Zhu3D 3.3.0

[Heinz van Saanen]

Name: Zhu3D
Version: 3.3.0
Type: KDE Scientific
Depend: Qt 4.x
License: GPL
More Info:
http://www.kde-apps.org/content/show.php?content=43071

Description:
 Zhu3D is an interactive OpenGL-based mathematical
function viewer. You can visualize explicite
functions, parametric systems and isosurfaces. The
viewer supports zooming, scaling and rotating as
well as filed lighting or surface properties.
Special effects are animations, transparency,
textures, fog and motion blur. Equation systems
can be solved with a fast adaptive search.

You have up to 8 lights, background settings,
wire-modes or illumination models. For picture
rendering and textures all common formats are
recognized. User-defined functions can have any
amount of parameters, can be nested or recursive.
For special purposes if-clauses and boolean
operators are supported. Isosurfaces can use
different volume-based algorithms.

Zhu3D runs under Linux/Unix, Windows 98-Vista and
Mac OS X and is fully localized for English,
German, Spanish, French and Chinese. It supports
API's like KDE, Gnome, Motiv or Windows. All these
settings can be changed dynamically at runtime.
The application comes with extended help files and
a lot of examples.

HARDWARE:

For basic viewings even a slow PC without
HW-OpenGL may be sufficient. However, goddies like
motion blur or animation are a challenge for every
GPU. Isosurface tessellation needs a lot of
CPU-power and automatically utilizes multicore
CPU's therefore.

COMPILING:

All unnecessary dependencies are strictly avoided.
You just will need Qt >=4.2 and OpenGL >=1.2
whereas OpenGL may be a software implementation
like Mesa. The qmake easily can be taylored for
special needs, what supports packagers.

VERSIONS:

Versions with odd numbers are considered as "pre".
These are not intended to be buggy, but my testing
facilities are limited. So packagers should wait
for an even number. A Windows version is
available. Thanks to Victor Fernandez for hosting.


Have fun, Heinz van Saanen

Changelog:
 What is new in 3.3.0

- In demo mode you can browse forward and backward
now. Made these buttons autorepeateable
- Added automatic slideshow to demo mode
- User defined constants can be altered in any
desired sequence and all following dependencies
are resolved correctly now. So building complex
and nested expressions is a lot easier and less
error-prone
- Reordered help-menu in a more logic way
- Detected thanks to fussy ICC. Setting a new work
directory could cause a malfunction under special
circumstances. Fixed
- Beeing extremely unsound you still could provoke
a crash when changing iso-tessellation mode during
ill parser-states. Fixed
- Defining a single and only a single user-defined
item could lead to wrong views on multi-core
CPU's. Fixed
- Continously scaling during animation could lead
to unwanted loop-effects on too slow PC's. Fixed
- Small gui optimizations
- Some slight source code unifications
- Shrinked and corrected language files. Yanqing
Girard updated Chinese again. Thanks
- Updated install.txt
- Polished examples. This was quite easy now
thanks to the new demo-mode:-)

What was new in 3.2.9

- Complete code review. Substitutions of global
dependencies with signals, substantial code
reductions, formatting, optimizations, typos,
naming conventions, ...
- The executable is as small again as many
versions ago
- Added new demo mode. You comfortable can browse
through all examples with just one click now. Note
that you really can do everything within demo mode
what can be done normally. Opening editors,
solving, changing light properties, ...
- Most demo examples will be performed extremely
quick even on older hardware. The exceptions are
some single examples which stress multicore-CPU's,
OpenGL or parsers. Here you simply will need some
seconds patience when using ancient hardware
- Function input can be completely empty now for
comfort. There is no need to mark blank functions
with a comment anymore
- Changed file format. You still can read old
Zhu3D files, but older releases will fail to read
the new format
- Updated all examples to new file format
- The continous and repeated input of blunder
without correcting it opened many doors for a
crash. Fixed. Zhu3D should hopefully never crash
now, independent from whatever junk you may feed
in
- Main window and OpenGL-viewer are locked on
erroneous inputs
- New user items can be defined or changed only,
when previous input was error free
- Small bug in animation-setup under "File/New".
Fixed
- Adding a faulty constant may have shown an
unspecific or wrong error message. Fixed
- Small corrections in French and Chinese language
files
- Used re-emerged upload headroom to add new
examples