SweetHome3D - interior design app - 64- and 32-bit, in 'portable' format...

[mikewalsh]

Evening, kids.

Time for another 'portable'; this time, an easy one.

SweetHome3D has been mentioned on the forum a few times before. I first became aware of its existence due to Pelo's endless "necro-excavation", as a result of which many threads otherwise 'lost' to the community kept coming back to the top of the listings. The old Forum's search-engine WAS pretty useless, as I'm sure many of you will recall.....so although Pelo's behaviour often seemed pointless to many of us, in his way he was doing the community a favour!

Anyways. SweetHome3D is one of those 'niche' applications that will perhaps only appeal to a few, enabling interior design functionality combined with photo-realistic 3D 'rendering' of the 'finished product'. However, it's one of those 'perfect' apps as far as I'm concerned; self-contained, even including the Java it needs to function. And because it's Java-based, it's cross-platform in the best possible way.....it'll function on pretty much any Puppy from a 4-series onwards. This lends itself perfectly to "portabilization".....so, here ARE both 64-bit and 32-bit "portable" versions for your perusal.

It came to my attention tonight because of this thread by peppyy. So I thought I'd take a butchers at it again, since it must be nearly 7 years since I last did anything with it.....and y'all can benefit from this!

(ONE word of warning. If you have an Nvidia graphics card with the Nvidia driver, SweetHome3D expects to find the very newest up-to-date proprietary build.....but if you're running the 'nouveau' in-kernel driver, it appears that any reasonably recent version is good enough. I found this out to my cost; it won't run on the Dell Latitude, because the newest driver that supports the Nvidia mobile chip it runs is only a 3xx-series, and it appears that if SweetHome3D detects the nvidia.ko module then it thinks you should be running the newest 5xx-series version!)

Anybody who might be interested in this can find it here:-

https://www.mediafire.com/folder/ppum03 ... weetHome3D

Help yourselves to the relevant package arch. Have fun!

Mike.

[williwaw]

thanks for the portable, Mike.

I usually keep my portables outside my installs, but do not neccesarily install the menu entries.
The launch script works fine, as do links to the launch script. Is the folder "dirIcon" supposed to be clickable also? As extracted, It just opens the folder in rox.

[mikewalsh]

thanks for the portable, Mike.

I usually keep my portables outside my installs, but do not neccesarily install the menu entries.
The launch script works fine, as do links to the launch script. Is the folder "dirIcon" supposed to be clickable also? As extracted, It just opens the folder in rox.

@williwaw :-

If you want to make it even easier to fire-up, just create a sym-link to 'LAUNCH' inside the directory (rt-clk -> Link), and name it AppRun. This turns it into a ROX-app, and just clicking on the directory will launch it. No need to look inside to fire it up.

(If you don't use the Menu entries, there's no real need to maintain the script name "LAUNCH". By re-naming "LAUNCH" to "AppRun", it does exactly the same thing...)

Mike.

[mikewalsh]

Well, now....

Having a shufti through the FAQ section of the SweetHome3D forums, it seems the "Nvidia official driver no-launch issue" is well-known, long-understood AND catered for. It all seems to revolve around the fact that when you install the official Nvidia driver, it replaces your OpenGL library with Nvidia's own version. This plays havoc with Java's interpretation of the standard OpenGL runtime routines, and results in the warning message....

(I found this was happening in every Puppy where I've got the official driver, 32-bit & 64-bit alike. In those few that stick with the in-kernel 'nouveau' driver, however, everything was tickety-boo.)

Which all explains why there's TWO executable scripts inside the SweetHome3D-7.2 directory. The standard script is the one that 'plays nice' with 'nouveau'. The second script - named 'SweetHome3D-Java3D-1_5_2' - is the one you use IF you're using the official driver. What this does is to direct OpenGL/DirectX 'calls' to a special version of the OpenGL runtime that's been developed specifically to run directly inside the Java virtual machine, intercepts the OpenGL/DirectX 'calls' only if the nvidia.ko module is detected, AND - this, it seems, is the important bit - uses an older version of Java's 3D library.

This issue has been ongoing since at least 2009, apparently. To rub salt in the wound, AMD cards don't suffer from this issue.....at all!

- I got the message Sweet Home 3D will exit now because of a fatal error in 3D rendering system. What can I do?

"This is a problem due to the configuration of your graphic card.
Under Windows:

• First, if you use Windows 7 or a previous version of Windows, open the Display Properties pane by right clicking on desktop screen and choosing Properties item in menu. In that pane, display the Settings tab, and click on the Advanced button. Then in the Troubleshoot tab of the pane that opened, check the Hardware acceleration cursor is at its maximum on Full, confirm your choice and try to run Sweet Home 3D again.
• If the previous operation didn't resolve your problem, update the OpenGL and DirectX drivers of your graphic card with the latest available ones, and try to run Sweet Home 3D again.
• If this update still doesn't fix your problem and you use a 64 bit system, relaunch the installation program of Sweet Home 3D and select the 32 bit architecture option in the screen used to choose the installation folder (32 bit drivers are sometimes more stable than their 64 bit counterpart).
• If running Sweet Home 3D in 32 bit still doesn't work, download the file SweetHome3D.l4j.ini, copy it in Sweet Home 3D installation folder (by default, C:\Program Files\Sweet Home 3D or C:\Program Files (x86)\Sweet Home 3D) and relaunch Sweet Home 3D. The file SweetHome3D.l4j.ini tells Sweet Home 3D to use the DirectX version of the Java 3D library rather than the OpenGL version, but this option is available only in 32 bit (if you installed a JRE 32 bit, you may also click on this link to run Sweet Home 3D with Java Web Start and the DirectX version of the Java 3D library).
• Finally, if this last solution doesn't work, you may still want to use Sweet Home 3D without 3D features, by reading the answer to the next question.

Under Linux:

• Update the drivers of your graphic card with the latest available ones, and try to run Sweet Home 3D again.
• Try to run the script SweetHome3D-Java3D-1_5_2 which is available in the Linux installer and runs with an older version of Java 3D."

So; I've modified the 'LAUNCH' script accordingly. If the 'nvidia.ko' module is detected, it runs the modified exec script; if not, it runs the 'standard' exec script instead. Bob's your mother's brother; all totally automatic, and behind-the-scenes. Nobody needs to concern themselves with this issue, 'cos it'll now resolve itself regardless of your setup.

Sorted! Modified builds now uploaded to the link in post #1...

Mike.

[peppyy]

@mikewalsh You are correct, with an AMD card either one will work. I see you have been busy as always. Although I have not tried the portable yet I have been very busy with the program and having too much fun. I have been using your blender portable to create furniture and other necessities for my plan, (Even joined the sourceforge forum to share them). I had no problem creating an (open with) blender (.blend) file association.

I tried to do the same with .sh3d and .sh3f files and found that they are basically .zip files. I could simply click on one to open it in sh3d. The problem was that then. any .zip file I clicked on, tried to open in sweethome 3d. causing a lockup and having to restart x to get out of it. Do you know where or how in rox or puppy to add the information that allows you to add a new association? I have looked everywhere I haven't found a way to do it yet.

I am excited to try your portable, perhaps that will solve the problem.

Edit Tried a couple different ways to create a new mime type and they all did the same thing, so I simply added your launch to the right click menu and renamed the shortcut to SH3D. That appears to have solved my problem. Interestingly, since I already had it running before I got your portable, it also listed all my recent files. Runs great on my machine.