At http://sourceforge.net/projects/visualpython there is 4.beta8 for
Windows and Linux/Unix.
The big change is that this incorporates the work of Arthur Siegel to
use the new numpy and eliminate dependence on Numeric, which is no
longer supported.
There are three major known bugs still being worked on, somewhat
different from the previous release:
1) On Windows, programs that process mouse events may leave a copy
of python running after clicking the close box. The example program
toroid_drag.py has this problem.
2) On some Windows machines, the animation in the program gas.py is
very jerky; this is the only example program affected in this way.
3) Graphing (from visual.graph import *) works well for many simple
uses, but if the axes must be continually adjusted it can be very
slow. If you know the extent of your variables and can specify xmax
and ymax for the graph, the graphing is very fast.
This version is much more usable on Windows, because mouse events now
seem to work okay while running, thanks to a workaround by Arthur
Siegel. However, there remains a mouse-related problem with quitting.
Arthur has narrowed the problem down to being associated with situations
like the following:
if scene.mouse.events:
m = scene.mouse.getevent()
One way to track the quit problem on Windows is to press Ctrl-Alt-Del,
choose Processes tab, click on Image Name, and scroll to python. If
you're running IDLE, normally there is one copy of python for IDLE
itself, another copy for the shell, and a third copy for the running
program (though oddly enough if you run a program and wait about ten
seconds you may see the third listing disappear).
Issues on Linux: When I compiled and installed Python 2.5, numpy 1.0,
and Visual into /usr/local on Ubuntu, I found that at the start of every
run I get a warning message (which doesn't prevent running), "Python C
API version mismatch for module cvisual: This Python has API version
1013, module cvisual has version 1012." Through Google I've seen many
references to this exact same warning, with the same version numbers,
but no enlightenment.
When I tried to build against Ubuntu packages for Python 2.5 and numpy
1.0 (in /usr), the configuration failed in a way I don't understand,
with the check for the existence of numpy looking in
/usr/local/lib/Python2.5/site-packages/numpy instead of in
/usr/lib/Python2.5/site-packages/numpy, despite other indications in
config.log that it knew that I'd specified --prefix=/usr.
Any help in testing and debugging would be most welcome!
Bruce Sherwood
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