Zhu3D 4.0.8

[Heinz van Saanen]

Name: Zhu3D
Version: 4.0.8
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 was new in 4.0.8

- Added multicore-support for
isosurface-tessellations when user-defined
functions are enabled. The whole time critical
iso-stuff is multithreaded up to 16 CPU-cores now
without any exceptions
- Updated fparser to the new 2.83 release which
fixes some small parsing errors in combination
with the optimizer
- Removed never referenced functions from the 2.83
optimizer
- Switched solver module to fparser 2.83
- Adopted two examples due to slight parser
changes and documented this. Important: all
constants and function-parameters must have
different names now mandatory
- Speeded up parser-inits for the "File/New"
menu-action
- Removed 2.x-3.x file support as announced. This
shrinks code-and executable-sizes considerably as
well as compilation time
- Minor typo-fixes, renamings,
install.txt-updates, ...
- Raised Windows version to Qt 4.3.5
- Replaced ugly macro-RNG's with a clean and fast
RNG-class
- Replaced CPU-clockcycle-stuff with an optimzed
class
- Removed CPU-clock display for Windows. The
granularity of the Windows-timers is simply too
bad for this
- The solver display does not show comments and
empty functions any more. Replaced these by a
mathematically more sounding 0
- Stripped html-docs again to save some KB in
download size
- Updated intel-icc.txt in regards to errors with
gcc 4.3.x
- Updated readme.txt in regards to errors with Qt4
4.4.0. Trolltech fixed a severe bug in newer
snapshots
- Fixed a (harmless) error message for a uic-part
of Qt4.4.2 snaphot release
- Inserting rows in user defined tables did not
work under some seldom circumstances. Fixed
- Entering something in the last row of the user
defined table did not set the current row pointer
correctly. Fixed
- Fixed a small header dependency issue for the
newer gcc 4.3.x compilers
- Eliminated (harmless) compiler warnings with gcc
4.3.1

What was new in 4.0.6

- Speeded up parser inits. "Normal" users will
hardly notice this, but this measurement is
important for lets say eight or more CPU-threads
- Changing the font size resized the width of the
vertical user-table header after a restart at
first. Fixed
- Updated Chinese and French doc-htmls. Thanks to
Yanqing and Henri again. All language htmls are
100% complete now
- Updated readme.txt in regards to potential
problems with the new Qt4.4.0 and some
localizations. Newer Qt4.4 snapshots solve these
problem
- When you are still having old Zhu3D 2.x-3.x
files, think of converting them to current 4.x
ones. To do so, just load and restore them.
Reading-support for this ancient stuff will be
canceled in future