New Features in
Visual 5 |
 |
New in Visual The extrusion object introduced with Visual 5.50 enables the easy creation of complex extruded shapes. Aided by the shapes library, you make a 2D shape that can contain holes. Then, aided by the paths library, you choose a path along which your 2D shape is extruded. The curve object can use the shapes library and paths library for constructing the set of points. Visual 5.60 adds facilities to extract faces data from extrusion and text objects, the ability to make these objects single-sided for increased speed, and improved gear facilities in the shapes library, including rack gears. |
 |
Visual 5.61 adds mouse crosshairs to graphs, simplifies the use of controls (no need to call interact), fixes a long-standing inconsistency in the background of a label object's box, and fixes bugs in materials.bricks and in the checking for the presence of Polygon and font modules.
Visual 5.70 adds an easy way to leave a trail behind a moving object.
Visual 5.71 adds log-log and semilog plots to graphs, and the ability to offset the graph origin.
Visual 5.72 corrects a bug in graphs where plotting (0,.001) followed by (.001,.001) failed to autoscale correctly. Also added documentation explaining what objects are used to represent gdots, gcurves, ghbars, and gvbars.
Here is more information.
Credits
Visual 5 was created by David Scherer and Bruce Sherwood. Jonathan Brandmeyer 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.
The late Arthur Siegel implemented dependence on the currently supported numpy library in place of Numeric, which is no longer supported. Hugh Fisher provided a big start on the native-mode Mac version. Michael Temkine fixed some bugs and implemented keyboard handling for Windows.
Previous to Visual 4beta, Jonathan Brandmeyer made several major contributions to Visual 3, including changing the connection between Python and C++ from CXX, which was no longer supported, to the Boost C++ libraries, and implementing auto-configurable installations for Linux.
Kadir Haldenbilen and Bruce Sherwood collaborated to create the 3D text object, and the extrusion object.