Announcing: S2PLOT V2.02

cfl...@swin.edu.au

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Apr 27, 2008, 9:27:10 PM4/27/08

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The S2PLOT development team is very pleased to announce the release of
S2PLOT version 2.02, which is now available for download from:

http://astronomy.swin.edu.au/s2plot

Version 2.02 is being released to fix bugs detected in version 2.00.
However a couple of new features have been included:

* A new stand-alone application "s2anim" is now included (with source
code) for displaying time-evolving point sets (documentation is
minimal at this stage).

* Two new architectures - linux-gomp-x86_64 and darwin-gomp-i386 - are
introduced which enable the use of OpenMP pragmas in S2PLOT programs.
Some internal S2PLOT code uses OpenMP if it is available.

* New functions:

- ds2vbbr: draw a billboard texture with a specified rotation angle

- ss2qnfp: query the near and far clip plane distances from the camera

- ds2protect, ds2unprotect and ds2isprotected: save dynamic geometry from
deletion as determined by driver program. Using these functions can
improve performance for dynamic-geometry-intensive programs.

Some optimisation work has also been accomplished, for example, simple
billboard codes (one texture, thousands of billboards) may experience
frame rates improved by more than 100%.

The future: we are progressing with our intention to provide a source
release of S2PLOT later in 2008.

Chris Fluke