1 What's New?

In this section, we highlight the latest additions to map3d in the (vain?) hope that people will read at least this much of the manual and be able to quickly make use of the latest and greatest that the program offers.

1.1 Version 5.4: January, 2003

This is the second third revision of the ``new'' map3d and we are getting very close to the functionality of the old GL based version. There are also some features unique to the OpenGL version like the lighting model and excellent mouse controls of rotation and translation.

Some of the specific things that you should notice over the version 5.1 include:

Multiple surface .geom files:

there now exists the capability to open all the geometry files within a single .geom file (see Section 6.1.3 for details. There also exists the capability to have several data files per geom file, but there could be undertermined results if you try anything fancy. We will need a GUI layer to do those kinds of things (next release).

More scaling options:

group and slave scaling. Group scaling enables you to view based on the global range of a subset of surfaces, and slave scaling enables you to use one surface's range as the range of another surface. These options better empower you to compare data across surfaces. See Section 7.4.1 for more information.

Scale locking:

now you can lock the scaling between surfaces and ensure that the value to color mapping is consistent between (or among) locked surfaces.

Leadlinks file support:

map3d now has the capability to read and display leadlinks files. See Section 6.4.

More picking options:

More support for picking, including printing info to the screen, triangle construction, flipping, deletion, etc. See Section 8.5 for more info.

Bug fixes:

not that the previous version had any bugs, but we found a few(!) things to fix.

1.2 In the works (``vapourware'')

A small sampler of things that are in the works:

• Reading of Time Series container files
• Addition of a GUI to allow data windowing and better interactive selection of parameters
• Interactive controls for sizes and other continuous variables
• Reread function for both geometry and data.
• Geometry editing functionality.
• Proper reading of the container files in the graphicsio file system.
• Dynamic menus that indicate the current parameter selections.
• Saving and reading state.
• New display modes for the display of vectors,