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--- 2011-04-12 Release 7.18.4 ---
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After considerable development, this release includes the preliminary
integration of our high-performance Triangle Intersection Engine (TIE)
with BRL-CAD's LIBRT raytrace library. TIE uses specialized
acceleration techniques for faster raytracing of triangle mesh models.
TIE was experimentally developed over several years as part of
BRL-CAD's Advanced Distributed Ray Tracer (ADRT) tool suite. As this
is the initial integration, TIE is available but presently disabled by
default. The engine optimization is configurably integrated with
LIBRT mesh (BoT) raytracing and optionally enabled via settings
available in RT and MGED. Initial testing of "real-world" models shows
average improvements around 20-60% while individual meshes with high
(1M+) face counts are rendering more than 2000% faster than before.
Also included in this release is the development of a new "shp-g"
geometry importer for Shapefile data. Shapefiles are a common file
format for storing geospatial vector data commonly used by geographic
information systems (GIS) software. Shapefiles may be imported as 2D
sketch geometry that can be extruded to a 3D representation.
* fixed units conversion bug with mged 'title' command - Bob Parker
* fixed memory management crash in the dem-g importer - Richard Weiss
* fixed edcolors so it retains and accepts colors again - Cliff Yapp
* support for applying matrix edits to revolve primitives - Dongxu Li
* fixed mged 'red' command bug on Windows - Sean Morrison, Cliff Yapp
* support matrices over halfspaces within combinations - Sean Morrison
* fixed archer and rtwizard startup failure bug on Mac - Sean Morrison
* fixed bug starting up the Combination Editor in mged - Sean Morrison
* mged 'mater' command interactive prompting restored - Sean Morrison
* added pix2fb and fb2pix screenshot commands to archer - Bob Parker
* fixed bug running nirt on a Windows command terminal - Bob Parker
* improved wireframe updating when editing within mged - Sean Morrison
* added -T bot_mintie BoT optimization options to nirt - Sean Morrison
* fixed Windows display manager bug when drawing strings - Bob Parker
* mged command-click zoom binding for one button mice - Sean Morrison
* removed 'txyz-pl' utility tool in favor of 'xyz-pl' - Sean Morrison
* new shp-g importer for Esri Shapefile geometry files - Sean Morrison
* new 'rt_bot_mintie' option for triggering TIE BoTs - Erik Greenwald
* integrated optimized TIE BoT raytracing with LIBRT - Erik Greenwald
