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--- 2006-04-11 Release 7.8.0 ---
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This release marks a major milestone in the massive effort by the
BRL-CAD developers and the open source community to provide a complete
port of BRL-CAD to the Microsoft Windows platform. This effort
includes particular support and contributions from SURVICE
Engineering, Inc., TNO Prins Maurits Laboratory, the U.S. Army
Research Library (ARL), and others. The Windows port effort was
started several years ago, primarily through efforts of friends at the
U.S. Army Aviation and Missile Research Development and Engineering
Center (AMRDEC) and CG2, Inc. Over the past year, the development
effort was accelerated to a stable status through the work of SURVICE
working for ARL.
This release also includes another major contribution by SURVICE
Engineering, Inc., a new modeling tool called Archer. A more detailed
announcement and overview of Archer will be given in the near future
after the new tool is more fully integrated into the build system and
tested further.
Other noteworthy enhancements provided in this release include new
sample applications that demonstrate the capabilities of the libpkg
networking library, in-memory geometry database processing, reshooting
of rays from analysis codes for testing purposes, and the librt root
solver. For analysts and modelers alike, the MGED modeler also
acquires a few new commands including reid and remat that respectively
assist with the assignment of region and material identifiers.
* fixed mged B command bad geometry resource bug - John Anderson
* new tracker tool for extracting sf.net tracker data - Sean Morrison
* added manual page for benchmark tool - Sean Morrison
* fixed g-dxf export compatibility issue - John Anderson
* smoother sketch primitive spline drawing - Sean Morrison
* fixed read bug in giftorle - Sean Morrison
* fixed multiply referenced object illumination bug - Sean Morrison
* improved nmg tessellation support reliability - Sean Morrison
* new tpkg ttcp-style example application using libpkg - Sean Morrison
* new roots_example root solving sample application - Sean Morrison
* prevent several g-nmg segfaults during tessellation - Sean Morrison
* fixed brlman/awf `./"' unsupported or unknown issue - Sean Morrison
* new g_transfer in-memory geometry example program - Sean Morrison
* new reshoot program to reshoot rays & compare results - Lee Butler
* added support for -F framebuffer option to fb-bw - Sean Morrison
* reid mged command, recursively assign region IDs - Sean Morrison
* remat mged command, recursively assign a material ID - Sean Morrison
* get_regions mged command, list assembly regions - Sean Morrison
* extensive Windows build support enhancements - Bob Parker
* new Archer modeling and visualization tool - Bob Parker, Doug Howard
* raytracers use image size for default aspect ratio - Sean Morrison
* fixed benchmark sqrt of negative numbers error - Sean Morrison
* raytracer performance enhancements - Sean Morrison
