News

• The CVS-Head now contains support for a new object type "Gordon" that creates gordon surfaces (GIF, 27K). The surface in this image is made of a network of four NURBS curves, where the upper curve has 5 control points (all other curves have 4), and the leftmost curve is of order 2 (all other curves have order 4). Try this example scene file (AY, 1K).

• The shader parsing plugin support pack for Win32 now also contains shader parsing plugins for Aqsis, RenderDotC, and PRMan.

• There is now a shader parsing plugin support pack for Win32 available, that contains three shader parsing plugins (for Air, Pixie, and 3Delight). Just unzip it to the same directory to which you unzipped ayam1.6.win32.zip and follow the instructions in ayam/bin/plugins/readme.txt.

• With some help from the Fink project, the plugin interface for Ayam could be enabled on Mac OS X (X11). RRIB and MFIO plugins work ok., the ayslx (Aqsis) shader parsing plugin is, unfortunately, a little (b|p)ig (15M) and the ayslo3d (3Delight) shader parsing plugin requires a .dylib to be present in a quite non-standard path. Due to the problems mentioned, the official Mac OS X binary will stay as it is. Necessary changes to the Makefiles are in CVS already, so if you want to compile your own executable...
• Ayam successfully loaded a shader parsing plugin (ayslb.dll for Air) on Win32 today. The necessary changes will be put into CVS later on.

• There is now an experimental Mac OS X (X11) binary available from the download page.

• To all users of Ayam on the Win32 platform:
  Recent private communication revealed, that Ayam does not work properly, when installed in folders whose names contain spaces (e.g. "Program Files"). There is a new ayam.bat file available, that should fix this. Please try it and send E-Mail if it does not work for you.

• The support for arbitrary primitive variables has been extended to cover the following additional primitives: BPatch, PatchMesh, PolyMesh, SDMesh.

• The CVS-Head now contains preliminary, but working, support for arbitrary primitive variables through the new "PV" tag. Support is preliminary because currently only NURBS patch objects support this for RIB-Import and RIB-Export. All other primitives will follow in the next days.

• The online documentation has been updated.

• If you manage to compile Aqsis 0.8.0 on IRIX (see the discussion in the development forum on the Aqsis site), you may want to download the ayslx.so plugin for Ayam 1.6/Aqsis0.8.0 (IRIX, N32, MIPS3, 822k) as well.
• The FAQ has been updated again.

• Ayam 1.6 is now available from the download page.

• André Pascual wrote up another nice tutorial for Ayam in french which is available in HTML and PDF. This time basic CSG functionality is explained.

• After tinkering around for two days, the latest version in CVS now contains changes that allow wrapped binaries of Ayam to use the BWidgets directly from the ZIP archive in the executable. This means on UNIX it is not necessary to have an "unzip" installed and on Win32 the BWidgets do not have to present besides the Ayam executable anymore.

• Due to incompatible changes in the interface of libslxargs from Aqsis 0.7.19, the Ayam 1.5 ayslx shader parsing plugin will not work with this, and following, releases of Aqsis. I am currently working on the CVS-Head to get this "fixed".

• This might be of interest for all users of Ayam 1.5 on Win32; the ayam.bat file has been updated and may now be used as target for a file type association without modification. Just copy it into your "ayam/bin" directory.
• Furthermore, I have cooked together a small WSH script ( make_shortcut.vbs ) that creates a properly parameterized shortcut on your Win32 desktop, which you may use to start Ayam. Just place it in your "ayam/bin" directory and start it.

• The FAQ has been updated again.
• There is a new image in the gallery.

• The FAQ has been updated again.
• The example image for ShadeAndDraw drawing mode (GIF, 41K) has been updated.
• The CVS-Head now contains better support for parsing the progress output of Pixie plus some minor changes like automatic backups of scenes loaded and improved "Special/Save Environment" feature.

• The CVS-Head now contains a shader parsing plugin for Pixie (aysdr.so), as well as a new icon based drawing mode menu for view windows (GIF, 10K), right beside the grid menu.

• The CVS-Head now contains support for two new renderers ( Angel and Pixie ), as well as a new drawing mode: "ShadeAndDraw", that is capable of e.g. showing a shaded NURBS surface with the characteristic "isoparam" curves (GIF, 41K).

• Due to a bug related to drawing NURBS patches that occurred with certain OpenGL/GLU implementations, Ayam 1.5 has been updated and is now available from the download page in a new version.

• Ayam 1.5 is now available from the download page.

• Ayam 1.5a is now available from the download page. Please test it, and mail me your comments.

• New in CVS is a NURBS to PolyMesh conversion facility (new scripting interface command "topoly") based on the GLU1.3+ tesselator.
• In the light of the many bugs still found in 1.4, a new release (1.5) is planned for the near future. Please get the CVS-Head, and check wether the bugs are really fixed.
• If you use Ayam on Windows 95/ME/XP, please please please please please please check for the presence of the Win32 specific known problems mentioned in the FAQ (question about bug reports) and report whether they also exist on your system.
  [Response count: 0 after 7 requests over 2.5 months!]

• With a little help editing the Makefile, Volker (Lefti) Schmidt yesterday successfully compiled Ayam on MacOS X using XFree86/Mesa3.4.2/Tcl/Tk8.4.1. The menu bars look a little bit tall, but otherwise it is fully functional. I will try to switch off the MacOS X (Aqua) specific menu code if Ayam is compiled on a MacOS X (X11) system. If you managed to compile Ayam using the new X11 server from Apple (and possibly hardware accellerated OpenGL) please share your experiences.
• The FAQ has been updated again.
• If you use Ayam on Windows 95/ME/XP, please please please please please check for the presence of the Win32 specific known problems mentioned in the FAQ (question about bug reports) and report whether they also exist on your system.

• The CVS-Head of Ayam now contains some changes, that fix Ayam exporting RIBs with RiSpec violating RiSolid hierarchies. In other words, doing CSG with RiSpec compliance enforcing renderers (such as Aqsis) should now work without problems. The necessary changes were quite big, so you should really test this with your CSG using scenes!
• If you use Ayam on Windows 95/ME/XP, please please please please check for the presence of the Win32 specific known problems mentioned in the FAQ (question about bug reports) and report whether they also exist on your system.

• New in CVS is an adaptive polygonization algorithm for the MetaBalls custom object (Frank Pagels), please test it!
• If you use Ayam on Windows 95/ME/XP, please please please check for the presence of the Win32 specific known problems mentioned in the FAQ (question about bug reports) and report whether they also exist on your system.

• André Pascual wrote up a nice tutorial for Ayam in french which is available in HTML and PDF.
• If you use Ayam on Windows 95/ME/XP, please please check for the presence of the Win32 specific known problems mentioned in the FAQ (question about bug reports) and report whether they also exist on your system.

• The list of frequently asked questions has been updated.
• If you use Ayam on Windows 95/ME/XP, please check for the presence of the Win32 specific known problems mentioned in the FAQ (question about bug reports) and report whether they also exist on your system.

• Ayam 1.4 is now available from the download page.
• If you use Ayam on Windows 95/ME/XP, please check for the presence of the Win32 specific known problems mentioned in the FAQ (question about bug reports) and report whether they also exist on your system.

• Ayam 1.4 alpha is now available from the download page for Linux and Win32. Please test it!
• The list of frequently asked questions has been updated.
• If you use Ayam on Windows 95/ME/XP please check for the presence of the Win32 specific known problems mentioned in the FAQ (question about bug reports) and report whether they also exist on your system.

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