United3dArtists Archive

Hi

A bit of history, even archaeology some might think as it concerns iSpace.

I've been out of the 3D world quite some time, concentrating on my writing career and particularly my first novel .

I dipped into TrueSpace again over the Christmas period to update some 3D images I was doing for a work presentation -and I may even post these...

I constructed our family website using iSpace and actually, although I have an author blog site, I never got round to a proper author website, but always planned to use iSpace to make a cool and pretty unique science fictional website. Now the British Science Fiction Association has accepted one of my short stories for its inaugural fiction magazine, Fission, I may get some more traffic. The blog is serviceable now I fixed 450 spam comments that awaited my return, but it would be nice to get the website up and running, especially as a friend who is a really good space photographer has donated me an amazing double nebula photo to use!

With some trepidation I installed my copy of iSpace 1.5 on a Windows 7 Enterprise machine. I don't think I installed it in compatibility mode, but anyway it opened fine. The problem came when I tried to render: it crashed the program, almost certainly due to some rather out of date 3D graphics drivers, I guess.

I checked the compatibility mode it had chosen to run on and it was XP, there was a Windows 2000 option so I tried that without success. The only thing I haven't tried is to uninstall and install under a Windows 2000 compatibility mode, and now I've found my software pass-code I could do that.

Am I just banging my head against a brick wall of obsolescence here, or does anybody have experience or pointers to save this neat program?

The other reason I liked iSpace was its integration with Microsoft FrontPage 2000, which, incredibly, seems to work fine on Windows 7 and is even supposed to work on Windows 10!

So I can easily edit my old websites in Frontpage, just not introduce new content from iSpace.

Looking forward to hearing from any other archaeologists out there

Best wishes

CdeB

Congratulations on the novel and short story!

Thanks Finis

Some recent art will appear here in the not too distant future.

Still hoping somebody has a solution...another approach could be to launch one of my old computers

Have you tried run as admin?
Does it have open gl and dx..?
Truespace has settings for the drivers in the setting panels! Could also be a shader problem???

in worst case, you can use a virtual machine with winXP to run it.

CdeB wrote: 17 Apr 2021, 12:57 ... I installed my copy of iSpace 1.5 on a Windows 7 Enterprise machine.

Just for your information (though I don't know this helps).

I tried to render a template "Deco" on iSpace 1.1 trial version (executions are limited to 20 times, and watermark is added) newly installed in my two PCs today.
(a) Win 8.1 64 bit
(b) Win Vista sp2 32 bit

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For (a), "Render entire table" is OK, "Save As" crashes and leaves an .html file (size 0 byte) and an .iss file (e.g. 1.5 KB). After I started "debug" using Visual Studio, it shows an error at mshtml.dll (out of iSpace);

Unhandled exception at 0xXXXXXXXX (mshtml.dll) in iSpace.exe: 0xC0000005: Access violation reading location 0x0000003C.

Also tried the XP-compatible and/or as-admin, but that didn't improve the situation.

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For (b), "Render entire table" is OK, "Save As" is OK. An html file and an .iss file are created but browsers (IE11 and Chrome) don't display any images including background image.

The created html file has several IMG tags and each of them requests a .jpg file (like below), but there isn't any .jpg file in the same directory with the html file and the browser displays "X" icon in TABLE/TR/TD tags.

<IMG height=76 src="_basic559001050.jpg" width=104 onload="iSpacePreloadImages('_basic559001050_h.jpg','_basic559001050_p.jpg')"

In this line, "iSpacePreloadImages" is a function defined at the beginning of the .html.

The file format of .iss seems not to be distributed as document, and I don't know the role of the .iss file (and whether it includes image or not). A simpler scene from scratch seems to make .iss file size smaller. A binary editor shows the head of the .iss file as below;

0000000: 4361 6c69 6761 7269 2056 3030 2e30 3142 Caligari V00.01B
0000010: 4c48 2020 2020 2020 2020 2020 2020 200a LH .
0000020: 5068 4153 0000 0300 0000 0000 0000 0000 PhAS............

I re-intalled iSpace to a folder with shorter name because I saw one of an .iss or an .html file that has 8.3 short filename with a letter "~" in it (but forgot which file does). However, that didn't improve the situation.

Also tried the XP-compatible, as-admin, .png output, "SSE/3DNow!" off, or "Image Path" (using setting panel below), but that didn't improve the situation.

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"Redering options" for iSpace (1.5?) archived on Oct 17 2002:
https://web.archive.org/web/20021017163 ... ptions.asp

I believe I bought ISpace wayback when. Later this week I'll try to see if I can get this app running again.