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Preferences
CubicNavigator's Preferences are comprhensive and allow you to change many aspects of how the program works. This chapter lists each of the preference areas and describes what each settings does. To display the Preferences window, choose it the menu command in its normal place in the application menu, or just press command-comma.
The Preferences window can remain open while you are using other parts of the application. Most settings take effect immediately without having to close the window.
The Window settings affect how the parts of CubicNavigator's main window behave. The settings here concern bookmarks and displaying web content.
Start With Bookmarks Drawer Open - this checkbox controls whether the bookmarks drawer should be opened when the app is launched, or simply returned to its last state.
Open Bookmarks Drawer At Left of Window - this checkbox controls where the bookmarks drawer should open, on the right (default) or left.
Display Symbols In Bookmark List - this checkbox controls whether to draw the small icons in the bookmarks list (a folder for an enclosing folder, a miniature blue cube for an un-cached bookmark, and a green cube for a cached bookmark).
Allow Web Pages To Adjust Window Size - when viewing pages in the web view, this setting controls whether the page is allowed to resize the window.
Display Resolution Indicator - controls whether to show information about the currently loaded panorama at the bottom of the viewer window. See this FAQ for more information.
Open Locations In:
Web Page View - locations entered (via cut & pasting or typing their address or clicking bookmarks) will be always displayed as normal web pages, displaying VR content (if any) with the QuickTime plugin or a Java applet.
VR View - locations will attempt to open first in the OpenGL-acclerated VR view, falling back to the web page view if no understandable VR content is found.
Current View - locations will be opened in whichever view is currently showing. If it is the VR view and there is no VR content found, it will fall back to the web pgae view.
Always Open Un-Cached Bookmarks In Web Page View - this checkbox causes un-cached bookmarks, that is, those that haven't been visited in VR view before, to alway load first in the web page view. You might do this to start reading information provided by the photographer before switching to the OpenGL-acclerated VR view to display the panorama in its fullscreen glory, etc.
Note: the above settings determine the view in which a new location is opened, but you can always toggle the view between Web Page and VR once the destination is loaded.
Restore Window Defaults - this button resets all of the window preferences to what they were when the program was installed.
The mouse tracking style is the way the panorama moves according to mouse movements.
Like QuickTime VR - means the panorama moves faster the more you move the mouse from the point you started dragging from. A drag small distance means the panorama rotates slowly, while dragging a large distance across the window makes it spin faster.
Acceleration Factor - determines how quickly the distance dragged results in faster motion. Slow acceleration means you have to move a fair way to have the panorama spin fast, fast accleration not so far.
Positional - means the panorama moves to a fixed point dependent on the mouse position. There is thus a one-one-one relationship between where the mouse is on the mouse pad and where on the panorama you are looking at. This mode is reminiscent of changing the viewpoint in 3D modeling programs.
Mouse Sensitivity - determines how much you have to move the mouse to result in a change in the panorama's position. Slow means the panorama view will change slowly as you move the mouse, fast means a short change in mouse position will result in a larger movement on the panorama.
Use "First Person Shooter" Mode in Fullscreen - this checkbox controls whether this special mode is active when CubicNavigator is displaying fullscreen. When on, First Person Shooter mode allows you to move the mouse to change the panorama position, without first having to click the mouse button.
It can be used with either the "Like QuickTime VR" or "Positional" style mouse tracking. (If the mouse button is pressed in fullscreen, that respective behavior takes over.)
The sensitivity of the mouse movement response is determined by the slider setting for Positional style tracking, so to adjust it you will need to temporarily change the radio button to Positional, move the slider, then change back to QTVR style tracking.
Restore Mouse Defaults - this button resets all of the mouse tracking preferences to what they were when the program was installed.
The keyboard preferences control how quickly the panorama moves in response to keyboard actions.
Shift / Control Zoom Speed - how quickly the panorama will change its field of view when pressing the shift key to zoom in, or the control key to zoom out.
Arrow keys Panning Speed - how quickly the panorama will move when the right/left/up/down arrows are pressed.
A cache is the amount of disk space used to store previously accessed material. The advantage of doing this is that you don't have to wait for it to download from the internet again or, in the case or QuickTime VR, to be extracted from the movie and resized to appropriate OpenGL textures.
There are two kinds of caches because data retrieved through web pages is handled differently from data retrieved from QuickTime VR movies.
URL Cache Maximum Size - the most amount of disk space that will ever be used to store things like JPEG images, web pages, XML description files, Shockwave applet information files, etc. The more VR media of this type you anticipate looking at and want to have accessed quickly, the higher it should be. (A typical node takes between 200K and 2MB.)
QTVR Movies Cache Size - the most amount of disk space that will ever be used to store media extracted from QuickTime VR movies. Downloaded QTVR material is not saved in its original form, rather the cache is used to reconstruct the OpenGL-based VR view within CubicNavigator. The more QTVR movies you anticipate looking at and want to have access quickly, the higher it should be. (A typical node takes between 300K and 2.5MB.)
Clear Caches... - this button will completely clear all cached material. You will be prompted to confirm the operation so that you don't inadvertently lose all previously stored media.
Use URL Cache When Loading Normal Web Pages - Normally you will leave this checkbox on, as it speeds up web page loading. However during testing it was found certain pages could cause a crash if they were loaded from the cache. If you notice any crashes during loading of normal web pages, unchecking this box is a possible solution.
Collect Data From QuickTime Plugin As It Loads - This setting determines whether the data downloaded for the QuickTime Plugin will be collected to use if subsequently the VR view is toggled to. If on, the VR will load very fast as it will not have to be downloaded separately. The only disadvantage is a minor amount of extra memory use.
Leave Previously Accessed Nodes In RAM For Multinode Tours - If set, this checkbox determines whether node image data is left in memory or removed when the node number of a multinode tour is changed. The reason for leaving it in memory is to increase access time when the node is returned to, as it doesn't have to be loaded from the disk (cache) again. However, for large multinode movies, the accumulating RAM requirement may become undesirable on a low memory system.
Restore Default Cache Defaults - this button resets all of the settings to what they were when the program was installed.
The VR preferences control how the elements superimposed over the actual panorama are displayed.
Don't Adjust Cursor - this radio button chooses to never update the cursor, it will remain the standard system arrow. You might want this if you don't like cursors changing to indicate drag direction or the presence of hotspots, or if you find the overhead of calculating appropriate cursors is detrimental on a slow machine.
Standard System - this radio button chooses standard Mac OS X / QuickTime VR cursors to indicate things like drag direction or grabbing. The cursors are 16x16 pixels in size.
Open GL-based - this radio button chooses vector based graphics to use as cursors. The actual system cursor is hidden when the mouse is over the VR viewer area, but is simulated by OpenGL graphics.
The size of these cursors can be adjusted from around the standard system size up to giant cursors visible from the back of a room.
Labels: Draw Background - this checkbox draws a translucent dark patch around the label text, allowing it to be more easily seen if the background is a similar color to the label text.
Labels: Size - this slider controls the size of the font used to display labels. It ranges from 9pt - 72pt.
Keywords position - this setting sets the corner/midpoint of the window (or screen in fullscreen mode) where the name of the VR media and/or keywords will be displayed.
Default Field of View - this number determines what FOV (ie, how far it is zoomed out) a panorama will open at in the VR view. Some VR materials have their own default, while others (such as a plain equirect TIFF image) will use this value.
Slideshow FOV - slideshows normally display at a fixed field of view, which is determined by this number.
Animate Map To Current Orientation When Opening - this checkbox determines whether the map is rotated to face the direction the panorama is current facing, having a similar effect to turning a paper map around to face the direction you are looking at. If you find this annoying, you can turn it off.
Restore Default VR Settings - this button resets the VR settings to what they were when the program was installed.
Matrix - the matrix color is the color of the gridlines which show when there is no panorama loaded into the viewer window.
Background - the background is the color behind the gridlines.
Hotspots - the color of the translucent shapes which indicate where hotspots are when they are displayed. Note: this color should be fairly dark when set as it is blended with the panorama and too light colors will give a washed out appearance.
Label Text - the color of the text used to display label text overlays indicating where hotspots go to, and keywords.
The Advanced preferences are mainly for tweaking performance and should usually only be changed on a badly performing installation.
Maximum OpenGL RAM To Use (MB) - the most amount of video card texture memory to use to create texture images representing the panorama. When first run, the program sets this maximum to a certain proportion of the memory available in the graphics card, for example, 30MB for a 64MB graphics card, 72MB for a 128MB or higher graphics card. Not all of this will necessarily be used at any given time, as some VR media is much smaller than others. The textures of very large panoramas will be constrained to fit within the limit set here.
(Competition for video card RAM comes from other OpenGL uses such as the system and Mac OS X itself to drive the Quartz Extreme accelerated window display and effects like Exposé. If panning takes place at very low frame rates, then most likely not enough video RAM is available. Reducing this number and reloading the panorama (causing the image sizes to downscale) can help.
Note: Graphics cards which support Quartz Extreme need more VRAM than earlier graphics cards which don't. In the case of 16MB VRAM cards which "just" support Quartz Extreme, less VRAM is available (4MB is the default for this environment) which may result in more blurry images when they are downscaled to fit this constrained size.
Generate Mipmaps For OpenGL Textures - Mipmaps are used in OpenGL rendering to prevent artifacts appearing when textures change in size. They are, in effect, pre-scaled textures each suited to viewing at a different distance. Their use in panoramic VR, though they can create a smoother image, is often not desirable due to a lessening of the resolution when zooming out. However, if you want a very smooth, ripple free image, this option is available.
Use Non-Power of 2 Textures - Turns on the use of OpenGL textures which have dimensions that might not be a power of 2. (Earlier versions of OpenGL and graphics cards required all textures to be a power of 2, eg, 256x256, 512x512, 1024x1024, 2048x2048, etc. Later versions support textures which aren't a power of 2.)
For panoramic VR use, this means that the textures used to represent the panorama can very closely match the original media, for example, displaying a cube face size of 1392x1392 instead of of downscaling to 1024x1024 which would result in a slightly less sharp image. Generally, if your graphics card supports them you should use them to get this benefit and the option is on by default. Your graphics card supports non power of 2 textures if it supports Quartz Extreme, Mac OS X's OpenGL accelerated display mode. If not, the checkbox will be dimmed.
OpenGL Display Updates - This set of radio buttons determines how the OpenGL based VR view will be updated when the mouse is dragged (mainly when using QTVR style mouse tracking). The current setting can be changed if it is giving poor performance, for example, if there is a lot of stuttering or tearing as the image is moved.
Lock Swap Interval To Monitor Refresh Rate - The "swap interval" is the duration between OpenGL refreshes, that is, how frequently the VR display is updated. If OpenGL updates occur outside the monitor's natural refresh interval, it can look like the image is "tearing." This setting prevents the tearing effect by locking the OpenGL buffer swapping interval to that of the monitor.
However, if a frame or frames cannot be displayed when the monitor refresh occurs because of other activity in the system environment, for instance, Quartz itself (Mac OS X's sophisticated window display engine) also times its updates to coincide with the swap interval, frames can be lost in the update sequence and it is possible a visual stuttering effect will occur. In this case, changing to another setting may give smoother updates.
Sync To VBL - VBL or Vertical Blanking occurs when the monitor is between refreshes of the screen and by syncing updates to this time, tearing can be avoided. This setting uses a separate thread to determine the optimum time to update, reducing the possibility that the system will override it.
The "flushing latency" is the offset from the bottom of the display (ie, the last line to be drawn) to allow for any difference between OpenGL being asked to flush its buffers and it actually happening. If there is a tear at the bottom of the display, adjust the number downwards (it can be negative) until the tear goes away. If it is near the top of the screen, adjust the number upwards.
The Sync To VBL setting can potentially give the smoothest panning of each of the choices, but may require the additional adjustment above.
Don't Sync Display - This setting doesn't attempt to coordinate display updates with the monitor refresh and is likely to give some degree of tearing. It is the most basic of the update methods, requiring the least overhead, and is what is used most frequently when updating OpenGL displays. However, using OpenGL for panoramas with QTVR-style mouse tracking makes phenomena such as tearing more noticeable, hence the above choices.
The "Refresh At" number is the frequency in cycles per second (Hz) of the updates. The number entered here should approximately match the monitor's refresh rate (which is indicated in gray at the top right of the display update choices).
Always Lock Swap Interval For Fullscreen Mode - when showing a VR full screen, system activity is far less likely to intrude on display updates (there are no windows or menubars visible), so synchronizing the updates to the swap interval is advised. Most games operate in full screen mode.
Restore Default Values - this button resets the advanced settings and number entries to what they were when the program was installed.
Although not actually part of the Preferences, customizing the toolbar is covered here. To change the appearance of the toolbar, choose the command "Customize Toolbar" from the View menu.
You can customize the toolbar to remove or add certain buttons, change their order, and select whether to view them with text labels or just as icons.
Viewing toolbar items as Icons Only can save space, and allow the location bar to extend further without resizing the window.
To remove an item from the toolbar, simply drag it off and let go. Click Done when you have finished customizing the toolbar.
This completes the Preferences chapter. The next chapter lists the Shortcut keys and mouse clicks available in the program.
Watch Movie of Tutorial Being Performed [2:57]