Frequently asked questions

iRIC is distributed for Windows only. Windows 10 has been confirmed to work well, and the project has stated that a Linux build is not available. If you need to run iRIC on another operating system, you would have to use a Windows machine or a Windows virtual machine.

The internet background image is fetched from Google Maps, and it will not appear unless a valid Google Maps API key has been registered in iRIC. The steps are:

1. Obtain an API key from the Google Maps Platform (your own Google account is needed).
2. In the iRIC GUI open the Preferences dialog (Option menu) and enter the API key in the corresponding field.

After the key is registered, the online map should load as the background image. The exact location of the field is described in the Preferences section of the iRIC GUI user manual.

iRIC is updated with the built-in maintenance tool: choose Option > Maintenance in the iRIC menu bar, click Close iRIC and launch iRIC Maintenance, then follow the Next buttons to see the update information and start the update.

If iRIC closes but the maintenance window does not show up, try starting the tool directly from the installation folder: %userprofile%\iric\maintenancetool.exe (paste this path into the Windows Explorer address bar or the Run dialog). This workaround does not resolve every case; if it still fails, reinstalling from the latest installer on the iRIC website is the remaining option.

MeanderJP is not bundled with the iRIC 2, 3 or 4 installers. It was distributed by a third party through a separate website (meanderjpiric.wordpress.com, page Solver and Grid Generator), and the solver files had to be copied manually into the solvers folder of the iRIC installation. The code was never updated for newer iRIC releases, so it only works with iRIC 2.x (for example 2.0 or 2.3), not with iRIC 3 or 4. Note that recent reports say the files can no longer be found on that site, so the solver may effectively be unavailable now.

Nays2DH cannot handle tidal flow: it is a single-layer, depth-averaged model for a fluid of a single density, so salt-water intrusion or stratified tidal flow cannot be represented. If the phenomenon of interest is a vertical two-dimensional flow such as a salt wedge, Nays2DV is the solver to consider. The theoretical background of these models is covered by iRIC Academy.

Nays2DH and Nays2DFlood support multi-threaded computation on a multi-core PC. Open the calculation condition dialog (Calculation Condition > Setting), go to the Others group and set Number of threads for parallel computation (Only multi core PC) to the number of cores you want to use. GPU (GPGPU) acceleration is not offered as a setting, and the availability of parallel computation in other solvers depends on each solver.

The upstream side is defined by the bed elevation of the grid, not by a separate flag. When a straight channel grid is created with the grid generator, the bed slope you enter fixes which end is higher (upstream). When the grid is built from imported river cross sections, the slope and elevations come from the cross-section data. To check the result, open the Bird's-eye view of the grid and display the bed elevation as a contour; the flow enters at the higher end. Note that this is one interpretation of the question given in the thread.

A crash on re-running a simulation that uses cg_iric_write_sol_particle was a bug in the iRIClib / iRIC GUI release of May 2020 (2020.05.22). It was fixed in the following release, so updating iRIC resolves it: choose Option > Maintenance in the iRIC GUI and apply the update. A separate problem with cg_iric_write_sol_particlegroup (only final particle positions shown with NaN scalar values) was acknowledged but no fix was described in the thread, so it may or may not be resolved in later versions.

The standard solvers do not include dam-breach erosion, but a modified version of Nays2DH for breach simulation has been published and may cover this kind of problem, depending on what you want to obtain from the simulation. It can be downloaded from the CERI website (http://river.ceri.go.jp/contents/tool/nays2d-breach.html). Be aware that all documentation for that modified solver is available in Japanese only.

This display problem is caused by the graphics driver, and there are two things to try:

1. If the PC has a dedicated graphics card, open Windows Graphics Settings, add iRIC under Apps and explicitly set it to use the high-performance graphics card. Since Windows 10 version H1, Windows chooses the GPU per application, and by default iRIC may be running on the integrated GPU.
2. If there is no dedicated card, the pink lines indicate that the Intel integrated graphics driver is out of date; install the latest driver from the Intel website.

Reinstalling iRIC itself does not fix the issue.

There is no dedicated water quality module, but the UTT solver can be used for general advection and diffusion of a dissolved or suspended material, which covers many water quality problems. Its documentation, including a simple bend example, is available at https://i-ric.org/yasu/UTT_EN/03/02_Symple_Bend.html.

In the iRIC 4 installer, roughly 43 % is the point where all required files have been downloaded and the actual installation begins (when Miniconda is not selected). First check the detailed log in the installer window to see what it is doing, and wait a while. If it still does not proceed, the installation is possibly being blocked by folder access permissions or security software on the PC. Try the following:

• Temporarily disable your security (antivirus) software.
• Run the installer with administrator privileges.

A normal installation should not take hours; a stall of that length indicates that something is blocking it.

Nays2D+ itself is not provided as a Python-callable solver. If you want to drive a 2D flow simulation from Python, the suggested option is NaysMini, which is designed to be used with Python. Try NaysMini as the starting point for Python-based workflows.

In iRIC 4.x the resolution of exported images and videos follows the size of the visualization window, so a wide domain rendered in a small window looks coarse and blurry. Two things help:

1. Zoom in on the area of interest before exporting; the polygons are then drawn at a finer scale and the output is noticeably sharper.
2. Use the menu option that sets the size of the visualization window. The window can be made larger than the monitor's own resolution (you then navigate it with scroll bars), and the enlarged window is what gets exported, which effectively raises the pixel dimensions of the image or video.

There is no separate DPI setting; adjusting the window size is the intended way to obtain high-resolution output. A larger monitor (for example 4K) also gives sharper results by default.

A crash with no warning or message when opening projects or examples is most likely related to insufficient available memory, especially on a machine with only about 6 GB of RAM. Whether a given case runs depends on the model size and the grid resolution: larger domains and finer grids need considerably more memory and computation time. Possible ways forward are to close other applications to free RAM, try a smaller example or a coarser grid to confirm that memory is the issue, or use a machine with more RAM. This is a probable cause rather than a confirmed one, so if the problem persists with small cases, report the details of your environment on the forum.

This happens when Rivmaker.exe is launched directly from Explorer (for example <iRIC install folder>\guis\rivmaker\Rivmaker.exe); the executable cannot find sqlite3.dll and zlib.dll in its own folder. It is not caused by skipping the Miniconda installation. Two approaches work in iRIC 4.x:

1. Start RivMaker from inside iRIC: open iRIC v4 and choose Option -> Tools -> RivMaker. Launched this way it finds the DLLs and starts normally.
2. If you need to launch it directly, copy sqlite3.dll and zlib.dll from <iRIC install folder>\guis\prepost into <iRIC install folder>\guis\rivmaker, then run Rivmaker.exe again. Note that the DLLs must come from the guis\prepost folder; placing them only in the iRIC root folder does not help.

If the error persists after copying, uninstall iRIC v4, reinstall the latest version, and repeat the steps above.