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Getting Started With Mycosm
So you've just downloaded Mycosm Studio and you're about to hit the launch button. Here's a couple of things you should take care of before you do.
Mycosm is built on game technology and its requirements are no different than the rest of the 3D gaming industry. The most important of these is to make sure that you have the latest version of Microsoft's DirectX on your machine.
We've had a few reports of Mycosm Studio failing to start (the symptom is a lock-up) on machines with a fairly old version of DirectX installed. The fix for this is to install the latest DirectX. You can download this (free) from Microsoft's web site, or run the DirectX Installer that we supply with the Mycosm package. You'll find this as a shortcut on your desktop called "DirectX Setup (needs Internet)". Just run this and DirectX will check whether your version needs updating and if so, download and install the latest from Microsoft.
We've just completed a fix for the start up failure, so that Studio will check and report if your DirectX needs updating (rather than crashing). This will be available shorty (next day or two) as an upgraded version. If you gave us your email address when you downloaded Studio, then we'll notify you as soon as the upgrade is available.
The other thing to think about is the issue of video drivers. 3D graphics tech is still advancing at a rapid rate, and as a consequence, video drivers are changing fairly frequently. If you think yours are fairly old (say, more than a year), or if you're experiencing rendering issues, you should update your drivers. If you are unsure how to do this, refer to the Mycosm User Manual under the "Getting Started" topic.
Finally, if you having any other problems, you're welcome to jump onto our forum and see if we (or any of our users) can give you a hand.
Mycosm is built on game technology and its requirements are no different than the rest of the 3D gaming industry. The most important of these is to make sure that you have the latest version of Microsoft's DirectX on your machine.
We've had a few reports of Mycosm Studio failing to start (the symptom is a lock-up) on machines with a fairly old version of DirectX installed. The fix for this is to install the latest DirectX. You can download this (free) from Microsoft's web site, or run the DirectX Installer that we supply with the Mycosm package. You'll find this as a shortcut on your desktop called "DirectX Setup (needs Internet)". Just run this and DirectX will check whether your version needs updating and if so, download and install the latest from Microsoft.
We've just completed a fix for the start up failure, so that Studio will check and report if your DirectX needs updating (rather than crashing). This will be available shorty (next day or two) as an upgraded version. If you gave us your email address when you downloaded Studio, then we'll notify you as soon as the upgrade is available.
The other thing to think about is the issue of video drivers. 3D graphics tech is still advancing at a rapid rate, and as a consequence, video drivers are changing fairly frequently. If you think yours are fairly old (say, more than a year), or if you're experiencing rendering issues, you should update your drivers. If you are unsure how to do this, refer to the Mycosm User Manual under the "Getting Started" topic.
Finally, if you having any other problems, you're welcome to jump onto our forum and see if we (or any of our users) can give you a hand.
Comments
Whenever Mycosm loads an image file from disk, if it the load process fails for any reason (more of that in a second), Mycosm will substitute a red material for the image. This is to allow the environment to continue loading, even when such a failure has occurred. So the red sky that you see is caused by the image used to render the sly failing to load.
The reason that an image will fail to load is usually either because your machine is out of memory (unlikely in this case), or because you graphics card driver has failed to load the image. The first thing to do is to have a look at the Mycosm log to check whether an out of memory condition has been reported. You can bring up the log from the main menu in Mycosm Studio (“Help / Mycosm Log”).
The more likely cause of your problem is an issue with your graphics card driver. This in turn could either be a problem with the driver or something in Mycosm itself. To eliminate the first possibility, you should update your video drivers and see if the problem goes away. Making sure that you are running with the latest video drivers is very important (all of the major games recommend this very step), as graphics technology is still changing very rapidly, and as a consequence, so do the associated video drivers. You can update your drivers by going to the nVidia website if you have an nVidia graphics card, or the AMD site for AMD/ATI video cards.
If updating your video drivers does not fix the problem, then we will need to investigate the issue. To do that, we’ll need to find out the full system specifications of your machine and graphics card. You can get these specs by running the DxDiag application on your machine. This is a Microsoft tool that will dump the full system specs of your machine into a text file which you can then send to us for analysis. On a Windows 7 machine, you can run DxDiag by clicking the Start button and entering “DxDiag” in the search box.
If updating your drivers doesn't help, you can email me (jeff.cotter@simmersionholdings.com) and we can investigate the problem further.