$Id: Changes,v 1.148 2013/04/21 19:16:38 johns Exp $
Changelog for Tachyon(tm) Ray Tracer
------------------------------------
04/21/2013 o Added the Doxygen build files to the source tree
o Massive update to the list of different target platforms.
I have removed all of the old build targets that aren't
particularly relevant to an average person from the main list,
but they are still in the makefiles for those that want to
dig into Make-arch and see what is there.
o Implemented a new barrier synchronization mechanism for
synchronizing the pool of worker threads on each node
prior to sending/receiving the image buffer via MPI.
This increases the performance of hybrid MPI/threads
builds quite substantially on average. Rather than using
the higher-cost threadpool barriers on each row/scanline,
this implementation uses either lock-free atomic integer
operations or a minimalistic mutex-based approach.
Tests on the NCSA Blue Waters Cray XE6/XK7 give a
performance gain of roughly 3.6x when using the
mutex- or fetch-and-add/add-and-fetch atomic counter
barriers rather than the condition variable sleeping barriers.
o Added support for atomic integer ops for improved performance
when mixing threads and distributed memory message passing.
o Fixed a couple of bugs in the volume loader code.
Added check for successful read, and added a missing
call to fclose().
o Added bluewaters-mpi-thr target enabling both MPI and threads.
o Replaced hard-coded threading defines in the makefile with
inclusion of flags from Make-config similar to what is
already done for MPI and other features. This makes it
much easier to enable/disable various implementation
options, tunings, and machine-dependent, compiler-specific,
platform-specific optimizations, and experimental code.
04/20/2013 o Eliminated a small bit of unnecessarily inlined/duplicated
code for caching the AO RNG handle in the two main
image generation loops.
o Added commentary about the costs of the barrier synchronization
in the context of mixed threads+MPI builds, and the opportunity
to replace it with simpler mechanisms such as a scheme based on
fetch-add atomic ops.
04/19/2013 o Integrated bug fixes for the old OpenMP code path
and added build targets linux-icc-64-openmp and linux-64-openmp.
o Fixed a bug with OpenGL+MPI where all of the non-zero nodes
were setting their image output buffers to rgb96f, but
node 0 was setting rgb24f. All nodes now set their output
buffers to rgb24f if OpenGL is enabled. Added a simple
linux-mpi-ogl build target for easy testing.
04/17/2013 o Misc cleanup of the Makefiles, added more comments
regarding the need for -DUSE_MPI_IN_PLACE when compiling
with MPI 2.x libraries.
04/09/2013 o Changed the double-precision epsilon values to prevent
occurence of the "digital zits" problem when rendering
VMD scenes of extremely large structures such as the HIV capsid.
Reducing the epsilon value by 50 cures this problem for
extremely large VMD scenes. In the longer term, Tachyon
should be changed to use epsilon differently to avoid
this sort of sensitivity.
12/09/2012 o Use the pthread affinity APIs when compiling for Intel MIC
12/07/2012 o Added support native Tachyon builds on
Intel Xeon Phi (MIC) compute accelerators
12/06/2012 o Updated CARMA Tegra3 targets to use forced override of
the number of CPU cores to prevent offlined CPUs from
causing Tachyon to spawn too few host threads.
11/15/2012 o Added new linux-carma-thr and linux-carma-softfp-thr
build targets supporting the NVIDIA / SECO Tegra3
development boards.
09/29/2012 o Added workaround to address the problem of varying CPU counts
reported by sysconf() on the Android platform. Android varies
the number of active CPU cores according to system activity,
thermal load, and battery state. Several existing Android
versions incorrectly report the number of active processors
rather than the number of physical processors when queried
with _SC_NPROCESSORS_CONF, so until this is fixed, we work
around that problem by reading and interpreting the contents
of the file /sys/devices/system/cpu/present.
09/28/2012 o Added special Java JNI wrapper functions and supporting
infrastructure that is required in order to call Tachyon
from Java, wrapped in an Android application.
o Don't call exit() on the Android platform, return instead.
o Added new Makefile macros to control the naming of the Tachyon
Java JNI wrapper function, and the app/class that it
gets embedded into.
o Significantly streamlined Android JNI builds by adding new macros to control NDK binary/include/lib/sysroot paths.
09/24/2012 o Updated the Tachyon threads code for MacOS X to avoid using
the old Carbon Multiprocessing APIs, which are now deprecated
on versions of MacOS X 10.7 and later.
08/27/2012 o Fixed a potential thread handle leak on Windows platforms.
03/14/2012 o Added check for USE_MPI_IN_PLACE macro when compiling
Tachyon for platforms based on MPI 2.x, such as the
NCSA/Cray Blue Waters system.
04/11/2012 o Fix behavior of non-blocking glwin_handle_events() calls
on windows.
Updated OpenGL window handling code to process various
mouse events and to prevent dropping any events.
02/17/2011 o Revised Tachyon APIs to greatly improve const correctness.
02/15/2011 o Changed the behavior of OpenGL fog such that fog color
doesn't override the background color or background sky sphere.
OpenGL only applies fog to drawn fragments and not
to raster ops or glClear() so this makes it easier to
emulate the behavior that OpenGL applications like VMD expect.
o Added orthographic sky plane background gradient mode, renamed
the background gradient API deprecating the old one, and added
copius comments to the Tachyon header file.
02/11/2011 o Updated in-memory texture image definition API, replacing
rt_define_image() with rt_define_teximage_rgb24().
02/06/2011 o Updated various header files to improve doxygen output.
o Further progress in automating conversion of the threading
code to the WorkForce APIs used in external programs.
02/05/2011 o Misc improvements, added new command line -raydepth
parameter to override maximum ray recursion depth setting
in the scene file.
02/01/2011 o Added "3fv" versions of most object creation APIs
which is more convenient and familiar to OpenGL programmers.
01/31/2011 o Eliminated dependencies on libGLU
01/28/2011 o Greatly expanded range of keyboard input allowed
by OpenGL window handling routines on X11 and Win32.
01/24/2011 o Improved Win32 window resizing behavior
01/19/2011 o Added support for interactive fly-throughs using the
SpaceNavigator and other devices that send events
via windowing system messages.
01/16/2011 o Marked with new version number 0.99
o Updated camera code to allow changes to rendered
image resolution independent of other camera parameters.
o Added keyboard hotkeys to change the window size and
resolution of the ray traced images on-the-fly.
o Added code to gracefully handle window resizing and dynamic
scaling/centering of the ray tracer output image.
o Fixed Win32 OpenGL drawing code to double-buffer by default
01/15/2011 o Added window event handling code for SpaceNavigator/Spaceball
and compatible devices.
o Eliminated code and build settings related to the Mercury/MSTI
i860 and PowerPC builds supporting RTVI framebuffers, circa 1998.
01/12/2011 o Added support for quad-buffered stereoscopic display
modes to the OpenGL window management code.
Updated the OpenGL display code to handle keypresses and a
wide range of other event types. Rewrote the Win32 display
code to eliminate global window state variables through
the use of user-defined window property data.
Added support for both blocking and non-blocking window system
event queries.
o Fixed scene parser logic for extension-based file type
determination
o Update const-correctness of various image I/O modules
o Updated various source files to eliminate Microsoft
compiler warnings
02/10/2010 o Added support for limits on the maximum number of
transparent surfaces shown, a related flag to enable
or disable shadow filtering for transparent objects,
and a new transparency mode flag to enable modulation of
surface transparency based on the angle of incidence of the
incoming ray and the surface normal, emulating the equation
used by Raster3D.
01/18/2010 o Fixed a problem with hybrid MPI+threads builds where
thread IDs other than zero were incorrectly being allowed to
make calls to the parallel message passing code.
11/05/2009 o Fixed a bug in the handling of transmission and reflection
rays in the presence of user-defined clipping planes. The
secondary rays were not being properly clipped due to a ray
flag not being propagated correctly.
07/15/2009 o Greatly improved efficiency of PPM and Targa image output
codes. Image output was making large BlueGene runs I/O bound.
The Targa format is costly on BlueGene due to the need to
swizzle RGB color channels to BGR order, apparently byte loads
and stores perform poorly on this architecture.
05/27/2009 o Updated vertex array primitives to allow the use of
volumetric texturing in place of vertex colored smooth
triangles, when the color block is not defined. This is
used by VMD for rendering of electrostatic potential maps.
05/17/2009 o Added new "shader_mode" scene file block where the
rendering quality setting, and ambient occlusion
settings can be specified, along with special
fog and transparency rendering modes used by VMD.
05/17/2009 o Increased efficacy of the combination of AA and AO samples,
such that any combination of AA and AO sample counts will
result in a grand total of AAsamples*AOsamples unique AO
sample rays for each pixel.
05/16/2009 o Updated X11 OpenGL window event handling to address a problem
on some platforms running KDE.
o Added additional color range clamping checks on output
so that larger-than-unity outline texture values can be used
without corrupting image data.
05/15/2009 o Added "outline" texturing feature for use with VMD
04/22/2009 o Added a VMD-specific fog rendering mode to allow renderings
to precisely match what is seen in OpenGL, which uses a
simple planar fog implementation.
Added higher level thread pool/iterator constructs intended
to eventually replace hand-coded thread calls in the rendering
loops. Various small tweaks to place GCC 4.4.x. Updated the
Make-arch configurations for GCC to only use -O3 since the
higher optimization levels are now ignored anyway.
03/24/2009 o Added Win32 condition variable implementations and enabled
multithreaded builds by default on Windows.
06/01/2008 o Added output image cropping for use by SPEC MPI benchmark
suite when rendering very large test images.
03/09/2007 o Correct the handling of cases where degenerate triangles
are eliminated from the scene by checking for NULL objects
before applying normal fixup mode changes.
02/12/2007 o Implemented a new output stage for high dynamic range
image formats. Added support for uncompressed
48-bit color PPM and 48-bit color Photoshop PSD files.
Renamed rt_rawimage() to rt_rawimage_rgb24() and
added rt_rawimage_rgb96f() for floating point color images.
Added new -clamp, -normalize, and -gamma options for post
processing floating point image data before output is written.
02/11/2007 o decrease the double precision epsilon values by a factor
of twenty to improve rendering of VMD images and other
scenes that use a coordinate system with small absolute
coordinate values. This should still leave plenty of
range for scenes with large coordinate values.
02/09/2007 o Added basic shadow attenuation for transparent surfaces.
02/05/2007 o Added new inline image/volume texture definition feature
to the scene description language for use by VMD.
02/04/2007 o Added a new "-normalfixup" command line argument to
indicate whether and how Tachyon should attempt to correct
surface normals that are inverted relative to the triangle
winding order.
01/29/2007 o Added a vertex array primitive to the scene description
language, supporting an arbitrary number of subsequent
trimesh and tristrip blocks which reference the array.
01/24/2007 o Added a new class of texture mapping routines specifically for
the special case of the background texture. Implemented a
default solid background texturing routine, and a prototypical
sky sphere implementation.
01/23/2007 o Added a "-res" command line argument to override the
default image resolution.
01/21/2007 o Added support for Ambient Occlusion lighting.
Added comments about the safe use of the limited
length cycle-free random number sequence for antialiasing,
random ray direction generation, etc. Updated README
with current date and contact info. Cranked version
number and copyright dates of the package.
03/18/2005 o Updated the Make-arch target list shown by default,
and improved the flags used for 32-bit Linux targets.
05/30/2004 o Added first implementation of clipping groups consisting
of a set of clipping planes.
o Changed version number to 0.97.0 (for use by VMD builds)
05/28/2004 o Miscellaneous code cleanup, makefile improvements, and
minor performance tweaks here and there.
03/04/2004 o Significant updates to texture allocation management code
03/01/2004 o Fixed an incorrect string allocation in the command-line
argument parsing code
02/02/2004 o Released version 0.96
o added a per-vertex colored triangle primitive intended
primarily for use with VMD-generated MSMS and NewRibbons
representations.
o subclassed textures to reduce memory consumption with large
per-vertex colored triangle surfaces exported from VMD.
o changed color types to use floats instead of flt to
conserve memory.
08/03/2003 o significant documentation updates, including recently
added features.
07/29/2003 o added several new compilation targets for Linux running on
the 64-bit AMD Opteron platform.
o Spaceball flight mode is disabled when running Tachyon on
a distributed memory machine, since there isn't code to
send camera parameter updates between the nodes presently.
06/06/2003 o Released version 0.95
o added new transparency mode APIs and shader code to enable
a new transparency mode that more closely matches the results
of real-time renderers that use stipple/screen-door transparency
such as VMD. Added -trans_orig and -trans_vmd command line
options.
05/29/2003 o added internal tracking of texture objects so they are
freed when the scene is deleted, absolving the user from
having to do this in their own code.
o main program will now render more than one scene at a time,
and will generate a numerical sequence of output images.
05/13/2003 o fixed swapped texture mapping constants
03/07/2003 o Released version 0.94
02/16/2003 o Added first implementation of fog
01/27/2003 o New fisheye camera projection code
01/21/2003 o New code for setting the camera view frustum
07/27/2002 o Released version 0.93.6
o Made the shader used for specular highlights globally
selectable by the user.
o Made the Blinn shader and the fast approximation version
faster by eliminating some redundant calculations and
by moving normalization calculations around.
o Re-worked the MGF and AC3D scene file loaders
o Improved the Itanium2 compiler flags on HP-UX.
o Added depth of field
07/08/2002 o Added antialiasing code for orthographic scenes
o Added directional lighting (non-local) primitives and
made the shading system more flexible
o Large amounts of const correctness improvements.
07/03/2002 o Added code for rendering orthographic scenes
o Added reader/writer locking code
05/10/2002 o Added Make-arch flags to compile on IA-64 versions of HP-UX
03/27/2002 o tachyon.h header updates for C++ and prevent multiple
inclusion.
03/26/2002 o Const correctness fixes
03/21/2002 o Added Alphaserver SC configuration
12/12/2001 o Released Tachyon version 0.93.4
o Misc cleanup, updated readme info, prepared for release.
12/03/2001 o Updated for compilation on VMS, with updates
contributed by Peter Ljungberg
11/29/2001 o Ported to Linux on Compaq iPaq PDA
10/29/2001 o Ported to Linux on Sony Playstation 2
08/19/2001 o Added spaceball code to main ray tracer control loops, for
doing fly throughs etc. The old OpenGL previewer code can
now be rewritten more simply, eliminating all of the
old special case code for the spaceball etc.
o Added Solaris and Scyld Beowulf targets for MPI and
OpenGL runtime display. (larger scale parallelism,
particularly useful for doing spaceball controlled
fly-throughs)
08/18/2001 o Reorganized main loop code to make adding spaceball
fly-through code cleaner.
07/27/2001 o Added a Pentium 4 target for gcc.
o Cranked rev to 0.93.4
07/26/2001 o Released Tachyon version 0.93.3
o Updated distribution for Siggraph 2001 demos.
o Improved usage message printing on MPI builds, fixed
some minor initialization issues in printing related
startup code.
o Fixed a bug that could crash Tachyon when it was trying to
do a clean shutdown in MPI, there was a case that could
crash if message buffers had not yet been allocated at
the time of shutdown. New code checks buffers more carefully.
07/25/2001 o Added support for Sun's ClusterTools 4.0 MPI implementation.
04/06/2001 o New compile flags AMD Athlon chips yield 15% performance
improvement. These flags are known to work with the
"gcc 2.96" that comes with Redhat 7.x. Older versions of
gcc don't have them yet.
04/05/2001 o Added a configuration for Linux Alpha using the Quadrics
implementation of MPI.
o Reorganized the Linux section of Make-arch by platform
o New multithreaded build for MacOS-X with Carbon Multiprocessing
detection code.
o Added missing documentation for spotlights, distance-based
lighting attenuation, and made several corrections to the
existing text.
o Improved performance of builds on Linux for Athlon CPUs
by 15% through the use of better GCC flags.
04/04/2001 o Updated MacOS-X build flags for new version of the system
released on March 24, 2001.
04/03/2001 o implemented new -aasamples command line flag to more easily
control antialiasing settings without editing files.
03/12/2001 o Released Tachyon "0.93.2"
03/11/2001 o Improved handling of parser errors and debugging information
printed. Added line numbers, character offset, expected token,
and actual string. Added checks for self-recursive scene
include files. Improved default handling of unspecified
animation filenames per format.
o Added HTMl docs to doc makefile, and to distribution.
03/05/2001 o Redesigned parser data structures and rewrote all of the
parser's internal interfaces to use them. This is the first
step toward more useful error messages, elimination of static
and global data, and making the parser itself multithreaded
some time down the road.
o Rewrote the texture table code using new parser interfaces,
eliminated hard-coded size limits on texture names, number of
textures, etc.
03/04/2001 o Added comments about case sensitivity of file names
and texture names to docs. Also added info about the
behavior of lights with a radius of 0.0
o Changed glwin code to allow specification of the window
title so that Tachyon and its OpenGL previewer are more
easily differentiated from each other in all cases.
03/03/2001 o Fixed some parser error handling code to print better
messages when scene files or include files fail to open.
03/01/2001 o Made some more changes to the Phong specular highlighting
code, trying out some other potential implementations etc.
02/28/2001 o Added a more traditional Phong specular highlight
shader function. Also clarified the code and renamed
the original function to make it clear which one is using
Blinn's halfway vector and which one is using the calculated
reflection vector.
o Added new Windows-specific timer code to make use of
millisecond resolution timers.
o Updated the Windows project files for recent changes to
the code.
02/26/2001 o Added PNG reading and writing support to Tachyon.
Currently only does 24-bit RGB files, but may add
support for 48-bit RGB PNG files in a later revision.
o Changed the tachyon main program and getargs so that
users can select what format and what filename/frame
format specifier they want to use for their animations,
so that users can do things as below on the command line.
tachyon .... -format PNG -o /tmp/frame.%04d.png ....
02/25/2001 o Added some rudimentary orthographic camera code,
although it is not exposed to user callable APIs yet,
a basic implementation is now there. After some more
camera models are tried out, I should be able to
clean up the camera APIs significantly.
02/23/2001 o Released Tachyon "0.93.1"
02/22/2001 o Fixed AIX multithreaded builds so that they
force PTHREAD_SCOPE_SYSTEM scheduling, so we get
to use all of the CPUs. The AIX 4.3.x default
scheduling scope is unfortunately set for
PTHREAD_SCOPE_PROCESS, so we override it now.
02/19/2001 o Camera definitions can now be placed anywhere in
a scene file, the last definition overrides all
previous definitions in the scene.
o Changed the OpenGL "glwin" code to acquire a
Z-buffer on Unix systems, so that the
OpenGL-based Tachyon "simulator" code can share
this code instead of having to use GLUT, which
eliminates GLUT as a build requirement, and avoids
the limitations it imposes on program structure.
o Fixed various incorrect/out-of-date information
in the Tachyon docs. Updated for recent changes
to scene language etc.
o the wood grain procedural texture scale correctly now.
o updated test scenes to match changes to wood grain
texture code.
02/18/2001 o Added new Make-opengl file which contains
make macros to define OpenGL include/link info
for all of the major platforms that are supported.
o Updated copyright dates again.
02/14/2001 o Released Tachyon version "0.93"
o Added better EOF handling into parser, and
implemented "include" files.
01/19/2001 o Renamed thread data structures to avoid a small
namespace collision with system headers on IRIX
in certain circumstances.
01/04/2001 o Updated documentation files.
o Added a "#" comment keyword so that people can
have comments in scene files.
12/19/2000 o Added build targets for IA-64 machines running
Linux, using both GCC and the SGI Pro64 compilers.
o Added new targets for the Portland Group compilers.
o Added ability to disable the allocation and use of
mailbox grid-acceleration data structures at compile
time with new configurable option in Make-config.
o Fixed Make-arch so it pays attention to the FLT macro,
it was a bug that it was not already doing so.
o Added scene handle as required parameter for
the rt_texture() function.
o fixed the -nosave flag so that it disables image
saving for single frame renderings as well as
animations.
11/22/2000 o Released Tachyon version "0.92"
o Changed makefiles to be more IRIX/Tru64 friendly.
o made rt_timer_xxx() and rt_rand() publically usable.
o added Frames per second display to camfile processing
o Rewrote timer code to be more useful.
o Added MacOS-X build configuration
o Added Linux threaded OpenGL build configuration
o updated MSVC project configuration
11/21/2000 o Received a bug report from Osama Youssef, the
grid_intersection() code was causing tachyon to
step through grid cells starting from the grid
boundary rather than from the ray origin in the
case where rays originate inside the grid rather
than outside. Fixed this problem by changing
grid_bounds_intersect() to return a tnear of 0.0
minimum, rather than negative t values from the
boundary of the grid. Rendering times for the
balls test scene are around 70% faster now due to
the large decrease in overhead.
11/17/2000 o Added an build config for UltraSPARC-III
machines. The -xarch=v8plusb flag gives a good
10% performance boost.
10/02/2000 o Got rid of unused local variables..
o Added a compile target for Alpha Linux using
Compaq's C compiler.
09/26/2000 o Added support for Linux on the Alpha platform,
and changed the statically linked Tru64 build flags
so that the produced binaries can run on Alpha Linux
as well, since Compaq C is much better than GCC still,
my tests showed a factor of two speed difference.
09/14/2000 o Released Tachyon version "0.91"
09/13/2000 o Improved camera code and sped up primary ray
generation. Minor improvements to make it easier
to add new camera models soon.
o Updated usage message to only list file formats
that are parsable by the compiled code.
09/11/2000 o Several more optimizations to reduce per-pixel
overhead for better real-time speed. Removed
clamping code for negative color values.
o Improved camera ray generation and did some cleanup.
o Merged various shared items in tachyon.h and types.h
into rtcommon.h
09/04/2000 o Released Tachyon version "0.90"
o Nice per-pixel speed increase by overlapping
pixel clamping arithmetic and writes, and by
changing ray direction normalization to multiply
by reciprocal rather than divide, helps speed up by
10% on Sparc, no effect on Alpha.
08/16/2000 o Added a solaris-pthreads-gcc build that works
on Solaris 7 X86, used by VMD.
o Splite distribution targets into their own
Make-distrib file, included by Makefile.
08/15/2000 o Added OpenGL-display multithreaded build targets for
Solaris, IRIX, and Tru64 Unix.
o Added 24-bit Windows BMP image writing code and new
flags to make it one of the available output options.
o renamed Tachyon include file to tachyon.h from
api.h, update all sources/makefiles correspondingly.
08/14/2000 o Renamed api.h to tachyon.h, and did lots of
cleanup, updated distribution makefile and
added lots of missing runtime usage message help.
o Added build targets for the OpenGL-capable run-time
display version on IRIX, Solaris, and Tru64.
07/31/2000 o Added single-threaded BeOS build target to the
"Unix" makefiles. Since BeOS's development
environment is so tachyon-friendly, there was no
need to do anything new or crazy here.
07/25/2000 o Added 64-bit build targets, and new code for
eliminating the run-time clearing of the mailbox
arrays when running on a 64-bit platform, since the
mailbox counters will never overflow with 64-bit
integers. Will be a performance win someday :)
o Added Linux PPC build target.
07/13/2000 o Finally updated copyright dates etc.
07/07/2000 o Updated Alpha build targets to enable speculation.
05/18/2000 o Ray tracer binary is now called "tachyon" and not
just "ray".
o rearranged lots of compile targets to be more update
with the way newer revs of the OSs are setup or
are named now. (i.e. renamed osf1 targets to tru64)
o added a pthreads build for AIX 4.x, but it doesn't
appear to schedule threads in system scope yet.
o updated the makefiles and documentation in the
tree to reflect the name "Tachyon" which has stuck
pretty well for the last year or two.
o Changed hpux-thr build to work for POSIX threads on
HP-UX 11.0.
o migrated from RCS to CVS for real finally, have
been too lazy to get this done for a while.
11/08/1999 o changed the definition of the "medium" quality
shader to make VMD users more happy.
09/22/1999 o eliminated unused variables, misc cleanup.
o added user selectable output image format code
instead of hard-coding to Targa format output.
o improve image writers, better correctness etc.
o added image I/O routines for SGI RGB, PPM, JPEG
11/29/1998 o Made an important change to the grid code, the grid
code caches the value of the ray serial number, and
the pointer to the mailbox array, this helps the
compiler avoid generating stupid code on some
platforms, and helps avoid one level of indirection.
o Changed intersection structures within the ray struct,
they are no longer arrays in the general case, since
CSG is different anyway, it will use the new code
for adding intersections specially rather than making
the average case performance suffer.
o Intersection functions for each object now use a
function pointer for "add_intersection" instead of
calling a specific function. This makes things much
more flexible and helps performance slightly due to
the use of special case code for regular rays and
shadow rays, instead of using one function for both.
o Improved the constants in type.h when building for
single precision rather than double precision. Should
allow a single precision ray tracer to give good
results through the use of customized EPSILON constants
etc, while allowing double precision builds to remain
maximum quality. Single precision builds run anywhere
from 5-20% faster than double precision builds,
and they use about half as much ram for the same number
of objects.
11/25/1998 o The code now outruns Rayshade for all of the SPD
scenes, even on a single processor, even with the
overhead of the multiprocessor capable builds, and
even with no shadow cache.
o Further improvements to the grid traversal code
which yield a 50% speed improvement for scenes that
end up having a single-level low-res grid, usually
with 20-100 objects.. Big decrease in the setup
overhead per ray..
o removed unused static functions from several places,
and got rid of unused parameters on some shader code.
11/23/1998 o Several critical improvements to grid.c which
yield a 30% speed increase on several of the SPD
test scenes. (at least on a Sun Ultra 2...)
o Added RTVI display code for MSTI's SC'98
show.
o Added new i860 MCOS platform support.
09/09/1998 o Added OpenGL support for Windows 9x/NT..
o Added support for MPI on NT, using MSVC and
MPI Software Technologies' MPI/Pro for NT.
Configurations for both TCP and VIA interconnects.
o Added support for the Cygnus Cygwin32 compilers
for windows in the standard Unix makefiles.
08/30/1998 o Fresh build on NT with all new MSVC project files
o Various small performance enhancements
08/06/1998 o New Platform Support Added:
DEC Alphas running Digital Unix (aka OSF1)
o new APIs for camera control.
o new APIs for querying scene resolution.
o new APIs for user interface callbacks.
o significant changes to API functions, many now
require the scene handle as their first parameter.
o improved parallel work decomposition code for
multithreaded runs on only 1 "node". Eliminates
cache thrashing on CC-NUMA machines like the
SGI Origin2000 machines, probably helps others too.
Also generally improves memory coherence properties
of the entire ray tracing process as a side effect.
o completely eliminated limits on the number of
lights in a scene. New code is fully dynamic,
no fixed size tables. Memory is the only limit.
o eliminated old unused code constructs.
o Redesign and completely new implementation of
all of the top levels of the core rendering loops.
The new code caches a lot of setup in order to
vastly reduce overhead when rendering animations.
o Complete redesign of the multithreaded parts of
the rendering code. Entirely new approach, which
runs much better when doing animations, and when
doing mixed-mode threads and message passing.
Worker threads are now long-lived. They live
for the duration of a given scene. Future revs
may increase thread lifespan even longer. Threads
are created in a pool, and the pool is awakened for
work when a frame is rendered. After work is complete
the threads sleep until they are needed again. This
reduces thread creation and destruction.
o Changes to surface normal code in all objects
more is done in the shader code, less in the objects.
Much more of the math is inlined now too.
07/23/1998 o New Platform Support Added:
Cray Vector Supercomputers using POSIX Threads
Cray T3E Supercomputers using MPI
CSPI Multicomputers using MPI/Pro (PowerPC)
Linux with POSIX Threads and/or MPI (x86)
Mercury Multicomputers using MPI/Pro (PowerPC)
Mercury Multicomputers using MPI/Pro (i860)
SGI IRIX 6.4 with POSIX Threads
o Several Rendering fixes
o Complete rewrite of the distributed memory
communications routines. New code uses much
higher performance MPI constructs than before.
o New code no longer needs concurrent I/O in order to
perform well on distributed memory machines.
o Tremendous amounts of internal restructuring for
improved scalability on both shared memory and
distributed memory machines.
o New code provides much higher performance for
rendering fly-through type animations.
o Added MIP Mapping capabilities to texturing code.
o Added Spotlights.
o Added controls for lighting falloff equations.
o Automatic shader/quality determination based on
scene contents.
o Multiple shader support for user specified
rendering quality levels.
o Fixed memory leaks.
o Greatly improved antialiasing code
o Added many new command line parameters for
additional control over the rendering process.
03/17/1998 Fixes to distribution directories, renderering bug
fixes here and there.
01/07/1998 New code uses a hierarchical grid based efficiency
scheme to accelerate ray tracing. Runs as much as
25 times faster for some of the SPD scenes, runs
*incredibly* fast for huge scenes containing upwards
of 1.5 million objects. (can render a 1.5 million
object SPD teapot scene in 86 seconds on a 4 processor
Sun ES3000) New code has several improved APIs for
texturing, and global scene settings. Future revisions
will include extensive changes to the external APIs
which will make future implementation of new features
much cleaner and better organized.
New image reader API for loading texture map images.
New image readers for JPEG, Targa, and PPM replace
old PPM-only code. Easily extensible to support new
image formats.
11/02/1997 A complete overhaul of many aspects of the ray tracing
system has been done. Many improvements have been made
to its reliability. The ray tracing API has changed
to enhance extensibility and improve organization.
Overall execution speed has been improved by
approximately ten percent over previous versions,
especially for simple scenes. Internal library
reorganizations have reduced the code size, and
improved orthogonality within the implementation.
Enhancements have been made to the image map
code to allow reading targa files as well as ppm files.
A new image loading and saving API will allow
support of new image formats such as JPEG for
texture maps. Extensive command line overrides
are now available on the ray tracer application.
Display enabled builds of the ray tracer should be
the default from now on, since run-time display
can be enabled and disabled on demand.
10/20/1997 Now reads NFF files (ala SPD) directly. Initial
implementation of AC3D model file reader. Rewrote
the regular parser in entirety. All of the old
statistics which used to be kept in the parsers have
been removed. In the next few distributions, the
geometry parsing systems will be reworked so that
a much greater variety of models may be loaded from
foreign 3D file formats. This version is the first
major step in that direction. 3D Studio files are
next on the list for implementation. Quite a bit
of code housekeeping has been done recently as well,
removing all warnings I'm aware of. I'll be adding
support for a number of new image file formats for both
reading and writing, as well as the ability to load
files over the network from WWW servers. The OpenGL
scene previewer will also be getting a makeover in the
near future.
10/02/1997 New solaris-gcc-thr-x11 target, with some further
cleaning applied to the source code. Also added
support for 24 bit TrueColor X visuals in the X11
code. The TrueColor support code still needs a
few tweaks, but does work on Suns and SGIs. The
X11 code will probably reverse the Red and Blue
channels on x86 machines, but I'll be adding code
for plane masks etc soon, which will also allow
it to work for 16 bit TrueColor displays..
10/01/1997 New solaris-gcc-thr-x11 target for building the
multithreaded version correctly with gcc on suns..
This problem was reported by Lars Rzymianowicz, and
should be cured now.
This release also includes various syntactic and
semantic cleanup using lint-like compiler flags.
09/25/1997 This version includes quite a number of changes
to the OpenGL scene previewer. The previewer
now has greatly improved shading, uses display
list for much faster rendering, and includes
support for the "SpaceOrb 360" spaceball controller
for use with real-time fly-throughs of scenes.
Recorded fly-throughs can now be rendered by
the ray tracer for creating animations. The
new distribution also includes a lot of new
experimental codes for creating OMF files, PPM
files and supports several new extensions in the
ray tracing library.
03/06/1997 98% of the basic functionality found in the raytracer
now exists in the OpenGL previewer. Cylinders,
spheres, triangles, smoothed triangles, infinite
planes, and rings are all supported. Volume
rendering is not supported, and neither is texture
mapping at this time.(after all, its only a previewer!)
The previewer can be linked with a program much like
regular raytracing library can. At the present time,
the previewer code does not have a way to be
invoked multiple times, and can't run without a
display of some kind. As I have time I'll be
trying to merge the features of the ray tracer and
previewer so they are relatively seamless. Eventually
I plan to implement a polygon rendering library that
will not depend on having a display. So in the future
there will be a "quality level" between 0 and 100%,
with 0 being non-shaded polygons, 100% being fully
antialiased raytracing etc..
Now to write some animation code :-)
03/03/1997 More functionality added to the OpenGL scene
previewer. It now writes out PPM files
(in addition to rendering them) in the same way
that the raytracer writes TGA files.
The new version can be built using either
the AUX lib, or the GLUT library (both are
helper libraries for interacting with the
windowing system, and input devices)
Display performance on this version is probably
10 times faster than the previous version.
03/02/1997 Major functionality has been added to the OpenGL
previewer. It will render 70% of the objects
supported in the raytracer. It has a slightly
simplified lighting model. The OpenGL camera
should now behave just like the ray tracer's does.
One minor fix was made in the fractal landscape
generator code, to orient the normals correctly for
use with systems that only want to render the
front facing polygons/triangles (OpenGL).
(This version requires the AUX OpenGL toolkit)
02/23/1997 Fixed some prototypes/compilation warnings,
cleaned up the unix makefiles, trying out some
new compiler optimizations for UltraSPARC machines
with the Sun 4.x tools. Updated all of the
example models so output goes to /tmp rather
than /cfs/johns/... (my old work area on a parallel
computer :-)
Added a simple model file parameter to command
line parsing. Hopefully this will *not*
cause problems with MPI builds, since MPI likes
to take the first shot at parsing command line
parameters. Getting ready to add more code
into the OpenGL scene previewer, hopefully the
camera model will be completely fixed shortly :-)
The OpenGL code should now work with Mesa as well
as vendor supplied OpenGL libraries.
02/05/1997 Added threads and multiprocessor support for
Microsoft Windows platforms. Added a 'renderapp'
to the msvc directory. Renderapp is a first hack
at doing a windows GUI front end for the raytracer.
The GUI compiles for Windows, Mac, and PowerMac,
but at this time its incomplete and has poor
event handling. The Windows threads seem to run
great on multiprocessor Pentiums. I'm assuming
that all of this code will also work for the
DEC Alpha's running NT, and the PowerPC version
of NT. Only minor minor changes would be needed,
mainly the byte swapping order for the big
endian machines (copy from Pmac and 68k configs).
11/17/1996 Cleaned up all extra/unneeded variables, added
lots of typecasts, and added a new 'makefile.msvc'
for compiling with Microsoft Visual C/C++.
Also has Macintosh targets in the makefile.msvc
for people with the cross compilers.
11/10/1996 Removed 90% of globals, removed 90% of hard coded
limits on numbers of threads etc, now does thread
spawning totally dynamically. Runs 10% faster
with new intersection structures, should run much
much faster on SMP machines, got rid of some cases
of 'false data sharing' which would cause MP cache
thrashing unnecessarily. All intersection info
is now created and destroyed within each thread,
and eliminates false sharing due to memory addresses
being too close together.
04/11/1996 Updated parvol code, matches extvol at the moment.
Decided to write a distribution tar after fixing
a long standing bug in cylinder normal code.
Added polycylinder code to the api..
04/09/1996 New extvol rendering code does much better
voxel shading. Next version will have the
parvol rendering code in place, and will allow
the use of the gridmap code and new RPC's
04/01/1996 Reworked API function names, first rev of the
new volume rendering code (extvol).
First rev of the irregular grid mapping code.
Updated the source for Solaris 2.5 and UltraSparcs.
01/27/1996 Updated the thread code to autodetect the number
of available CPUs. It will spawn as many threads
as there are available CPUs. Tested on Sun
SparcCenter 2000 at WU.
01/21/1996 Major performance improvement on triangle related
objects.. Runs about 2 times as fast as it did.
Minor cleanup and some performance improvements
when rendering simple scenes.
01/08/1996 New util (tgatoyuv) for converting tga's
to YUV files for MPEG compressed animations.
Extensive performance tuning of existing code.
01/01/1996 Bugfixes and cleanup
07/13/1995 Fully multithreaded version (Sun && Paragon)
Vastly improved support for shared memory
machines. Still needs threads for other platforms
but the foundation is complete. Improved load
balancing for threads is in place.
Haven't extensively tested on other platforms,
mainly Sun, iPSC/860, and Paragon.
07/05/1995 MPI+Multithreaded version Intel Paragon XP/S only.
1994-1995 Many many versions, all experimental quality only...
Change logs for these versions only exist in the revision
control system.
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