[Therion] BreakOut 3D cave viewer

[Bill Gee]

Update:

I installed Breakout Cave Survey Viewer on three different Fedora 30 systems.  It works on two of them.  It does not import the PLT files generated by Therion.  According to the documentation, when you import Compass data you must specify both a PLT and a MAK file.  Therion generates only the PLT.

After much web searching, I think the problem on my laptop is not with Breakout itself but rather with the display driver.  Breakout requires GLX3, but the Intel i915 display driver for my Lenovo Thinkpad T410 does not provide that.  It only provides GLX2.

The two systems that work are running nVidia and VirtualBox display drivers.  I have not tried it with Nouveau.  The nVidia display driver I use is the kmod packaged driver from the Fedora repository.

Breakout Cave Survey Viewer duplicates much of the functionality provided by Aven and Loch.  The main new feature is searching.  You can tell Breakout to search for a particular survey station and it will take you there.  It can also search for a range of stations, a named passage or room, surveys by date and much more.

On the other hand - Breakout does not provide a way to see the straight-line distance between any two survey stations.  It does not display the bounding box.

-- 
Bill Gee



On Monday, June 24, 2019 11:15:33 AM CDT Bill Gee wrote:
> Hello everyone -
> 
> I attended the NSS annual convention in Cookeville, TN last week.  There was a very interesting presentation on a 3D cave viewing software that might be interesting to this group.  The web site is
> 
> 	https://breakoutcavesurvey.com
> 
> The program is pure Java, so it requires a Java Runtime Environment of some kind.  The whole thing is just one .jar file.    The demonstration was on a Mac laptop.  It starts on my desktop running Fedora 30, but gives an OpenGL error on my laptop.  There are probably some missing libraries of some kind.  The developer said that it will run on Windows.
> 
> The viewer knows how to deal with Compass and Walls files.  Therion can output a Compass PLT file, so should be able to feed Breakout.  I have not tried this yet.
> 
>