[brlcad-news] BRL-CAD 7.10.4 is released

[Christopher S. M. <br...@ma...>]

Once again, the BRL-CAD developers are proud to announce another full  
release of the BRL-CAD solid modeling system.  The 7.10.4 release,  
made available a few weeks ago, contains more than 111 enhancements,  
bug fixes, and new features additions since the 7.8.0 release.  As  
there have been several source and binary releases since the previous  
announcement, each filled with dozens of changes, the full list of  
changes can be seen in the NEWS file available in our download or  
viewable on-line at http://brlcad.cvs.sourceforge.net/*checkout*/ 
brlcad/brlcad/NEWS?pathrev=rel-7-10-4

Of several major features worth highlighting in this release, the  
most significant BRL-CAD development focus over the past year has  
been towards improved hybrid modeling support.  This includes  
development of spline surface boundary representation (BREP) support  
using the well-designed openNURBS (tm) library from Robert McNeel &  
Associates (i.e. the folks that develop Rhino (tm)).  The work on  
BREP support in BRL-CAD is initially being focused on fundamental  
geometric representation and accurate rendering so BREP models from  
other CAD systems may be faithfully imported and analyzed.  As the  
BREP implementation is completed, attention will be focused on the  
development of a complete STEP converter (ISO 10303, AP203 & AP214).

A major productivity change introduced with this version is tab- 
completion in mged, a default scroll-back history of 10000 lines, and  
a plethora of other editing enhancements.  The ray-tracers that  
utilize a framebuffer now all create lingering windows by default  
instead of transient windows so users no longer need to provide the - 
F option, nor do users need to set the FB_FILE environment variable  
in order to get a render window that remains displayed.

Other changes include the new 'beset' tool that was developed as an  
experiment in using evolutionary computation for performing shape  
matching; the Archer suite was enhanced to work across all supported  
architectures; support for the Intel-based Mac OS X platform was  
adopted with there being separate downloads now for Intel and PPC  
Macs; the DXF importer receives significant enhancements where  
support was added for all 2D entities; and the IGES, OFF, and STL  
converters all received significant bug fixes.  The Windows port gets  
a great new installer and considerable development attention with  
dozens of feature requests being implemented and issues being  
resolved, in preparation for an upcoming binary release to be posted  
as soon as testing is complete.

Since the previous 7.10.2 source release, the following major changes  
have occurred:

* lingering framebuffer windows by default
* improved matrix readability on mged 'red' command
* "editor" for ted commands can be set in .mgedrc
* fixed benchmark results computation on Solaris
* fixed database corruption bug caused during dbconcat
* mirror BoT primitives
* BoT vertex selection in mged reports local units
* improved photon map irradiance progress reporting
* tab-completion for mged
* quelled various flawfinder security issues
* fixed photon-mapping lighting model crash
* ADRT libtie bug fixes and performance enhancements
* mged now tests for vim before vi for text editing
* fixed parallel operability bug on the Intel Mac
* detect actual available CPUs on an Intel Mac
* Z clipping now off by default in mged
* added pipe primitive performance optimizations
* handle discontinuous changes in pipe inner radii
* allow rt more than available cpus for debugging
* fixed small TGC (cone) primitive raytrace prep bug
* increased output precision from nirt/query_ray
* removed op-bw for reading Optronics Scanner images
* beset - Ben's Evolutionary Shape Extraction Tool

This version is fully binary backwards-compatible with the previous  
release of BRL-CAD.  Please visit the Sourceforge project website to  
download the latest version: http://sf.net/projects/brlcad

BRL-CAD is a powerful constructive solid geometry solid modeling  
system that includes an interactive geometry editor, ray tracing  
support for rendering and geometric analysis, path-tracing for  
realistic image synthesis, network distributed framebuffer support,  
image and signal-processing tools.

See the BRL-CAD website at http://brlcad.org for more information.