Zhu3D 4.1.2

[Heinz van Saanen]

Name: Zhu3D
Version: 4.1.2
Type: KDE Scientific
Depend: Qt 4.x
License: GPL
Homepage: http://sourceforge.net/projects/zhu3d/
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, morphing,
transparency, textures, fog and motion blur.
Equation systems can be solved with a fast
adaptive random 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 XP-Vista and
Mac OS X and is fully localized for English,
German, Spanish, French and Chinese. API's like
KDE, Gnome, Motif, Mac OS or Windows are supported
natively. All these settings can be changed
dynamically at runtime. The application comes with
extended help files and a lot of examples. A
precompiled and ready-to-go Windows version is
available.

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 up to 16
parallel threads therefore.

COMPILING:

All unnecessary dependencies are strictly avoided.
You just will need Qt >=4.3 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 the
testing facilities are limited. So packagers are
advised to wait for an even number.


Have fun, Heinz van Saanen

Changelog:
 What is new in 4.1.2

- Added OS-independent high resolution timer
class. Maybe interesting for developers as general
"Swiss Army Knife"
- Spent own CPU-class for core/frequency-detection
what cleans up unsound dependencies to other
modules too
- Calculated CPU-clock frequency is precise up to
6-7 digits now. At least under *nix systems:-)
Windows support for this is pointless and disabled
therefore
- Small optimizations throughout the
OS-independent CPU-ticks-code
- Cleanup/shrink in sysinfo-code. Added dynamic
endianess detection
- Zhu3D should compile on Windows 64 bit now. Not
tested, maybe someone can try this out and give a
short report
- Small improvements/unifications throughout code
- Small shrinks in timer-code
- Small language fixes and optical improvements in
examples
- A yet open but minimized help-window was not
automatically brought to foreground on certain
actions. Fixed
- Fixed SGI/Irix CPU-core-detection
- Files from < 4.1.2 were just 99.99% XML-valid.
Fixed. Note that you still can read the old files,
but save them in the new and 100%-correct format
only. But not the other way round
- File loading for versions < 4.1.2 will not be
canceled in near future
- Switched all Zhu3D-files and examples to correct
XML-format
- Revised/checked/reformated all html-docs with
Tidy and made them strict html 4.01 valid
- The cleaned docs are in scope of the internal
browser again now. Made this default therfore
- Unified/cleaned up source code comments and made
them more Doxygen/editors friendly
- Last but not least: Added 2 stunning demos for
Microsoft fans. Wow-effect guaranteed! Watch out
for the bluscreen demo and the reincarnation of a
famous office assistant

What was new in 4.1.0

- The benchmark calculates relative "Isomarks" too
now. So the effect of misc. thread settings or
compiler switches can be evaluated quickly
- Changed the benchmark-file to be more suitable
for Isomarks Note: This file must contain exactly
one isosurface-equation mandatory now
- Added additional sanity checks for file-loading.
Any potential malware attack through a Zhu3D-file
should be completely impossible now
- Slightly adjusted menu-structures for better
gui-conformance
- Small optimizations and code polishing in the
iso-OpenGL-parts and elsewhere
- Revised translation files
- Updated readme.txt in regards to Postscript. My
new Linux-box renders ps-files up to
"poster-formats" like 10000x10000 e.g. without
problems now
- Small enhancements in the html-code of the
help-docs
- The builtin QTextBrowser for the new Qt4 4.4.x
has some minor troubles with html. Switched
default help-browser for the very first start to
"external" therefore. This may be a better choice
anyhow
- Despite improvements the download is smaller
again than 4.0.8