topbanner_forum
  *

avatar image

Welcome, Guest. Please login or register.
Did you miss your activation email?

Login with username, password and session length
  • Thursday March 28, 2024, 4:05 pm
  • Proudly celebrating 15+ years online.
  • Donate now to become a lifetime supporting member of the site and get a non-expiring license key for all of our programs.
  • donate

Author Topic: Plot3D candidate for submission  (Read 6780 times)

marcsl

  • Honorary Member
  • Joined in 2006
  • **
  • default avatar
  • Posts: 8
    • View Profile
    • Donate to Member
Plot3D candidate for submission
« on: May 02, 2006, 08:37 PM »


I'm considering entering Plot3d in the contest.

I'm posting to hopefully get some feedback about the program,
maybe some folks can also test it and offer helpful comments.
The program download is at http://www.plot3d.net/download.html.

Plot3d is a  simple 2D/3D mathematical function graphing program for Windows and
uses the OpenGL library it was compiled with C++ Builder version 5.

For entry it probably would be under the academic/educational software
category. 

The program can graph functions of the type y=f(x) and z=f(x,y).
In creating this program my goal was to keep it easy to use
so that someone can begin graphing functions in a minimal amount of time.
Also I wanted to try and produce high fidelity images.
OpenGL provides a fairly easy and very powerful rendering library with
very wide hardware support.

Still a few people have reported problems with the program not looking right.
Also received a couple of reports of floating point errors.
I think these are usually video card issues.
I haven't been able to duplicate these errors myself,
so it helps to have updated drivers for your computers video card.
Very old computers or very generic inexpensive video cards might
be the problem, feedback about this would be very helpful.

The program is still under development and there are certainly a great
many features it needs and that would be nice to add to it.
For example parametric graphs would be very nice, also the ability to have
more than one graph on the same window at a time.
The 2d grapher is very functional but still needs greater ability for
the user to customize the graph, also an adaptive plotting algorithm
would be very nice so the 2d grapher could better deal with discontinous
functions.
As was repeated on here somewhere, software is never really finished so we
continue to prod along.
The next issue I plan to concentrate on is to have the program normalize the
surface normals instead of having OpenGL do the normalization.
This would delay the initial drawing of a graph just a small amount, but
it would make all the redraws after that faster.

I hope people find the program useful. Let me know what you think.
best regards,

Marco



Shed

  • Honorary Member
  • Joined in 2006
  • **
  • default avatar
  • Posts: 26
    • View Profile
    • Donate to Member
Re: Plot3D candidate for submission
« Reply #1 on: May 03, 2006, 03:00 AM »
Very interesting Marco....

it seems very useful (and more for edu stuff)

thanks and good luck in contest!  :Thmbsup:

mouser

  • First Author
  • Administrator
  • Joined in 2005
  • *****
  • Posts: 40,896
    • View Profile
    • Mouser's Software Zone on DonationCoder.com
    • Read more about this member.
    • Donate to Member
Re: Plot3D candidate for submission
« Reply #2 on: May 04, 2006, 09:31 PM »
looks really nice..
i only see one problem - a rule of the contest is that the programs should not have been previously "released".

marcsl

  • Honorary Member
  • Joined in 2006
  • **
  • default avatar
  • Posts: 8
    • View Profile
    • Donate to Member
Re: Plot3D candidate for submission
« Reply #3 on: May 05, 2006, 12:43 PM »
thanks....  :-\

oh well there goes that idea...

I've recently been working on a different mathematical program perhaps I can submit that one, it's never been released mostly I started it  for personal use, but it would need a user interface.
I'm not sure if it's of general interest, it takes a data set does  a Fourier transform on it and plots a periodogram (some call it a power spectrum).
Anyway I'd still like to enter the contest....I'll see what I can come up with I guess there is still time. :)



mouser

  • First Author
  • Administrator
  • Joined in 2005
  • *****
  • Posts: 40,896
    • View Profile
    • Mouser's Software Zone on DonationCoder.com
    • Read more about this member.
    • Donate to Member
Re: Plot3D candidate for submission
« Reply #4 on: May 05, 2006, 02:58 PM »
There's plenty of time and i hope you will enter something!
And maybe we can put our heads together and think of some other application that might use the core graphing elements of plot3d..

mouser

  • First Author
  • Administrator
  • Joined in 2005
  • *****
  • Posts: 40,896
    • View Profile
    • Mouser's Software Zone on DonationCoder.com
    • Read more about this member.
    • Donate to Member
Re: Plot3D candidate for submission
« Reply #5 on: May 05, 2006, 03:00 PM »
just throwing out ideas.. what about a math game that presents random graphs and formulas and user has to try to guess which formula matches which graph.