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.

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.


QUICK START
==================================================================================

The fastest way to explore Zhu3D is to run the menu "Help/Demo". The demo
lets you browse through all examples with just a mouse click. Most examples
explain, what currently is going on. For further informations you may take a
look at the "Help" itself.


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
the newer Qt4 4.4.1. This bug affects users of German locales only. German users
of the precompiled Windows version do not have to care for this

* 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 text 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 even may crash, when print/file dimensions are too big.
My Windows XP printed up to a 8000x8000 resolution without problems. My quite
old Linux-box handles 2000x2000 only, but my current Linux 10000x10000. Or
even more, what was not tested:-)

* 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, which
you would not even notice normally:

* Hyperbolic functions like asinh() and friends are available under *nix only

* 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 and Mac OS's

* 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 Windows

* Under Linux/KDE e.g. language support for Chinese works out of the box. Windows
users have to play a little install/reboot-adventure for the Microsoft East-Asian
language pack before. When the interal help-browser fails with Chinese, just
switch to an external one under the menu Settings/General

* Ancient 16/32 Bit 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

The Help/About-box offers a link, where you quickly can check the latest version.


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
3 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) 2008 Heinz van Saanen