What's going on with Geomorph (June the 30th, 2006)
Version 0.31 (November the 25th, 2005)
     Update about version 0.31 (November the 28th)
What's new in version 0.30 (October the 31st, 2005)
February the 2nd, 2005
What's new in version 0.22 (October the 30th, 2004)
What's new in version 0.21 (August the 16th, 2004)
What's new in version 0.20 (May the 7th, 2004)
What's new in version 0.12 (November the 16th, 2003)
Replace a broken file (November the 16th, 2003)

What's going on with Geomorph (June the 30th, 2006)

Geomorph is not dead, though the updates are less frequent for some very good and trivial reasons (work, family...). I also apologize for the scarcity of the site updates, particularily for those who expected to get their work displayed.

Version 0.40 will provide a cracks network tool, among a few other goodies. Maybe I'll also be able to package a "Fourier Explorer" subsystem. The internals are done, but the interface is a challenge.

There are also a few noticeable news:

1. A FreeBSD port of Geomorph is now available at http://www.freshports.org/graphics/geomorph. My best thanks to Dmitry Marakasov for providing it.

2. The Gallery has been updated with very interesting work from Marc Carson, Jaime Vives Piqueres and Simon Donike.

3. The German messages file of the 0.31 package displays the special characters of this language incorrectly (ß, ü...), because of a double UTF-8 conversion.

• If you are using the binary, you can get the right de.gmo file here. Login as root and copy it like this, in a console:
  cp -fv  po/de.gmo /usr/local/share/locale/de/LC_MESSAGES/geomorph.mo
• If you are using the source, you can use the first method, or if you prefer a slower method, you can get the right de.po file here, copy it in ~/geomorph-0.31/po, recompile and reinstall.

Version 0.31 (November the 25th, 2005)

Version 0.31 fixes these bugs:

1. Some users with a Nvidia video card and the Nvidia proprietary driver were not able to display the preview at all. Version 0.31 uses the GtkGLExt library instead of GtkGLArea, which solves the problem. Special thanks to Vincent Le Prince for testing this change.
   

2. With the "fill bucket":

• Use of the "subtract" option does not crash Geomorph anymore.
• Filling up 10 areas or more (or subtracting them) does not exit Geomorph anymore.
  

3. The installation scripts have been corrected. A new Geomorph user can be installed in one of 2 ways: from the uncompressed archive, or at the first launch of Geomorph. The second one was not working because of a typo. Furthermore, the "sed" command was used with a GNU extension which does not work on some systems. This extension is no more used.

4. The cloning function ( ) now works without errors with a new and unsaved document. Geomorph asks to save it before copying it.
   

5. Output of comments in the geomorphrc file are now translated to the current locale. They were written in the UTF-8 format, a concern for French and German users.

What's new in version 0.30 (October the 31st, 2005)

A new version of Geomorph is finally available, after one year!

The migration towards the GTK2 libraries explains most of the work. It does not improve the interface or the features of Geomorph, at least for now. This is a long term investment, to avoid obsolescence.

But version 0.30 also provides a lot of improvements.

For instance, if you like desert or seashore landscapes, you'll be able to use Geomorph for creating dunes and ripples.

Dunes and ripples produced with Geomorph

Povray textures provided with Geomorph

• 4 new tools

• Gravity erosion
  
• Oriented gravity erosion
  
• Dunes generation, derivated from the papers of Bruno Andreotti and his colleagues (http://www.lps.ens.fr/recherche/formes/papers.html)
  
• Ripples generation, derivated from the same papers

• A new "fill bucket", in the drawing section, for filling depressions up to a specified height, with a variable level of noise.
  
• A new button which stops the Povray rendering, as suggested by Simon Donike, the german version contributor.
  
• A closing dialog, which shows all the unsaved documents - very convenient for those who stack a lot of height fields during a trial-and-error work!
  

• Drawing is now faster. The main source of slowness was the preview update. Now, the preview is updated at low resolution when drawing, and at the full chosen resolution when the mouse button is released.
• Many dialogs have been optimized with a similar technique. For instance, the horizontal or vertical translation is echoed in the preview when the mouse button is released, after dragging the scale button.
• An other optimization technique has been generalized, when it is relevant: most scales now provide buttons for increasing or decreasing the value without having to drag the scale. With large height fields, it could be difficult to drag the scale cursor when Geomorph refreshes the image of the height field or its preview.
• The naming convention for Povray output has been changed. For instance, executing a file terrain.pov calling a height field with the name hf.png would give now a landscape called _hf.png instead of terrain.png. In the preceding version, the risk of overwriting the PNG height field with the Povray output was significant (e.g. a terrain.png height field rendered with the terrain.pov file gives a terrain.png output...). The _ prefix can be changed in the options file geomorphrc.
  
• There were scaling errors with the pen tools, which are now corrected.
  
• The erosion and crests processes outcome should look now more natural. The slopes are now hexagonal instead of rectangular.
  
• Scrolling controls have been added, when the height field display is scaled up. Drawing small details should be easier.
  
• In the "Waves" tool, the period can now be set to a value of 10 with a predictable outcome. The height field is then covered with a gradient of half a wave length.
  
• The changes and the undo/redo stack are now managed in a better way. The auto-accept feature, when there is a change of context (for instance, when clicking on a new tool or on a new document window), now works more consistently.
  
• The default browser defined in the options file when a new user is installed is now Epiphany instead of Galeon. Netscape is not a choice anymore. The choices are tried in this order: Epiphany, Firefox, Mozilla, Konqueror, Galeon.
• Many segmentation faults have been corrected.

February the 2nd, 2005

1. The binary package of 0.22 was broken

2. Problem running Povray from Geomorph 0.22 under Mandrake 10.1

3. Geomorph 0.23 is on the way!
   

1. The "fault" pen has been improved for creating cracks and fissures. A tutorial is provided.
• The width of the crack can be controlled (the separation level). 
• The default behavior is now to accept automatically the crack, fault or fissure when the user clicks away from the current control line. This makes the creation of networks easier.
2. Geomorph is now translated in German. This is a contribution from Tim Schürmann, to whom I give my best thanks! Tim insists that his translation is experimental, so I ask German speaking users to send me their corrections or suggestions, if any.

• The "antialiasing" had been unwillingly unactivated in the rotate tool. It's now restored. It's my mistake, I promise to be more careful in the future... 
• There is no more segmentation fault when the altitude difference of the "fault" pen is activated before drawing the first control line during the session. 
• In the "fault" pen, sometimes, the direction where was applied the altitude difference was not consistent. For some directions, it was not possible to invert the difference. It now works.
  

• All the message and title keys ("FILETXT" and the like) have been converted to full-sentence English, respecting the standard of the internalization library ("gettext"). The keys are now exactly equivalent to the English translation, except for a few very long error messages. These keys would appear if your language is not English or French, or if your system is not internationalized at all.
  
• The installation scripts (aclocal - automake) and the internationalization scripts provided with "gettext" have been reinitialized with more recent versions.
• A library option has been added (libGLU) so that the package can now compile under SuSE 9.1, and probably other Linux flavours.
• Three programs have been modified so that they can compile under older versions of gcc without a fatal error. Geomorph 0.20 dit not compile under Mandrake 8.0, Slackware 8.1 and probably other distributions of the same era, because of some C declaration ordering.
• The "pause" option has been added in the default Povray options, in the "geomorphrc" file (+P), so that the output window of the renderer stays open when the rendering is done. 
• The "libgtkgl" library is now included in the binary package ("statically linked"), so that the new user don't have to search for it. This library is part of the "gtkglarea" package, which is not installed in most current Linux distributions.
  
• The desktop shortcuts created during the initial installation now point to the right icon. The icon had been moved in version 0.20 to /usr/local/share/geomorph, so that it would not depend on the version in the future, but the shortcuts had not been upgraded.
• The FAQ and the installation instructions have been upgraded.

A continuous gaussian pen is now available. It provides size and level controls, a preview, a tip choice, an effect choice (raise, dig, smooth), and controls for adjusting speed against quality. The result is straightforward, and I hope it would be useful. But believe me, it's not easy to put up a set up allowing to draw really smooth thick lines in a 16-bit image! It took me almost one year to get it right. The next step would be to implement "wide" tips, allowing to draw roads with their ditches, for instance. For now, the tips have to be purely gaussian or very acute, otherwise the stroke "folds" on curves.

A fault pen has been added, with which you draw a control line generating a fractal fault. You adjust the control line with the mouse and the effect on the fault is seen instantly. You can control how the fault is divided, the altitude difference, the smoothing, and even add basic crevasses. It was fun to develop, and I'd call it "cool"! I propose a tutorial about it.

The "waves tool" is now a lot better. Aliasing is now controlled. Random vertical variations now work, and so does the "refresh seed" button. Wave shapes are slightly improved. When there are more than 2 tabs, accepting the changes doesn't modify the order in which they are applied. Globally, I would call the tool "almost usable", depending on your requirements. The main drawback is when you apply lateral waves at an angle which is not 90-180-270°, you get non-continuous edges (this is normal), but there is no tool yet to crop/scale the image for removing these edges. If you only use vertical waves, or apply a gaussian filter to blacken the edges after accepting the waves transformation, this is not a concern.

• Context changes are now better handled. For instance, when you edit a document and open or create a new document before accepting the changes, the changes are now automatically accepted. In the previous version, changes where accepted only when clicking on an icon of the menu bar where the user was. For now, the only option is to automatically accept the changes. The other possibilities are to cancel the changes as the default behaviour (this is how Gimp does), or to ask. A parameter in the option file could be added in the future for choosing the default behaviour, if somebody asks for.
• The height field pen now offers a spacing control. This gives more regular strokes.
• The rain erosion now works adequately on images which don't wrap.
• Rotation of a non-wrapping image now gives "rebounding" continuous corners, instead of non-continuous wrapping corners.
• In draw mode, the value of the pixe under the mouse pointer is now displayed. Also, when the display is scaled (25%, 50%... 200%, 400%), the mouse pointer position in the image is correctly displayed.
• The height field pen "subdivision 2" is now recalculated for each dot drawn, like "subdivision 1".
• The style of some icons has been standardized, like those of the pen bar.
• It should now be possible to install Geomorph elsewhere than in the default directory (thanks Warren), though I didn't test the feature.
• Some bugs have been corrected:
• The first change to the second document created during a session couldn't be undone. Now, it can be.
• There is no more seg fault when we apply a tool displaying a watch, like the rain erosion, after having undone all the changes on a document.
• There is no more seg fault when smoothing an image after having undone its first change in a session.
• There is no more seg fault when reading a 16 bits RGB PNG file, like those created with Cinepaint / Filmgimp.
• There is no more seg fault when applying the "craters" tool on the first created document during a session, or when displaying the warning message saying that not all the craters were drawn, after applying the tool with a low slope threshold.

• An angle scale has been added (a zoom).
• View parameters are now output as the main camera in predefined Povray scenes.
• 5 views (Povray cameras) can be defined for each document.
• The cameras are stored in the PNG height field file.
• The rotation angle values were adjusted, to make them consistent with Povray.
• The scales were overhauled for correcting bugs and providing more user-friendly steppings.
  

• A "change directory" was added before Povray rendering, so that all files referenced in a scene can be found in the current scene directory.
• A "watch" cursor is now displayed when long processes are run.
• The minimal width of horizontal scales (height of vertical ones) was increased from 50 to 75 pixels.
• These segmentation faults were corrected:
• When giving a file name on the command line.
• When leaving with many documents open (unfrequent).
  

Replace a broken file

The "desert.pov" Povray scene distributed with Geomorph 0.12 before March the 1st, 2004, is an old corrupted version. The file which works with the tutorial is here. Sorry for this.

Put the file in your personnal Geomorph directory. The default is ~/geomorph. If you think you will install new users, you can also copy it, as root, under /usr/local/share/geomorph/0.12/scenes, so that they get the right version.

The package distributed on Sourceforge (necessarily after March the 1st) contains the right file.

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Contact:    Patrice St-Gelais