BRayTracer Version History

0.8

Bug fixes

An exception was thrown when trying to edit a transform stack that had 0 transformations
Discs were very buggy. Many issues have been fixed.
Transformations have been redone to take into account world positions correctly.
Fixed bug with GetColorOfRay()--transparency needs to know when no color is reached. Now returns null if no object is intersected.
A number of small bugs with Cone, some related to hitting the caps
Anti-aliasing was not working with arbitrary camera position
Spheres of radius other than 1 were broken
Changing material name didn't update in the tree (still an issue with multiple appearances of materials in the tree)
Major crashing bug with interaction between tree and property view has been fixed
Property grid wasn't being reenabled correctly after a render

Enhancements

All menus and context menus have been reordered for consistency, to have "Add..." at the top
Transformations can be named
More thorough checks for invalid objects before rendering
Materials are now independent from objects and they are assigned to shapes rather than created specifically for each one. There is full GUI editor support for this.
Color editing is more robust. The user interface shows only byte values, consistent with Windows' color picker. SysColor is no longer visible. The system's color picker is now used to pick colors.
Shear transformations have been added for XY, XZ, and YZ shears
To support transparency, various interfaces have changed to check whether rays are orginating from inside objects. Shapes have the responsibility of flagging a ray as originating inside it.
Unit tests have been implemented for many more objects
Shapes now serialize to a binary file, not SOAP
No more specular colors for materials
Camera no longer shows ViewingTransform in properties/tree
Performance tests are present in the unit tests (mainly to show the difference of using bounding boxes--for now)
Most objects now have a Position property associated with them (as originally)
Scene tree colors updated
Program now starts up in full screen mode

Features

Transparent objects are now possible, including with indices of refraction
Preferences dialog box. Preferences file is saved in XML format in the user's application settings directory.
New shape: Box
Bounding boxes - and an enormous speed improvement
Light sources have been generalized
Directional light sources have been introduced, but still need more work.

0.7

Bug fixes

Cones now work and they have superceded cylinders, which have been removed. (A cylinder is just a special case of a cone)
Polygon normals corrected and they are double-sided
RayTraceSettings are now static and accessible to all objects
Vector3f.Normalize was returning backwards vectors

Enhancements

Display no longer updates every line, but when image is finished. Code has ability to customize how often, but not worked into UI yet.
Polygon meshes serialize only the filename of the original mesh
Vectors and Colors can now be edited as strings and the program will parse them into components
Color chooser dialog has been replaced by the system color picker
Rendering code has been split into a separate DLL. This will allow better unit testing and prepare for future features.

New Features

Transformations are implemented. Currently, there are translation, scale, rotation, and custom transformations available.
Transformations and matrices have their own GUI editor.
Camera can now be arbitrarily placed and pointed at a specific location
An NUnit project has been started. The tests are very incomplete, but they will be used extensively on new features, while existing features are eventually added. Unit tests for Vector3f are basically completed at this point.

Removal

No more "preview" mode. It just renders. It might be added back in the future in a different form.
Remove ICloneable interface from shapes--not necessary anymore
No more BenWatson namespace. Root namespace is BRayTracer.
Object names no longer show up as sub-properties of objects

0.6

Bug fixes

Hooked up all menus and toolbar butons to commands
Meshes now serialize/deserialize better--saving just the filename, which must be reloaded before rendering

Enhancements

New Features