Audition Runtime Quick Tips

This page is intended as a Quick Start help for users unfamiliar with navigating through a scene using the Audition Runtime Software. For more detailed instructions on the many features of Audition, please refer to the Audition User Manual.

Fly, can be enabled by clicking the button on the menu bar that says Fly. In this mode the eyepoint moves much like an aircraft and the mouse cursor position acts as a virtual joystick where the centre of the screen represents straight and level. Moving the cursor left or right turns the eyepoint and moving the cursor upward or downward from centre screen causes the eyepoint to climb or descend. Clicking on the left mouse button speeds up the eyepoint and clicking on the right mouse button slows it down (including reverse). If you click on the left and right mouse buttons simultaneously you will stop instantly. Some people find the up and down motion confusing compared to a real aircraft, so there is an “Invert” button on the menu bar that reverses the effect of mouse up and mouse down.

Direct Mouse Navigation, is enabled by clicking off the Fly button on the menu bar. This mode allows more degrees of freedom in moving about the scene and behaves more like a flying saucer. Holding the Left mouse button pivots the eyepoint left and right and up and down as you move the mouse around the centre point of the screen. Holding the Right mouse button down and moving the cursor causes the eyepoint to rise and fall as well as slide left and right in the scene. Holding both the left and right mouse buttons and moving the cursor causes the eyepoint to move forward and back in the scene as well as left and right.

Controlling your speed - In either Fly or Direct Mouse Navigation Mode, the overall sensitivity and maximum flying speed are controlled by the Mouse Sensitivity slider control on the menu bar. Moving the slider to the left has the effect of slowing down motion in the scene and to the right speeds things up. These scenes have been tuned to be viewed at normal vehicle speeds (50mph for ground scenes and 300 to 400mph for aircraft scenes). Motion will become less fluid and you will probably outrun the disk paging (database tears and low resolution imagery on terrain) if you fly too quickly. If this happens slow down or stop and wait for the paging to catch up. If you get hopelessly lost, there is a reset view button - 2nd icon from right on menu bar. 

Self running Flight Paths - It is al so possible t o run these demos along a pre-planned flight path without mouse interaction. To do so, go to the View pulldown menu in Audition and select the Path Dlg menu item. Hit the Play button to begin the pre-recorded flight path or Browse to a different file location to load a different path. 

Launching – The Audition runtime software is automatically launched when you run any of the VizMAP 3D Terrain Demos or by double clicking on the Audition.exe file in that demo’s directory. Please note that the larger files can take anywhere from 20 seconds to several minutes to load. Don’t launch multiple copies (repeated double clicking or Start menu launches) as the Audition program and VizMAP database typically consume a large amount of CPU memory and multiple copies will bog the system down. Check your Windows Task Manager if you experience very slow loading or rendering performance as you may have accidentally launched multiple copies. Also please realize that you will experience very slow performance running these demos on small memory configuration systems (< 128MB) or low disk free space configurations, regardless of the performance of your 3D graphics card, because the software requires CPU memory to continuously page data on and off the disk. You will see a small X rotating in the top left corner of the Audition window whenever the system is in the process of paging. The larger your system memory and faster your disk is, the less this paging icon will come on.