E57 Support in Linux CC version

[slavin]

Hi there. I am a new user of CloudCompare, and do most of my work in a Linux environment, with the rest mostly on MacOS. We have a number of workloads that begin with E57-formatted point clouds. My initial tests of CC on MacOS worked fine, and so I downloaded the flatpak distribtuion (tried both 2.11 and 2.12beta) on my Linux workstation (Linux Mint 20.2; effectively Ubuntu).

The flatpak distribution of both versions installs with no problem, and runs easily from the conveniently installed icons (an added bonus). Unfortunately, every E57 file I've tried fails to load properly. I've even tried sample data (the bunny) found at http://www.libe57.org/data.html. Works fine on MacOS, not at all on Linux. Downloading sample CC .bin files works great on both platforms.

I think it's an issue with the libe57 implementation, as compiled. The error is such that when I go to load the .e57 file, I'm prompted with a pop-up window asking me if I really want to load some enormous number of point clouds. It seems like a byte-order or alignment issue with the binary E57 format.

For what it's worth, I've compiled my own version from source, using the excellent instructions. It wasn't trivial, but straightforward, and the E57 functionality works fine. I didn't modify any code to achieve this. Just fought with CMake for a while to get it to find what it wanted, but I'm not a CMake pro either (still mostly using good old make for the small projects I write).

I have not tried the snap binary distributions. They may work. Thanks for your amazing software.

Best,

Shawn

[daniel]

Hum, weird. I don't know a lot about the Linux and Flatpak versions sadly...

What thing that strikes me is this popup about some enormous number of points (clouds?). The only I/O filter that can make this popup appear is the BIN file filter... Have you selected the right filter/file type in the 'Open File' dialog?

Ideally, could you declare this issue on Github? (https://github.com/CloudCompare/CloudCompare/issues). So that the Linux and Flatpak experts will see it.