sciview window blanks out sometimes on repaint, and starts blank

[ctrueden]

Here is how sciview looks when I first launch it:

If I resize the window to force a validate/repaint or whatnot, I can get the canvas+grid to appear. But when resizing, it flickers gray and sometimes ends up solid gray again, until I tweak it. Some kind of painting race condition perhaps, or maybe a graphics driver issue? I have seen this before with Java 3D windows many years ago—it's kind of funny that we still have this problem with 3D viz in 2023.

[kephale]

Hmm... I haven't seen this for a while [and don't see it on MacOS]. I can test on Linux in a bit.

[ctrueden]

How can I tell whether I'm running OpenGL vs Vulkan? I could check if it even happens on Vulkan...

[kephale]

In the interpreter/REPL in sciview you can run:
sciview.getSceneryRenderer()

[smlpt]

This happens to me too. Windows 10 with 1.25x display scaling, running today's master branch and using Vulkan.
I also noticed that after loading the Mesh demo and resizing the side panel a couple of times, the canvas stays blank and no windows resizing, movement or side panel adjustment will bring it back.
I don't know much about debugging in sciview, but I'm happy to assist where I can.

[ctrueden]

@smlpt Interesting—for me it doesn't ever get "stuck": I can always bring it back via another window resizing operation or two. FWIW, I'm on Ubuntu Linux with X11 and Vulkan renderer.

I am guessing this issue will need to be fixed at the scenery level. My next steps to debug this would be:

• Run scenery without sciview, see if it happens there.
• Understand more the types of windows that scenery can be embedded into (Swing, JavaFX, etc.) and try it each of those ways, to see whether the problem happens in all cases.
• Try diffing the thread dump (accessible from the CLI easily via the jstack command) when the window is painted versus gray, to see if there is any difference.
• And of course: ping @skalarproduktraum to ask him if he has seen this before, and/or has any thoughts on what could be causing it.