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--- 2013-06-13 Release 7.24.0 ---
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This major update to BRL-CAD comes after nearly a full year of
development. This is the alpha release unveiling of Archer/MGED, a
preliminary interface update to BRL-CAD's graphical geometry editor.
As alpha software, this new MGED prototype aims to provide functional
feature parity with the antecedent MGED interface while introducing
various changes. Included is an integrated graphical tree view, a
single window framework, drag-and-drop geometry editing, information
panels, shortcut buttons, improved polygonal mesh and 2D sketch
editing, level-of-detail wireframes, NURBS shaded display support, and
much more. Prior to upcoming beta testing where the emphasis will
predominantly be on stability and usability, this alpha status
solicits feedback from the community on capability and features.
This release also includes various improvements to BRL-CAD's ray
tracing infrastructure including CPU thread affinity locking for
faster performance, more consistent grazing hit behavior, expanded
volume and surface area calculations, numerous bug fixes, and more
robust NURBS evaluation. Following BRL-CAD's interface deprecation
policy (see CHANGES file), the Jove text editor is no longer being
bundled. Numerous converters receive robustness improvements
including the STEP, Patch, and 3DM importers.
* improved gqa performance on parallel SMP hardware - Richard Weiss
* fixed bounding box size calculation for pipe geometry - Bob Parker
* improved help option consistency across numerous tools - Carl Moore
* 'idents' command no longer reports negative booleans - Keith Bowman
* improved support for NURBS with big uv-domain changes - Keith Bowman
* improved ray tracing behavior for grazing rays - Keith Bowman
* improved robustness of the step-g geometry importer - Nick Reed
* fixed search command bombing on v4 database file - Sean Morrison
* fixed graphics window z-clipping bug in mged - Bob Parker
* fixed mged lesson 15 toy truck 'inside' ordering bug - Sean Morrison
* fixed uninstallable Linux RPM package on Fedora 18 - Jordi Sayol
* improved Mac, BSD, & Windows ray tracing performance - Sean Morrison
* improved Linux ray tracing via cpu thread affinity - Akshay Kashyap
* fixed nirt high object count failure on Windows - Richard Weiss
* added plate mode BoT support to 'bot_merge' command - Richard Weiss
* jove removed, see jove.emacs for compatibility bindings - Cliff Yapp
* added gqa -q quiet option to suppress 'was not hit' - Richard Weiss
* level-of-detail mged configuration dialog, under Tools - Nick Reed
* added level-of-detail wireframe support to mged/archer - Nick Reed
* initial NURBS shaded display and tessellation support - Keith Bowman
* fixed patch-g -f input file permissions failure - Sean Morrison
* improved large file support for the patch-g importer - Sean Morrison
* upgraded libpng to version 1.5.12 - Cliff Yapp
* openNURBS updated to version 5.0 (2012-10-24) - Richard Weiss
* improved BoT mesh editing interface in archer - Bob Parker
* fixed crash when running screengrab in archer - Nick Reed
* fixed memory leak when working with pipe primitives - Daniel Roßberg
* fixed asc2g and mged empty revolve object crashes - Sean Morrison
* improved Linux support for multiple hardware displays - Bob Parker
* fixed crash when parsing invalid shader parameters - Cliff Yapp
* fixed mged 'dbupgrade' -permissions error on windows - Sean Morrison
* fixed infinite loop raytracing subtracted lights - Sean Morrison
* added hyp centroid and volume output to 'analyze' - Aaron Keesing
* added support for wireframe drawing of 'hyp' labels - Bob Parker
* fixed random number SMP bug affecting rt and adrt - Sean Morrison
* added support for editing 2D sketch objects in archer - Bob Parker
* fixed File->New deprecation error in archer - Sean Morrison
* improved Linux platform application and file icons - Jordi Sayol
* modified gqa to report all missed regions - Richard Weiss
* added epa surface area and volume to analyze command - Chris Dueck
* added arbn surface area and volume to analyze command - Chris Dueck
* added eto surface area and volume to analyze command - Chris Dueck
* quell pix-png gAMA chunk warning defaulting to unset - Sean Morrison
* fixed mged interactive object translation keypoint bug - Bob Parker
* fixed corrupted tessellation pipe export bug - Richard Weiss
* fixed memory leak in bot_condense - Chris Dueck
* output from g-var no longer prints 'fwrite' messages - Sean Morrison
* fixed gqa to not report overlap regions as zero hits - Richard Weiss
* fixed crash in step-g tool importing AP214 entities - Sean Morrison
* improved 3dm-g output and invalid geometry support - Sean Morrison
* fixed crash revolving empty sketch objects - Sean Morrison
* fixed TIE raytracing bugs shotlining plate-mode BoTs - Sean Morrison
* g_diff gives non-zero return code if .g files differ - Sean Morrison
* fixed typographical errors in numerous tools and docs - Carl Moore
* fixed TIE perpendicular face mesh evaluation failure - Richard Weiss
* added -b option to set tpkg network packet size - Andrei Popescu
* added manual page for existing mged reid command - Richard Weiss
* added manual page for bot_sync, bot_flip, bot_split - Richard Weiss
* added manual page for running rtarea within mged - Richard Weiss
* improved documentation consistency and authorship info - Tom Browder
* new mouse-input unpushed matrix edit option in archer - Bob Parker
* fixed bug during pipe editing with working units set - Bob Parker
* added experimental 'bot_fuse' command to heal BoTs - Richard Weiss