Release notes for VARKON version 1.17A

The old SYMBOL entity type is now removed completely from the system. The SYMBOL as an entity type has not been supported for many many years but very old RES- or RIT files may still exist with SYMBOL entities in them. Such files will not work with Varkon version 1.17A and later. Note that this has nothing to do with the MBS SYMB() procedure which of course works as normal. We have waited many years to remove the last support for SYMBOL's to minimize the risc that users would run into problems. We now think the time is right and want to get rid of some old code thats making it difficult to implement new functions.

Function f200 "Dynamic rendering" now has a new controlbutton in its toolbar that can be used to activate z-clipping. With z-clipping active you can use the mouse to move an "invisible" clippingplane through the model and display only the part of the model behind the plane. This can be used to "look into" the inside of a model which is otherwise coverd by exterior surfaces.

A minor bug has been corrected in the "list views" function in the graphics/view/list menu. The current perspective distance shown for the active view was not always correct.

Three new MBS-routines have been added to store/retrieve and delete 1-dim arrays of FLOAT, INT or STRING data in GM. These routines can be used to store application specific data with a unique name and from any module in the application retrive or delete the data by its name. The data becomes global for the entire application. In many cases these 3 new routines will replace external files or special parts used only to save simple INT, FLOAT or STRING values.

A bug in the PERP_VIEW() MBS routine has been fixed. In some situations this routine didn't update the graphics window as it should.

A bug in the DEL() procedure has been fixed. If you (by some reason) tried to delete the part that was currently executing, ie. tried to delete "yourself" the system crashed. Now you get a proper errormessage.

Default values for GMSIZE is now 256 pages on all systems. Default value for PMSIZE is 400Kb and default value for RTSSIZE is 200Kb on all systems.

The "Create/part/plotfile/import" function (SYMB in MBS) now supports the WIDTH attribute.

A bug in the MBS function UNIQUE_FILENAME() has been corrected. On repeated calls it always returned the same temporary name.

An unusual bug in the "Edit Part" dialog window has been corrected. In multi page mode and parameters of type VECTOR the wrong promts were sometimes displayed when the "arrow down" button to the right of the edit window was used to edit the parameter. This is now corrected. Further, the default width of the window has been increased by 10 characters.

A bug in the MBS routine ASCII() has been corrected. For ASCII values greater than 127 it returned the wrong value.

4 new fonts for graphical text has been added. TFONT=2 and 3 are non serif and serif versions conforming to the ISO8859 characterset. TFONT=4 and 5 are non serif and serif version conforming to the PC characterset. National characters for Norweigan and Dansish language have been added. See the docs on the TEXT procedure for more infor and pictures of all 6 fonts.

A bug in the MBS-routine INV_ON_SUR() has been corrected. INV_ON_SUR() did not work correctly in 1.16E and could crash the system.

A bug in the keyboard routine for the CRE_EDIT() window that prevented it from displaying 8-bit ASCII characters has been corrected.

The MBS routine TEXTL() is now also available in 3D.

The preparation of the Varkon sources for release under the GPL license has also resulted in various optimizations that has increased the speed of the system. MBS code now runs 10 % (average) faster than in version 1.16. Note that 1.16 was10 % faster than 1.15 ! There is still some to do so Varkon will eventually be even faster !

Varkon has now been ported to the 64-bit DEC Alpha processor.

Running Varkon in batch mode is now easier. By specifying a project, a jobname and-b on the command line, Varkon loads the job, runs it silently (without any interactive input/output) and then exits. Errors or informational messages are written to a LOG-file. Batch mode can be used to create applications where other systems use Varkon to automatically create drawings, 3D images or other information.

Varkon now uses the latest version 3.0 of the Mesa graphics library. Version 3.0 is faster than the previous version 2.6 distributed with earlier versions of varkon.

The DXF export function now writes a comment line to the beginning of the DXF file stating the current Varkon version. It also adds a $ACADVER value of AC009 to the HEADER section. AC009 means that the DXF file conforms to Autocad version R11 or later. DXF import has been updated to support these changes.

DXF import and export functions now support linewidth for lines and arcs/circles.

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