When POV-Ray is invoked with the +D switch (to display a preview of the image as it renders) and a compositing manager (Compiz, Beryl, etc) is running, the POV-Ray window is partially transparent. This happens because it chooses an ARGB visual without setting the alpha channel properly.
Created attachment 102000 [details, diff] patch Patch to make it not use ARGB visuals.
Comment on attachment 102000 [details, diff] patch Patch works, but is rather hackish - once we figure out how to fix this in FontForge I'll attach something similar here for POV-Ray.
Created attachment 112187 [details, diff] better patch This one should be better.
Just revisiting this bug... Can you try the new 3.7.0 beta 29 version and see if the problem still exists? If so, we should send the patch to upstream. Thanks, Joe
(In reply to comment #4) > Just revisiting this bug... Can you try the new 3.7.0 beta 29 version and see > if the problem still exists? If so, we should send the patch to upstream. POV-Ray 3.7 switched to using SDL for display, which works fine under compositing.
(In reply to comment #5) > POV-Ray 3.7 switched to using SDL for display, which works fine under > compositing. SDL? Are you referring to "Simple DirectMedia Layer"? I don't see any indication that they use that. Or are you talking about POV-Ray's "Scene Description Language", which is not display-related? There are comments currently on the newsgroup, regarding beta 29, that mention they are still getting the kinks out the display functionality. I am still seeing the ocasional X error, which is, I'm sure, part of this. Also, people are still commenting about issues with compiz: http://news.povray.org/povray.beta-test/thread/%3C48f34464@news.povray.org%3E/ I'll keep this bug open, and I'll ping the newsgroup as well to make sure this is a known issue that is being looked at...
(In reply to comment #6) > (In reply to comment #5) > > POV-Ray 3.7 switched to using SDL for display, which works fine under > > compositing. > > SDL? Are you referring to "Simple DirectMedia Layer"? I don't see any > indication that they use that. [dleverton@shiny-one ~] $ ldd /usr/bin/povray | grep -i sdl libSDL-1.2.so.0 => /usr/lib/libSDL-1.2.so.0 (0x0000003df1c00000) > Or are you talking about POV-Ray's "Scene Description Language", which is > not display-related? Hah, sorry for the confusion, I did indeed mean the other one. > There are comments currently on the newsgroup, regarding beta 29, that mention > they are still getting the kinks out the display functionality. I am still > seeing the ocasional X error, which is, I'm sure, part of this. Also, people > are still commenting about issues with compiz: > > http://news.povray.org/povray.beta-test/thread/%3C48f34464@news.povray.org%3E/ I suspect they're either using an old version of SDL (IIRC it started to support ARGB properly in either 1.2.9, 1.2.10 or 1.2.11), or there's some other issue, apart from the one my patch is supposed to solve. My current system doesn't want to run any Compiz or any other compositing manager in the main X session (yay for ATI), but I tried the new POV-Ray with xcompmgr under Xephyr and it works fine.
OK, cool - thanks for trying it. I'll close this out (as fixed in 3.7), but if the problem crops up again, feel free to reopen or make a new bug on the newer POV-Ray version.
