This document contains frequently asked questions received by the Ventuz staff. Before posting to the forum or contacting Ventuz support, please check whether your question has already been answered here. Whenever something comes up multiple times, it is added to this list and the relevant documentation pages are improved.
Users new to Ventuz should also check the Common Mistakes by New Users document.
Q: Why I am not able to install Ventuz? Getting an error related to a Cabinet file.
A: You probably try to install Venutz on a Windows 7 System that is not up to date. Microsoft changed the Global Root certificate. So you either update you system or download the certificate here
Q: Why I am not able to install my Deltacast board? Getting an error related to the driver signature.
A: You probably tried to install it on a system that is not up to date. So please make a complete update to your system to get the board correctly installed. Another option is to disable the driver signature verification in Windows. How to do that is extensively discussed online, you can find some info here for Windows 8.x or 10.x - for other Windows versions just search online.
Q: I have two or more machines constantly changing orders inside the Machine List of the Configuration Editor.
A: You are probably using cloned Windows images. Ventuz is creating a so called SystemID that is generated from several System and Hardware IDs which are unfortunately not unique all the time. To solve this simply create a file called 'SystemID' (without file extension) in 'C:\Users\Public\Documents\Ventuz6\Configuration\VMS'. Open this file in a text editor and add a unique text string and save the file.
Q: Why does my presentation not run smoothly?
A: Assuming the hardware is powerful enough, there are various things that can cause a presentation to stall or stutter. For one, running a show is different from designing one. Read the documentation regarding Deployment and always run the final presentation in the Ventuz Runtime, not the Designer. The latter does auto-saving and many other things that are not necessary to run a presentation but can disrupt normal rendering. Then make sure that the presentation is running in Exclusive, not Virtual, Fullscreen.
Q: What are the changes in the license model
A:
Q: So the Director is not included in Ventuz 5 Designer?
A: Since the release of Ventuz 4, Ventuz Director is a separate product with a separate license. If you are interested in Ventuz Director or need more information please check our website, or contact sales@ventuz.com.
Q: How do I get a Community Edition?
A: Simply open the License Manager and request a Community license from there.
Q: I have built a project with the PLE version, can I use it with a licensed Ventuz version?
A: Ventuz PLE version is meant for only evaluation and learning purposes. Projects and scenes built in the PLE version cannot be transferred to any other Ventuz version.
Q: When starting Designer or Runtime the LicenseManager pops up with following message: Uncaught exception while searching for dongles: invalid class. Perhaps an invalid drive is installed? Check for virtual CD-ROM or other virtual drives. What can I do to fix that?
A: First try to remove virtual CD-ROM and other virtual drivers. If this does not help, you may have encountered a Windows problem which is not a bug in Ventuz. Please try the instructions provided here:
Q: Why is none/only one touch received when using Windows Touch?
A: First of all, make sure your display really sends Windows Touch information not just mouse position updates (which are converted by Ventuz into a virtual touch). Some devices come with a driver that supports multiple protocols (mouse simulation, Windows Touch, TUIO, ...). Check in the Machine Configuration that Windows Touch is enabled. Finally, check the relevant settings in the Windows Control Panel (see links in the Windows Touch tab of the machine configuration).
Q: Why are touches registered at the wrong position?
A: Enable the input diagnostics in the Renderer window and check where the raw touch positions are registered. Most of the times, the problem lies in the input hardware or driver and not inside Ventuz.
Q: Why does the behavior of my Touch Rotation node look wrong?
A: First, check if the Rotation Mode (on- vs. off-axis) is set appropriately. You might also want to change the IntersectionType to "Mesh" and see if that improves things. Otherwise, keep in mind that the rotation node uses a plane as its mapping system. Try changing the RotationAxis so that it is aligned with the geometry and try to avoid using Axis Nodes underneath the Rotation Node. Instead, one should also put the Axis above the Rotation Node and thus transform both the mapping system and the geometry in a consistent fashion.
Q: I try to use the Touch Paint node to paint onto an object. Why is the mapping completely wrong?
A: Keep in mind that the Touch Paint node uses a planar mapping and is thus totally independent of the actual geometry underneath it. A 1:1 mapping is therefore only possible if you use a unit size Rectangle. For any other geometry, if the geometry is transformed, or if the mapping of the Rectangle is not set to "Flat", the results might not be as you expect. Use a rectangle directly underneath the paint node, and then apply all transformations to both, by adding the appropriate Axis above the paint node.
Q: What is the Touch Pattern node for?
A: The Touch Pattern node can be used to detect abstract movement patterns, for example if the user swipes to the left in order to navigate through a collection of items. For more information, see Touch Pattern.
Q: What is the Touch Marker node for?
A: Some camera based tracking systems are able to identify unique objects instead of declaring everything a generic touch. These are often also called Fiducials. For example, if a glass has a special barcode on its bottom and is placed on an appropriate surface, the system could read the ID and pass the information to Ventuz. To use marker objects, your hardware device has to send TUIO 2dobj messages containing the unique ID. Those will be relayed to the Touch Marker node with the appropriate ID set. This node can be ignored when only a Windows Touch based system is available. For more information, see Touch Marker.
Q: Why does a Windows Touch display not trigger the Mouse I/O nodes?
A: When touching a Windows Touch display, two kinds of messages are emitted into the Windows operating system. For one, WM_TOUCH messages are send that are touch specific. To allow applications without explicit multi-touch support to support the display, Windows also create artificial WM_MOUSE... messages. These messages however behave somewhat weird in that order of mouse movement and press events can be mixed up. For those reasons, Ventuz does block all artificial mouse messages when the Windows Touch checkbox is activated in the [MachineConfigurationMC#Interaction Machine Configuration]. If a scene that uses mouse nodes is to be used with a Windows Touch device, deactivate the Windows Touch checkbox to treat the device as just a mouse.
Q: Why isn't the correct interaction node triggered by my touch?
A: By default, a quick ray vs. bounding box intersection test is used. The bounding box of an object however can be much larger than the object itself. For more precise intersection, set the IntersectionType property in the interaction node to Mesh. This is a bit slower but exactly compares the touch against the triangles of the geometry.
Q: In the Property Editor I can see, that output properties of my Script node are changing but the nodes which are bound to this properties do not react on the changes. Is this a Bug?
A: No, this is not a Bug! Most probably you did not set the 'changed' flag correctly in the source code. Every time an output property changes, the 'changed' flag must be set to true because the Generate() method returns a boolean value dependent on this flag. Only if Generate() returns true, bound nodes are informed about the property changes.
Q: What is the difference between exclusive and non-exclusive fullscreen?
A: In exclusive fullscreen, DirectX will take over the complete screen. While this offers the best rendering performance, switching to another application will hide the rendering output. If you work with Ventuz alongside some other applications and are constantly switching, you should rather use the non-exclusive (a.k.a. virtual) fullscreen mode. This creates a window that is the size of the display and hosts DirectX inside that window. While performance may not be as good as in exclusive fullscreen, the rendering output will stay alive even when switching to another application.
Q: Why is my fullscreen window sometimes minimized automatically as if by magic?
A: Make sure that every other running process cannot display any pop-up window. Also check whether the notification icons in the Windows Taskbar are set to “Hide icon and notification".
Q: Why does Ventuz not render my text elements?
A: To load all the character sets of a font into the memory would affect the performance massively. Due to that only the Latin and Symbol character sets are enabled per default. To activate different character sets you need to change the settings in the Machine Configuration.
Q: How do I enable Far-Eastern (e.g. Chinese or Korean) character rendering in Ventuz?
A: Open the Machine Configuration and enable 'Special 2' character set in the 'Culture Settings' section. And you certainly need a font which contains far-eastern characters.
Q: Why does Ventuz not show Emoijs?
A: Please check if you enabled the Emoji processing on the related Text Provider Node. A good resource to learn more about Emoijs in Venutz is the related How To.
Q: Why does my DeltaCast board not work correctly although I installed the drivers recommended by Ventuz?
A: Try to shutdown your computer, remove the card, wait a bit, put it back in and reboot. There is a known issue on DeltaCast's boards, sometimes the driver does not correctly initialize itself and this seems to be the only way to solve it. You should contact DeltaCast to report this problem.
Q: Why do the OSC Nodes not work in the exported VPR presentation whereas everything worked fine in Ventuz Designer?
A: VentuzPresenter.exe which runs the presentation is different from Ventuz.exe (Ventuz Designer). So you have to configure the Windows Firewall for VentuzPresenter.exe as well to allow network communication.
Q: Why does my Remote Application using Ventuz .net Remoting not work any more after update to the latest Ventuz version?
A: Please check the Release Notes for changes in the Ventuz.Kernel.Remoting DLLs. If any of these DLLs has changed, you have to re-compile your remote application with the newest Ventuz.Kernel.Remoting DLLs!
Q: The Output property of my Script node is changing but bound nodes do not react on the changes! What's going on?
A: Most probably you did not set the changed property to 'true' in the Validate() method. This is necessary to inform bound nodes about the change of properties. Find more information here: C# / VB Scripts