Software Release Schedule
Release Version 2.1 (6/15/01)
Release Version 2.0 (8/3/00)
Release Version 1.2 (3/3/00)
Release Version 1.1 (1/7/00)
Release Version 1.0 (9/30/99)

Operating System	Sample Applications/Programs Supported
MS Windows NT 4.0	Gfxsanity, Revli
MS Windows 2000	Gfxsanity, Revli
SUN Solaris™ 2.6 CC5.0	XVGTest, Sanity
SUN Solaris™ 2.6 CC6.0	XVGTest, Sanity
SUN Solaris™ 8 CC5.0	XVGTest, Sanity
SUN Solaris™ 8 CC6.0	XVGTest, Sanity
SGI IRIX 6.5.4	XVGTest, Sanity
HP HP-UX	XVGTest

New Features/Changes

See VolumePro® 500 Release Notes for more details.

• New VolumePro® 500 support for Windows 2000.
• New VolumePro® 500 support for support for Solaris™ 8.
• New thread VLI support features.
• New 7th point feature for improved embedded geometry support.
• Performance improvements.
• Updated support for Solaris™ 2.6
• Correction for VLI_MaxAngleDeviation error.
• Improvements to our sample applications Gfxsanity, Revli, and XVGtest.
• New separate driver with library and SDK installation for NT and W2K.
• New serial number prompt with SDK installation for NT and W2K.
• Volume True size control settings.

• New NT multi-board support providing the ability to load larger volumes with slight increase in performance.
• New VLI and driver command logging capability along with error handling improvements.
• New non-threaded VLI for better reliability and render control.
• New VLI maximum angle deviation error code to improve reliability.
• VLI improvements to stitching together of large rendered image.
• 3D cursor feature improvements.
• Super sampling blend mode feature improvements.
• Ray casting improvements for better centering on a volume to reduce image jitter and enhance image quality.
• Updated Revli sample application with new features plus many improvements.
• No program recompile required but is strongly recommended.
• The maximum volume loading size of a single 128 MB VolumePro® board is now 512 x 512 x 224 at 16 bits. The maximum volume loading size of a single 256 MB VolumePro® board is now 512 x 512 x 445 at 16 bits.

Volume data loading has new improvements. This means that the upper bound of the number of slices is slightly lower. For example, given a 512 X 512 XY dimension, 445 slices is now the upper bound. You may experience slightly lowered performance with super volumes.

The rendered baseplane is larger than before, since all the volume data is now loaded. The baseplane is also slightly larger due to the skew/jitter fix. This may cause some graphics cards to fail to load the texture (commonly expressed as a 1281 status from the OpenGL glTexImage2D function). The baseplane size will also change depending on the volume model and camera view matrix. Although still a power of two, it is no longer square and corrected.

The RenderBasePlane and RenderToGraphicsContext functions now return the kVLIErrMaxAngleDeviation status. VLI no longer perturbs the desired view to the next closest one expressible in the hardware. It is up to the application to handle this status. The Revli application provides an example that may be appropriate for other applications.

The texture coordinates are now the normalized indices of the baseplane. The image coordinates now contain the correct Z values. In addition, they represent the rendered extents. Note that this is always slightly less than the volume coordinates, due to the nature of ray tracing.

The cutplane placement is now more consistently in line with user-specified parameters. Whereas in the previous release in certain cases, the cutplane may have been placed slightly away from the location specified by the application, it is now placed consistently with the user-specified parameters.

The world space specified falloff distance converts to the closest chip expressible voxel distance. This means that the fuzziness of the thickness may change with non-isotropic data.

The crop interface now uses a start and size paradigm, although the interface remains unchanged. The start is floor of the minimum and the floor of the difference between max and min is the thickness.

Super sampling is now limited to three for X and Y and one, two, or four for Z. This represents the values that give the best chance of increasing quality while avoiding a kVLIErrMaxAngleDeviation status.

When super sampling and using kBlendBasePlane, the texture is allowed to increase to a dimension of 1K in X or Y before filtering occurs. This maximizes image quality, while still limiting the texture size to an achievable size.

Where possible, the getters in VLI objects now return the actual value, as opposed to what was set. This allows an application to understand what precision is actually being used.

• When rendering a super volume, the boundary between its component volumes may appear when the super volume is rotating. The boundary is especially visible if it appears on a surface that is at a large angle with respect to the image plane. This may also appear as seems in the image, stair casing in the image and image skew.
• When rendering a volume and rotating the image, the image will appear to move about on its axis or jitter. This may appear when using X, Y and Z super sampling, cut plane and or super volumes.
• When using Revli to view super volumes and rotating it causes occasional FetchBasePlane returned error and Render Base Plane returned error.
• When using Revli to view a volume the 3d cursor may have some issues such as thickness appears different for X, Y and Z, it ooks jagged in certain angles and opacity does not change much.
• When using Revli to view a volume Box Cropping does not crop evenly.

• Images in Revli or Gfxsanity may momentarily disappear when trying to render at an invalid angle with the error Invalid Render angle message.
• Images in Revli or Gfxsanity may momentarily disappear when trying to render at an angle with the error OpenGL Status 1281 message. The cause is that some graphics cards fail to load the texture.
• Slightly lowered performance issues to be addressed in future releases.
• Using Enbedded Pointers in Revli may occasionally return FetchBasePlane error.