Hi Folks,
I got this from Bruce Sherwood and thought others might be interested.
-steve
Begin forwarded message:
From: Bruce Sherwood <bruce_sherw...@ncsu.edu>
Date: December 9, 2008 11:01:05 AM EST
To: Steve Spicklemire <st...@spvi.com>
Subject: Advertising
-------------------------
At vpython.org there is now available the Visual 5.0 release
candidate for Windows, Mac 10.5, and Linux. The native-mode Mac
version does not use X11 nor depend on Fink.
Major new features include opacity, local lighting, and materials
such as wood. Of interest to researchers is the new "points" object
which is useful for representing data in 3D.
Visual 5.0 was created by David Scherer and Bruce Sherwood.
Jonathan Brandmeyer while an undergraduate at NCSU provided support
in Visual 4beta for opacity, local lighting, and textures, and made
some important architectural changes, but had to stop work on the
project before it was completed. Further development has led to
API changes which are incompatible with the Visual 4beta release,
so this release is called version 5 instead of 4.
P.S. You will see shader errors and/or the inability to display
materials such as wood if your graphics hardware does not support
Pixel Shader 3.0. The key point is this statement in the Visual 5.0
help (see the "What's new" section or the "materials" section):
Materials will work with graphics cards that support Pixel Shader
3.0 ("PS 3.0"). For details, see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pixel_shader#Hardware. Some materials
may work with graphics cards that support PS 2.0, but other
materials may need to be manually disabled; see instructions in the
site-settings.py module in the Visual package in your site-packages
folder. If the graphics hardware does not support pixel shaders,
the material property is ignored. If you think you should be able
to use materials but have trouble with their display or
performance, we highly recommend upgrading your video card drivers
to the latest version.
--
http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-announce-list
Support the Python Software Foundation:
http://www.python.org/psf/donations.html
