• Finish up color widget (deal with colors outside normal range)
• Deal with 'frozen' mouse problem (anim window refreshes GL, but particles aren't simulated and mouse doesn't respond - replicate by loading lava scene)
• Clean up layout stuff to reflect new Qt layouts.
• Focus throwing is not the same.
• Redo preferences panel to reflect changes.
• implement new Papi features.
• find out why R and B are reversed when loading images in Qt2

• mouse movement in an ortho window w/ automatic GL refresh prevents QTimer events from occuring. Create a GL render object that controls the updating of GL windows.
• infinite light may not be display listed.
• kill shader preview PIDs
• polish save/load, add autosave.
• rework polygon input
• deal with unfound shaders
• fix particle shader to copy/paste
• completely rewrite camera class and camera animation
• complete lights. Finish spotlight, implement ambient.
• add unary - operator to PFloat class.
• don't give every primitive its own GL material. Allow create/delete like RM shaders. Not having a hierarchy for push/pop is going to be a hassle, tho.
• organize GL drawing
• write network client & add server code for distributed rendering.
• design and implement keyframe animation - how best to do this?

             b  u  g  s
where's the damn raid?

• there's something wrong with GL lighting.
• system sometimes gets confused when actions are deleted - particles aren't drawn and screen refresh slows way down. This is rare, and has been around for a while, but I can't figure out what could be causing it.
• window placement is screwy. I'm not getting good values from Qt, and the kludge is inconsistent.
• my NumInput widget is causing X selection problems because of auto-select on focus entry. This needs to be fixed or at least kludged. I like the auto-select.
• color sometimes gets normalized when switched in surface shader widget.

• RiPolygon wasn't a very good choice for polygon input. 'Professional' RIB exporters (Polytrans, Maya) output PointsGeneral, so RiPolygon is only really useful for Font3D and AC3D. Find some code somewhere for a standard file format loader. Don't want to write my own.

• Make shader list jump to desired shader by keystrokes. How would this work with all the focus throwing I do?
• Should I allow particles to use displacements?

             d  o  n  e
one step closer to never being finished...

• 12/14/99
• Got some very strange behavior with the new QString type in Qt2 that should not have been possible (value of a const char* string passed into a function was changed to garbage after setting a QString to its value). I don't trust the new QString, so I'm going to use the old QCString as much as possible.
• 12/13/99
• UPHEAVAL! CHAOS!
• Upgraded to RedHat6.1
• Upgraded to BMRT 2.5beta
• Upgraded to new ParticleAPI
• Ported flow to Qt 2.0.1
• Everything is really flakey. Crash. Curse. Repeat.
• 11/10/99
• Just for kicks, I tried using libslcargs instead of the more general piping 'slctell' to check shader type at startup. It's a lot  faster. Given that probably everyone who uses flow will be using it with BMRT, maybe I should just go ahead and use slcargs throughout.
• 11/09/99
• Made an ugly hack to defer action hilighting from an ortho window hit to mouse release. It seems to work just fine, and interaction is much improved.
• 11/07/99
• Been playing around with a homegrown subdivision curve that I think I'll use for flow's animation. It will be different to a keyframe curve - based on acceleration along the curve. Think rollercoaster - it rigidly follows a specific curve (track), but it has acceleration, braking, and is affected by gravity as it moves along the track.
• 10/24/99
• Fixed minor bug in preferences
• Made an 'about' box.
• made it so particles are ignored in radiosity calculations. This should be a switch so it can be turned on if need be.
• decided to made development versions available for download.
• 10/14/99
• Changed the XY and ZY grids to only draw for positive Y - makes things more intuitive for the ortho views, IMO.
• 10/13/99
• Well, that certainly sucked. Just spent the last two days tracking down why glGenLists() kept returning 0 and all display lists weren't working. I came to the conclusion that it had to do with GL context init - the ortho views share the same display lists as the perspective view, but they are created before the context is initialized. Theoretically, it was Qt's fault. I've got to organize the GL stuff, though.
• 10/07/99
• Added image preview to the shader string file dialog to browse TIFF files for textures.
• 10/03/99
• Orthographic views are coming along quite nicely, especially given that it's a total hack. Lights and actions can be interactively moved and manipulated
• started on some grid snap stuff
• added icons and captions to temporary dialogs and ortho views.
• 09/17/99
• started playing around with orthographic views for interactive manipulation
• the GIG mailing list is active again. Cool. I hope GIG's new owners do something worthwhile with it.
• 09/12/99
• added render name option in perferences.
• fixed a bug with rendering lines as spheres based on velocity.
• 08/27/99
• No updates in a while.
• Added camera-facing disks as a particle primitive. These render faster than spheres and are good for things like sparkles.
• Added save/load of FOV in scene file.
• Finally made an icon for 'Clear'. It was a quickie, but at least the text is gone.
• Disabled renderman command line options for shader previews. -radio was making for some funky shader previews.
• 07/24/99
• Fixed a problem w/ declaring RiColor and RiOpactiy
• added some more documentation
• 07/21/99
• created MLineEdit - simply a QLineEdit that emits returnPressed() on focus out events.
• added 'save base.scene on exit' option to preferences
• tweaked the preferences panel a bit
• 07/18/99
• revamped polygon GL drawing and translations.
• changed all external executables to be absolute pathnames. This makes error checking easier and more robust.
• changed execlp to execv to allow calling rendrib w/ options (such as -radio, etc)
• NOTE: options are saved in scene file, not init file
• Unfound shaders are dealt with, but I think there's an issue w/ pasting an unfound shader.
• 07/10/99
• shader rescan now works, but shader not found needs to be dealt with.
• GL now updates when parameters are changed and animation is off.
• action disabled status is now saved to file
• parenthesis around disabled actions is now fixed
• fixed Vortex add bug
• scene background color widget partial update (only on show)
• camera FOV widget partial update (only on show)
• more documentation
• 07/04/99
• Still havn't heard back from Dave McAllister about the Particle API.
• Mostly cleanup and documentation.
• Going to start converting all the function names beginning w/ a capital to lower case.
• 06/30/99
• Fixed a bug which only showed up under IRIX.
• 06/26/99
• Got a lot of boring stuff done today. Most of the config stuff is done now, as is the geometry stuff (the winManAdd stuff still needs to be done)
• started the documentation
• 06/25/99
• Finished the toolbar stuff.
• 06/21/99
• Not much work on flow recently. Did a lot of work on devrep, which I renamed nerd but think will call snide (Simple Nedit IDE). Also installed VMWare, which is very cool indeed. A bit slow, but that's to be expected.
• Added a mouse speed edit box to mainFlow.
• 06/12/99
• Decided not to make the render progress dialog modal, so number of processes, end frame, and other parameters can be changed during a render. Won't be idiot proof, though...
• Fixed up lights some. Mostly working now, I think, but still needs to be rewritten.
• 06/09/99
• Light groups are totally gefloogled. Need to go over this carefully.
• 06/06/99
• Changed shader string edit dialog because of changes to Qt2.0 dialog semantics.
• Moved more RIB rendering stuff to the new class.
• 06/05/99
• Started moving the RIB rendering stuff that was in RenderPanelRIB into a new class, so the widget is only used for setting parameters.
• Added a progress dialog when directly setting frame number.
• 06/04/99
• Began porting to the Qt 2.0beta, but decided not to continue. A number of things have changed quite a bit, and I don't want to delay release because of this. Qt 2.0 doesn't really offer anything that would be greatly beneficial to flow anyway.
• Redid the toolbar location stuff. Safer and easier now. Mostly complete.
• 06/03/99 3D-Day
• So...the NVidia rumor was true! I figured they would have annouced this at Linux Expo - guess I was wrong. My dual 333 w/ a TNT edges out an SGI R5K O2 for performance, but there are some issues:
• 16 bit only. Very disappointing, especially since the TNT is capable of nice 32 bit rendering. I hate running 16 bit on my desktop. BMRT previews look like crap.
• multiple vertices between glBegin(GL_POINTS)/glEnd() has problems. Easily kludged, though.
• points/lines are emulated w/ quads. For flow, this is bad - I use lots of points and lines, and the emulation is a significant performance hit.
• Other than that, THIS ROCKS! 3D on Linux is happening finally. The Matrox G400 will be very interesting, as will the TNT2 when the driver has 32 bit rendering. Hopefully 3DLabs will get in the game as well. Full source from NVidia, Matrox being cooperative...things are looking sunny indeed.
• 05/29/99
• Shader pipe stuff is mostly complete. Sorting the shaders is really slow on startup (popen() on each shader, read slctell output, and sort to surface, displacement, etc.) popen seems kind of flakey, too. Doesn't seem to return a useful error code if it can't exec the command.
• Cleanup of some names and ugly stuff.
• Got Cygnus's GNUpro and SourceNavigator the other day. What a disappointment. All gui stuff is TCL(slow), and the install scripts for SourceNavigator were totally broken. Decided to work on devrep to give it search features (thinking of changing the name to 'dert'  (Development Environment for Reptile Thingies)). Very handy now.
• Tooled w/ the Particle API to try out hair-like particle systems. Looks like it would need a bunch of changes to do it right.
• 05/22/99
• Implemented turbulence for particle movement based on Perlin noise. It's pretty slow compared to many of the other particle actions, but the effect is cool. Very nice for smoke effects.
• 05/16/99
• Created RglCone, RglDisk and RglCylinder analogs to their Ri counterparts. Appears to be consistent, but with the right vs. left handed coord system, I think I'm getting confused w/ double negatives. Seems to work, tho.
• Havn't finished the geometry stuff (closing quadrics is not complete), but I think I should try to concentrate on getting flow ready for release.
• 05/15/99
• Began adding PGeometry (quadrics only for now). Stuffing everything into a PolygonAction works, but isn't very pretty or efficient. But it does work.
• Rewrote RglSphere, now uses quad strips and has consistent behavior w/ RiSphere. I got a NaN seg fault a couple of times, but couldn't track it down. Keep trying.
• 05/10/99
• Added a nice, large widget for editing shader string value - also has a file dialog, so it will be easy to enter texture filenames.
• 05/09/99
• Completed shader string stuff at long last. Havn't tested it much though, and a lot of that code is pretty old and dangerous (lots of void* casts...)
• Changed shader preview widget so that it doesn't default to hilighting cell 0, 0. This was a quick patch, so I should check it more thoroughly at some point in the future...
• 05/08/99
• Init file stuff is mostly complete. Kind of nice. Controls GUI config, external executables, toolbar positions, etc.
• 05/07/99
• Added a whole bunch of stuff for customization via the init file.
• 05/05/99
• Added some error checks/init stuff for startup.
• Got to start thinking about getting flow ready for release. Want it to be out when hardware 3D support is ready for Linux, and that may be getting close. Thinking about getting a G200, but will wait and see about the TNT2 rumor first.
• RedHat6.0 is slick, but AC3D won't run. Got to hand it to the GNOME boys, they did some nice work. It's fun to watch GNOME/KDE trying to outdo each other...I'm amazed at what they've both been able to accomplish.
• 05/03/99
• Added global toggle for shadows and true displacements for preview purposes. I should isolate all the BMRT non-standard options.
• Spent some time fiddling with making the button icons.
• Got a couple of SCSI drives on cobra - man, what a difference. Now I need more memory...
• 04/25/99
• Worked on lights a bit - spotlights are mostly complete now.
• Changed all the toolbuttons to use IconSets, and added a flag to turn tooltips off.
• 04/17/99
• Mostly tinkering for the last few days. Hacked a thing to have polygon objects emit their own polygons - unreliable(synchronization), but cool when it works.
• Trying to be a bit more memory-friendly. Having 256MB spoiled me...
• Got AC3D working again by installing the RH5.1 TCL RPMs.
• 04/06/99
• Spent the last few days doing a bit of cleaning up - there's still a lot of junk in a lot of corners, though (NOTE: clean up NumInput!!!). Made a 'triple num input' widget that allowed a few of the widgets to be smaller.
• Moved over to the dual 333 as my main machine - the extra speed is nice, but I miss the SCSI drives and extra memory.
• 03/30/99
• Started some stuff to transform domains interactively. Geez my math is bad.
• 03/29/99
• Fixed some minor bugs and did a little optimization w/ GL - this stuff is a mess, and needs to be better organized.
• AC3D doesn't appear to work w/ Redhat 5.2 or SuSE 6.0. Bummer. I guess I'll have to write something that can accept polygon output from Amapi.
• 03/26/99
• Added a splash widget that prints startup progress and creates global widgets. This should help me organize the global widgets and sort out the dependencies between them, and it makes a nice place to do error initial checks. Looks cool too. NOTE: AT some point, go back and free pixmap memory when it's not needed.
• 03/24/99
• Added the ability to switch active particle group from the ParticleControlWidget, using a writable combo box. I like the capability, but not the mechanism. It seems like it could possibly cause strange behavior later on. Verify safety, and possibly reimplement.
• 03/18/99
• Worked on structure for animation.
• Now can create multiple particle systems. I think I'll need some higher level construct later on to deal with actions that may be common between the multiple groups.
• 03/15/99
• Fixed the multiple rendering of frame 0 when beginning animation render. Geez that was a stupid bug.
• Started a widget that creates a tree of the scene, with PFloats at the leaves. This will be used to assign a curve to a float.
• Cleaned up PDomainWidget a bit; moved float title names into PDomain so that info can be obtained by other classes.
• Began working on keyframed animation yesterday. It's going to be a hack and won't be all that intuitive, but I think it will be safe.
• Installed SuSE 6.0 on the Windows machine last weekend, and got rsh working from dragon. I'll probably do the full server/client thing eventually, but first, I'll do a quick hack that uses rsh for distributed rendering.
• Wow. Haven't done anything in a while. Needed a break.
• 02/28/99
• made some modifications/additions to the Polygon Tweaker.
• added a default icon for the window manager.
• 02/26/99
• Modified the GL grid so the center lines are slightly colored to more easily distinguish X, Y, Z without having to look at the labels.
• 02/25/99
• Camera movement can now be done without animation being turned on, so one can navigate around a 'frozen' particle system. Cool with blend on.
• 02/23/99
• Modified the 'rate' of individual source domains in a polygon object to be scaled by the area of the largest polygon so particles are emitted roughly equally over object surface.
• 02/13/99
• Polygon objects can now emit particles normal to the polygon surface.
• 02/12/99
• Moved all the widgets except glPort in glWidget to toolbars in mainFlow. Time to start cleaning up some of the GL stuff.
• Default dir strings now correctly set $HOME instead of being hard coded. On a related note, I need to reduce the amount of global variables. They're getting out of control.
• 02/07/99
• Finally started on client/server stuff. Sockets suck. It'll probably take a fair while before I have things working reliably. Think I'll use CygWin for the Windows client rather than write it natively, mostly because of fork().
• 02/05/99
• Poly can import RIBs from AC3D, but  the 'PolyTweak' widget has to be used to invert handedness of polygons and sometimes normals. No big deal. Don't think I'll do much more on polygons - seems OK for sources, but w/ hundreds/thousands of Bounce domains, things get very, very slow.
• Fixed crash deleting last action in list. My stupid mistake.
• 02/01/99
• Ahhh. I'm not crazy. Font3D was outputting bad geometry. Had a look at the source and fixed it for RIB. Fix should work for the other exports as well - I'll have to contact Font3D's author. Import now behaves as I think it should, but I'll have to try importing stuff other than Font3D.
• 01/31/99
• Worked on lights a little bit. Added copy/delete, and started on spotlights. This code needs to be cleared up - it's a bit confusing as to what happens w/ copying and operator= for the light objects in relation to GL_LIGHT_#.
• What the hell is going on w/ polygon import? Am I screwing up or is Font3D's RIB export to blame?
• 01/30/99
• Got basic polygon import working (RiPolygon triangles w/ normals only). Works well enough for Font3D, which was the intention. Font3D doesn't seem to be outputting all the triangles w/ a consistent orientation, but as long as GL_CULL_FACE is disabled and RiSides(2), everything looks ok, except for the back of the objects, which I think are just screwed up anyway.
• X-selection kludge didn't work 100%. Going to increase timer value. This sucks.
• 01/29/99
• Hacked a kludge for the X-selection/autoselect problem using QTimer. It's not pretty, but it works.
• Can now load displacements from scene file.
• 01/25/99
• Began work on ParticleControlWidget to allow swaping ParticleControl* object.
• 'flow' will probably be entering a highly unstable state for a while while I move from the current global object stubs to a reasonable scene format.
• 01/24/99
• Added 'combined' preview button to SurfaceTabDialog so user can preview surface & displacement together.
• Whipped up a displacement shader to compliment the enhanced MBALava shader from Larry and re-rendered the lava/fire animation. Wicked. Shaders are awesome. Need to implement the distributed rendering soon. Complex scenes w/ complex shaders are getting s...l...o...w...
• 01/23/99
• Woohoo! Displacements! Some holes, but mostly complete.
• Added enable/disable to shaders for previews. Useful for comparing surface, displacement. Should I save this info in scene file? Probably not.
• Changed addParticleAction to a tab dialog. Looks better, is smaller.
• 01/22/99
• Got rid of zombies resulting from fork()ing shader previews.
• Got rid of hard coded strings in shader manipulation widget. Should be able to implement displacement shaders soon.
• Added displacement shader tab in mbaSurfaceTabDialog. Doesn't work yet.
• 01/20/99
• Got rid of zombies resulting from fork()ing scene previews. Shader previews still need to be fixed.
• Slowed down mouse movement. This should be a user-controlled variable.
• Put a catch before RiBegin() for scene and shaders if filename can't be opened for write.
• All temp RIB files are now written to ./RIB. Make this dir a variable (tmpRIBdir).
• began this status page.