks like and how it reacts.
Soon, Ill begin the CNC outut module, then start adding the other gear types and future gear
types. The display engine will be updated to allow gear rotation around other gears, many
things need to be done and it will take some time, but Im happy so far with the look and feel.
  The stability seems much higher than GM, resolution is orders of magnitude better no matter
the number of teeth and I think in the end we'll end up with a program that is of
ridiculous quality for the small size of its intended audience. The future looks fun . :)

Thx
Art




 

[Wod]

Art,
    I'm running Windows 7 64 bit operating system. GT wouldn't start because it told me that glut32.dll was missing from my system. I download the glut-3.7.6-bin.zip file from the Microsoft website, unzipped the file, copied the glut32.dll file to c:\Windows\SysWOW64 and now everything is fine. Just thought I'd let you know.
Wiley

[Ya-Nvr-No]

I'm running win7 32bit and I had issues also, so I download the file and put it in the windows/system32 folder.

I downloaded from it from here;
http://www.xmission.com/~nate/glut/glut-3.7.6-bin.zip

I just copied (drag and dropped) the dll file from the zipped file

in my case it was here:
C:\Users\Craig\Downloads\glut-3.7.6-bin.zip\glut-3.7.6-bin\glut32.dll

First thing I noticed is the screen font is hard to read in the Tools Tab.

The gear graphics are awesome.

[John T]

Hi Art,
The .exe won't open for me I get the attached message  I'm running Windows XP Home Edition on a Mac Partition.

[ArtF]

Hi John:

  Can you open regedit.exe and see if there is a folder labeled HKEY_CURRENT_USER/Software/Gearotic-Thoughts

If so , delete it and then run the program. Does it now run?

Ya-Nvr:  Thx for that, I will see if I can select a better stroke font. Stroke fonts are beiong used so that ny screen res will still get text, though it may be small on some systems.

Thx for the glue.dll errors, Ill investigate putting them in as well.

Art

[ArtF]

Hi Guys;

  Just updated with glut.dll in the download and also made the font thinner for more clarity.

Thx
Art

[John T]

Hi Art,

No luck Gearotic Thoughts won't open for me.  I can find the .exe file but it won't open.

John

[ArtF]

Hi John:

  Sorry for that, but then thats why I ran this test, to see if that woudl happen.
The message indicates its something fairly simple, Im looking into it and we'll see
if the next release will work for you.

Thx
Art

[ArtF]

>>No luck Gearotic Thoughts won't open for me.  I can find the .exe file but it won't open.

  Hi John:

  Weirdly, your system seems to be saying it doesnt have the redistributables for VC.
Can you try a google for "vc runtime download 2008" , and see if installing those from microsoft
helps?  Im not sure why your missing those, seems to me GM woudlnt work if that was true..

  Im sure we'll get this straightened out though, we had similar issues with GM. :)



Art

[ArtF]

John:

  Secondary question... the version of GM in that download works fine for you , right?

Art

[ArtF]

Hi Guys:

  For those having trouble running GT, Bob was crashing as well and we found it was related to a texture load routine, Ive killed it temporarily and uploaded a version without that texture. Seems to run for Bob now, as well as on all my machines.

Thx
Art

[John S]

Running OK here on two machines, desktop and laptop on W7

Not quite certain what I'm looking at though  ;D

[ArtF]

Good. :)


( If you select the tools tab and press circular youll find it all starting to look familiar.... ) :)


Art

[John T]

Hi Art,

That "vc runtime download 2008" worked.  As you know I work on a Mac so I downloaded the "vc runtime download 2008" and the Mac side and then transferred it over to the Windows side and installed it.  I re-ran the Gearotic SETIP and now GT opens. 

Now to have some fun.

Thanks Art

[John T]

Hi Art,
I've "poked" away at most of the buttons I could find and everything seems to work for me (clock gears).  I'm assuming that we can't build a project just yet, but so far so good.

John