VTK 5.2 Release Planning

Planned Schedule

• Announcement email: January 28, 2008
  • On the developers' mailing list
  • On the users' mailing list
• Create VTK-5-2 branch: end of February, 2008
• Fix bugs in priority order: through the end of March, 2008
• Stabilize the dashboards and release the first release candidate for VTK 5.2: early April, 2008

What's New in VTK 5.2?

New features in VTK since the 5.0 release include:

• Infovis kit
• Views kit
• New Widgets architecture and more than a dozen new widgets
• New Utilities: freerange, verdict, libxml2, metaio, sqlite
• Updated Utilities: freetype, zlib
• More than 300 new C++ classes.
• More than 100 new C++ tests running on most dashboards
• Many bug fixes, including much improved Java wrapping support and Mac OSX support

API Changes

vtkProp::RenderTranslucentGeometry() has been broken down into 3 methods:

* HasTranslucentPolygonalGeometry()
* RenderTranslucentPolygonalGeometry()
* RenderVolumetricGeometry()

Here is what to change in a vtkProp subclass:

• If RenderTranslucentGeometry() was used to render translucent polygonal geometry only, override HasTranslucentPolygonalGeometry() and RenderTranslucentPolygonalGeometry().
• If RenderTranslucentGeometry() was used to render translucent volumetric geometry only, override RenderVolumetricGeometry().
• If RenderTranslucentGeometry() was used to render translucent polygonal geometry and translucent volumetric geometry, override all 3 methods.