CEGUI (Crazy Eddie's GUI) Forums

Hi there. I'm new to CEGUI. I seem to be having trouble getting CEGUI running without crashing immediately under Windows with VirtualBox with an Ogre render target using OpenGL. VirtualBox is using software rendering, as hardware pass-through isn't possible on the system I am using (so I can't try it).

I've built CEGUI 0.7.5 from source with Ogre 1.7.2 on both Windows (MSVC++9) and Linux. I have two Windows systems for testing; one on real hardware, one not.

On Linux, the Ogre and CEGUI samples work fine. On Windows, the Ogre samples work fine on both Windows machines (but slowly on the VM, of course). The CEGUI samples work fine on the hardware Windows, but not the VirtualBox Windows install. Basically I run the app, choose the renderer, the get the Ogre dialog, choose OpenGL, Ok, then it crashes with the standard "send an error report" dialog. Note that these are the exact same executables- they all seem to crash under VirtualBox, and all seem to work on real hardware.

I have my own application that uses Ogre, and I've set it up to use the CEGUI includes and to link with CEGUI. Apart from includes and declarations, I've added just ONE line to the app:



as per the CEGUI/Ogre tutorial on the Ogre site. On both systems I have experimented with adding and removing that one line. On the Linux system, the app runs fine, with and without that line. On the Windows VM, the app runs fine without that one line, but once I add it, it crashes in a similar way to the sample apps. In each case I leave the CEGUI includes and libs in there.

It would appear that even just calling the bootstrapSystem() call under VirtualBox is enough to crash an application- I just haven't added anything else yet.

NB: The Linux install is using hardware 3D.

Some years back the Ogre samples wouldn't run on software OpenGL either, they would just crash. They do work there nowadays (many samples won't run, but at least they tell you why).

Is there something I can try out or do, or is VirtualBox software rendering simply not a supported environment for CEGUI? Yes, I know it'll be slow even if it works, it's a development VM, so that's okay. Happy to answer questions or try the occasional thing out.

I've included a CEGUI log for Sample_FirstWindow.exe for the VirtualBox Windows install for a run that crashed.

If there's any other information I can provide, please let me know.

Any thoughts, ideas, tips, suggestions, or similar? The samples look very nice and it'd be nice to be able to use CEGUI in my project.

VirtualBox is unsupported but not all is lost. The trouble is that since I don't have VirtualBox I can't reproduce this so I can't even fix it. Your best bet is to do some digging yourself. As far as I know for Ogre it was one function that wasn't implemented in VirtualBox and they were using it, they switched to a different one and all started to work.

Kulik wrote:The trouble is that since I don't have VirtualBox I can't reproduce this so I can't even fix it.

VirtualBox is free, if that makes a difference? Download is here:

http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads

I believe many modern Linux distros include it as a package as well, although myself I just downloaded it from the link above (version 3.2.10, non OSE).

Kulik wrote:Your best bet is to do some digging yourself.

I can certainly try, but being completely new to CEGUI the odds are not good that I will succeed.

Either way, thankyou for the feedback.

For what it's worth:

The crash occurs (from a CEGUI perspective) in OgreRenderer::setupRenderingBlendMode(), during the last _setSeparateSceneBlending() call (in Ogre). That call calls glBlendFuncSeparate, which causes the crash. I *believe* this is because the glBlendSeparate func itself is actually NULL (I can't confirm as the VS IDE won't let me examine it, not sure why), but the topmost function address on the stack is zero (ie. NULL) at point of crash, which seems consistent with this theory.

I could dump the whole list of stack frames if someone can suggest exactly how one can do that in VC++9, short of copying them all out by hand. :}

A bit of Googling on the subject suggests that this sort of problem has been seen before (search for "glBlendFuncSeparate"):

http://www.ogre3d.org/forums/viewtopic. ... &start=650

In fact, it might have even been experienced directly in the OpenGL renderer in CEGUI itself (search for "glBlendFuncSeparate"):

http://cegui.org.uk/api_reference/change_log.html

I've built and tried out MyGUI in the same environment, no crash.

Is there some feature or similar in CEGUI that I could disable somehow that would avoid this code path? My wild guess is that there is some sort of blending enabled by default in CEGUI that could possibly be disabled somehow to avoid tripping this function?

EDIT 9/12: I can't set up notification on this topic so I might not see any replies for a while- send me a quick PM if you've replied to the topic and would like to wake me up.