REQUIREMENTS, DOCUMENTATION & GENERAL
==================================================================================

Zhu3D runs under Linux/Unix, Windows XP-Vista and Mac OS X and supports different
CPU's as well as different API's like KDE, Gnome or Motiv. Your operating system
must support OpenGL or at least a compatible software implementation like Mesa.
Isosurface calculation currently supports up to 16 CPU-threads.

The absolute minimum screen-size is 1024x768. Hardware accelerated OpenGL is
recomended, but a reasonably newer card from the DirectX9-generation will do
the job. For simple viewing even an ancient PC without HW-OpenGL is sufficient.
However, for motion blur, big textures or heavy animations with narrow grids
you will need any CPU/GPU-power you can get.

Have a look in the doc-directory for further information! In your work-directory
you will find a lot of commented examples.

The strange program name was inspired by Zhu Shijie, a genius ancient Chinese
mathematician. If you are interested, you find some historic remarks in the help.


ERRORS & HINTS
==================================================================================

Zhu3D is pretty stable and reliable. Nevertheless some hints and observations:

* Qt4 4.4.0 may cause severe troubles (bug entry 211114), which are resolved with
newer 4.4.1 snaphots or later. This bug affects users of German locales only

* openSUSE 10.3 seems to fail with NVIDIA-drivers from the repository. Reinstall
the driver manually instead, what fixes the quirks.

* Due to driver issues in Linux some AMD/ATI-cards may fail, when HW-acceleration
is turned on. Updating your old graphics-driver will mostly solve this problem and
is strongly recommended anyhow.

* Rendering "huge" pictures with static legends seems to fail with old ATI-drivers
and/or too old Qt4 versions. If you rely on lets say 3000x3000 pics, update to
cure this.

* PostScript file-generation or printing is somehow depending on your printer/
driver-backends. These may crash, when print/file dimensions are too big. Under
Windows my configuration printed up to a 8000x8000 resolution without problems.
My older Linux-box up to 2000x2000 only, but my current Linux 10000x10000 e.g.

* When handling mathematically "strange" functions or moving to "huge" number-
regions, tessellation may result in odd views. The documentation gives further
hints, how to handle those extreme cases.

* Compared to function- and parameter-modes texturing in iso-mode works somehow
different. This is not an error. Applied in iso-mode the texture mapping as a
matter principal never can be as perfect as in the other modes. Nevertheless
interesting effects are possible.


WINDOWS PECULIARITIES & LIMITATIONS
==================================================================================

Sorry Windows-folks, there are some deficiencies and peculiarities I did not want
to fiddle arround. So you have to face some (very, very small) limitiations:

* Under Windows - especially the older versions - the measuring of the GPU/CPU-
utilization may be a bit erratic and not as precise as in Linux e.g. Due to the
missing timer granularity the CPU-clock ist calculated and shown in other OS's
only.

* Textures are a grain more brilliant under Linux/Unix.

* The compiler or the system-libraries are failing in the range of really high
precision calculations. Due to this phenomenon the solver-precision is limited
to 11 digits.

* Under Linux/KDE language support for Chinese works out of the box. Windows users
have to play a little install/reboot-adventure for the East-Asian language pack
before.

* Morphing: There may be some (very rare and very special) combinations of user
driven events, where Zhu3D even may crash. I did a lot to prevent this, but my
very old Windows XP-PC behaves like a princess when it comes to precise and quick
thread/timer-reactions (see above). It is quite likely, that there are no problems
at all on quicker and more recent hardware.

* Ancient Windows versions like 98/ME are not tested any more. They may work or
may not work.


VERSIONS AND UPDATES
==================================================================================
Currently updates are found under www.kde-apps.org/content/show.php?content=43071
what may change in future. Look at www.qt-apps.org than or just google in this
case. A detailed version history you will find in ./src/changelog.txt


PROGRAMMING
==================================================================================

A short word to Qt4 from Trolltech: As I really dislike non-portable code, I
hardly ever wrote GUI-programs. This project initially was started to test if
the promises from Trolltech hold true. They do. It is a powerful GUI-framework
for platform-independent solutions. Even without prior experience, I managed to
port my old C-code-basis within a few days.


CONTACT
==================================================================================

If you have wishes, suggestions or just a supernice graph you want to share, mail
to: zhu3d (at) aon.at. I will try to respond as reliable as I can, but don't put
a hat on a hen. Sometimes I am simply under stress with my regular work.


LICENSE
==================================================================================

This program may be used under the terms of the GNU General Public License version
2 as published by the Free Software Foundation and appearing in the file
license.gpl included in this package.

This program is provided AS IS with NO WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, INCLUDING THE
WARRANTY OF DESIGN, MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.

(C) 1991-2008 Heinz van Saanen