Nice application which visually improves on the classic I think, although it does seem to use quite significant CPU resource when running.

Most of the controls are quite convenient -
<B>Ctrl + hold</B> is very handy for zooming. Not sure about constantly cycling the help tips though - they get a bit irritating.

I particularly like the fact that a pressure field view is included and metric scales.

I note, when zoomed in sufficiently, geographical names appear which is a nice touch. Also coastlines now supplemented by national frontiers (although I spotted they're a bit out of date - eg East Germany and Berlin corridors appear!)

lunecaster

<ul><li>CPDN since: 2004-06-22</li>
<li>Team: <a href="http://www.uk4cp.co.uk/">United Kingdom</a></li></ul>

Yeah good noticed. My question is why you can only see the districts of the USA?

Greetings form Germany(Berlin)-&gt;Where East meets West ;-).
<a href="http://www.adastrawithseti.de"><img src="http://adastrawithseti.de/pic/logo.jpg"></a>

&gt; Yeah good noticed. My question is why you can only see the districts of the
&gt; USA?
&gt;
Special treatment I think ;)

&gt; Greetings form Germany(Berlin)-&gt;Where East meets West ;-).
&gt;
Greetings. Here in the UK we get a border between England and Scotland, but not between England and Wales.

Also no Black Sea or Caspian when outlines showing (this was also the same in the classic version)

&gt; Yeah good noticed. My question is why you can only see the districts of the
&gt; USA?

ummm, no other reason than I'm from the US and wanted to see the state borders and can't tell New Jersey from Pennsylvania on a borderless US map! :-)
Actually I think the main reason is this is just some "coastline &amp; national border" data Tolu found on the web so we haven't really paid attention to the details amongst the other stuff we do.

There seems to be a fair number of keyboard controls for the Visualisation app, quite a few not included in help tips. So as I'm not sure they're all documented, here's the ones I've encountered so far:

<b>H</b> -- toggle help tips (includes a selection of shortcut keys only)
<b>0</b> -- toggle starfield
<b>1</b> -- toggle credits - thanks guys :)

<b>P</b> (or <b>F1</b>) -- show precipitation field
<b>R</b> (or <b>F3</b>) -- show pressure field
<b>S</b> (or <b>F4</b>) -- show smoothed clouds
<b>T</b> (or <b>F5</b>) -- show temperature field
<b>U</b> (or <b>F6</b>) -- show unsmoothed clouds

<b>M</b> -- toggle metric scale
<b>2</b> -- toggle filter (smoothed view for precip, pressure or temperature)
<b>B</b> -- toggle headlight (clouds views only)

<b>X</b> (or <b>F9</b>) -- show no fields (ie displays physical map)
<b>3</b> (or <b>5</b> or <b>6</b>) -- coastline and frontiers only in red (Why?)
<b>4</b> -- mesh globe plus borders in red
<b>7</b> -- coastline and frontiers only in green

<b>Ctrl</b>+<b>drag</b> [hold] -- zoom in or out
<b>drag</b> -- rotate east or west
<b>A</b> -- rotate globe west to east
<b>Z</b> -- rotate globe east to west
<b>D</b> -- stop rotation (Only when started with <b>A</b> or <b>Z</b>)
<b>click</b> -- stop rotation (Only when started with <b>drag</b>)

<b>C</b> (or <b>F7</b>) -- toggles place names [<i>edit:</i> countries] (when zoomed in sufficiently)
<i>edit:</i><b>V</b> -- cities, <b>I</b> -- areas
<b>L</b> -- toggles latitude and longitude of places (when zoomed)

Nice and quick to use when you get used to them.

lunecaster

<ul><li>CPDN since: 2004-06-22</li>
<li>Team: <a href="http://www.uk4cp.co.uk/">United Kingdom</a></li></ul>

I wonder if my model is bit whacky or if it is the Linux version of viz that has some problems with the colouring. See http://www.ee.oulu.fi/~jabba/Climate.png

There's of course the mysterious white patches in Africa, but also close to poles the area is white. In fact, no greenish colour at all anywhere. Just yellow, orange, red and blue
(see south pole http://www.ee.oulu.fi/~jabba/Climate2.png)

Note also that the Earth can be zoomed to overlap the texts, which is not probably intended to happen.

Linux SuSE 8.2, NVIDIA XFree86 Driver 1.0-5336 Wed Jan 14 18:30:46 PST 2004, XFree86 Version 4.3.0. NVIDIA GPU detected as: GeForce4 Ti 4200.

Do other Linux users have similar problems? Do others have viz take up to 50% CPU-time?

&gt; I wonder if my model is bit whacky or if it is the Linux version of viz that
&gt; has some problems with the colouring. See
&gt; http://www.ee.oulu.fi/~jabba/Climate.png
&gt;
&gt; There's of course the mysterious white patches in Africa, but also close to
&gt; poles the area is white. In fact, no greenish colour at all anywhere. Just
&gt; yellow, orange, red and blue
&gt; (see south pole http://www.ee.oulu.fi/~jabba/Climate2.png)
&gt;
&gt; Note also that the Earth can be zoomed to overlap the texts, which is not
&gt; probably intended to happen.
&gt;
&gt; Linux SuSE 8.2, NVIDIA XFree86 Driver 1.0-5336 Wed Jan 14 18:30:46 PST 2004,
&gt; XFree86 Version 4.3.0. NVIDIA GPU detected as: GeForce4 Ti 4200.
&gt;
&gt; Do other Linux users have similar problems? Do others have viz take up to 50%
&gt; CPU-time?
&gt;
&gt;

I have a Windows Machine, but the same Problem. Often codl spots(-50°C) over the Sahara Zone up to India ?-(
<img src="http://www.funkymonkey.org/boinc/sig.php?id=87&amp;proj=cpdn">

It's almost certainly a colour mapping problem at the top end of the scale rather than genuine cold spots. Have a look at the thread <a href="http://climateapps2.oucs.ox.ac.uk/cpdnboinc/forum_thread.php?id=32">here</a>

<a href="http://climateapps2.oucs.ox.ac.uk/cpdnboinc/team_display.php?teamid=3"><img src="http://www.teampicard.net/templates/fisubice/images/phpbb2_logo.jpg"></a>

&gt;
&gt; Linux SuSE 8.2, NVIDIA XFree86 Driver 1.0-5336 Wed Jan 14 18:30:46 PST 2004,
&gt; XFree86 Version 4.3.0. NVIDIA GPU detected as: GeForce4 Ti 4200.
&gt;
&gt; Do other Linux users have similar problems? Do others have viz take up to 50%
&gt; CPU-time?
&gt;
&gt;

Takes below 1% CPU time. Have u tried to delete the libGL* files in the viz dir?

One thing that I noticed with the place names is that it locates Gibraltar as being on the coast of Ghana!!!

I'm also getting ~50% CPU use with Linux visualisations. Thanks for providing it in the first place, by the way.

Specs:
Debian GNU/Linux 'sid'
XFree86 4.3.0
Radeon 8500, proprietary ATI driver version 3.11.1

I tried renaming the libGL* files in the CPDN directory and that made the visualisations a whole lot smoother but the CPU use remained approximately the same.

&gt; &gt;
&gt;
&gt; Takes below 1% CPU time. Have u tried to delete the libGL* files in the viz
&gt; dir?
&gt;
&gt;

Correction, it is using all cpu time too :-o

_____
<a href="http://climateapps2.oucs.ox.ac.uk/cpdnboinc/team_display.php?teamid=43">Linux Users Everywhere @ climateprediction.net</a>

&gt; I'm also getting ~50% CPU use with Linux visualisations. Thanks for providing
&gt; it in the first place, by the way.
&gt;
&gt; Specs:
&gt; Debian GNU/Linux 'sid'
&gt; XFree86 4.3.0
&gt; Radeon 8500, proprietary ATI driver version 3.11.1
&gt;

Here the same problem (Debian Sarge, XF4.3, Intel 845G onboard graphic)

Hello!

Planet64Bit.de, Delkster, thanks for the tip! After renaming libGL* files things got rather smoother. Although the viz takes up the 50% as earlier. It seems that at least Linux people (I guess, Mac OS X as a Unix/OpenGL -platform too) are out of luck with the visualization CPU usage. At least for now. I suppose, Carl &amp; Tolu didn't bother too much with synchronizing the model and visualization apps as producer / consumer and the latter is reading the data in a busy loop. But they did notice that it was just a preliminary version, so I think something good is coming this way later on :)

By the way, do Windows people have the same kind of a "spaceball" visualization or something more sophisticated and does it take half the CPU time? Can any Mac owner confirm or deny my guess?

Cheers,
Jani

snip...
By the way, do Windows people have the same kind of a "spaceball" visualization or something more sophisticated and does it take half the CPU time?
Can any Mac owner confirm or deny my guess?


The vis application is pretty much identical on all platforms.
I'm aware of the numerous complaints &amp; requests for the the visualization.
We're working on it.

renaming libGL* :
you might as well delete it - this means your system has the necessary
GL libraries for the application. Not all do.
we distributed the libraries so that it could run out of the box without the need to faff around
So, the next version would fix the incorrect coordinates, cpu efficiency would be improved (there'll be a trade off),
as well as key map user specified preferences,
(i think I'll leave the US districts. the plan was to extend this to include world districts.)
&amp; other items on the wish list would also be considered.
All other ideas welcome.

Hello, Tolu!

I hope I didn't sound negative with the "Spaceball" comment --- in fact I like it a lot as Finland (and Skandinavia) doesn't stretch out of shape to a frightening size unlike in 2D projections. Although 2D projection has that positive thing that one sees by one look the whole planet's temperature development without needing to rotate. Perhaps later one could "open" up the 3D sphere to a 2D projection with a nice animation and the other way around? Well, maybe I got a bit carried away with the animation, but 2D projection might be alternative.

Another idea: if somebody has to fall back to software rendering or the default libraries, it might be nice to have simplified map. For example only the country borders could be selected and perhaps one could filter them a little bit to have fewer vertices (was this the right word to describe the lines there?) and so a bit lighter rendering. Even better if one could choose which countries' districts are shown in the map.

With the current it would be nice to have something to point the direction to sun. That could be sun in the space, some arrow pointing from the sun's direction or both. One can of course tell where sun is supposed to be by checking the clock running on the screen. One living somewhere further away from Greenwitch longitude might have figuring from where the sun shines if the model clock is in UTC.

A bit more: Zooming the Earth in and out makes the lighting intensity to change: further away Earth seems to be lit more and closer it's bit darker. It's bit distracting to me, but nothing too serious though. Perhaps others don't care...

Anyways, viz is a good starting point and you guys have done great job!

Cheers,
Jani

&gt; snip...
&gt; By the way, do Windows people have the same kind of a "spaceball"
&gt; visualization or something more sophisticated and does it take half the CPU
&gt; time?

Full 50% of the CPU Tolu - that's with an ATI 8500LE. Only way to change it currently is change priorities.

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