Release 1.12 of Tao Presentations, the most advanced 3D presentation software on the market, brings a wealth of improvements, features and fixes.

Tao Presentation's unique script-based approach to presentations makes it possible to build highly sophisticated interactive 3D presentations, and render them on practically any 2D or 3D displays on the market, including 3D without glasses.

The improvements in release 1.12 are in direct response to various use cases that pushed the envelope. For example, we were asked to create interactive 3D turntables from a large number of snapshots of a same object taken at different angles. The number of pictures in such a scenario can be very large, possibly exhausting the video memory even of the most recent cards. This is why release 1.12 implements a new "texture cache" that manages transfers of picture data to the video card transparently.

New features

• The "Help" menu contains new "Examples" and "Tutorial" menus, giving direct access to included examples and on-line tutorials.
• If an image file is changed while a presentation runs, the image on screen will update.
• The RemoteControl module makes it possible to remote-control a presentation using the telnet protocol.
• The frame_pixel_count primitive counts non-transparent pixels in a canvas.
• The command-line options now accepts tao:// URIs.
• The SDK offers a new script to facilitate the creation of new modules.
• The -tfps option now shows statistics for off-line rendering.

Optimizations and enhancements

• The application update mechanism is now based on the HTTP protocol and will work behind the majority of firewalls.
• A presentation can now load a much larger number of pictures than the video memory on the GPU can hold. This was tested with 5000 pictures representing over 1.5GB of data on a 64MB GPU memory budget.
• Rendering and saving images using the "Render to frames" menu is much faster and takes advantage of multiple CPUs to compress images to disk faster.
• On Linux, it is now possible to use tao:// URIs to launch Tao Presentations. The .ddd file extension is associated to the the application, and the application has the proper icon.
• On Ubuntu Linux, the screen saver is now disabled in presentation mode even when the window manager does not respect the xscreensaver protocol.
• The application now correctly identifies in the Audio settings on Windows, making it possible to adjust the volume separately.
• Rendering textured 3D models is now faster.
• When a key is pressed, only code that depends on a key press is evaluated again.
• Added missing French translations in the Preferences dialog box.
• Updated the documentation, adding module import names, documenting the refresh_on and no_refresh_on primitives, and freshening the Taodyne logo.
• Added alternate, frequently used names in the chooser for side-by-sdie and over/under stereoscopic modes.
• Opening a file after selecting an example no longer lands in the example source directory.
• Improved font rendering speed on MacOSX.
• Using version 2.03 of VLC on Mac and Windows, 2.04 on Linux.

Fixes

• Fixed a bug preventing application updates on Windows to install after having been downloaded.
• On Linux Ubuntu 12.04, Tao Presentations no longer crashes when using the Gallium3D-based display drivers.
• Fixed a crash in "Save as..." and another crash when giving a non-existent file on the command line.
• Several texture primitives, most notably frame_texture, could display incorrect contents if different parts of a document refreshed at different rates.
• The screen is refreshed correctly after rendering to files.
• Several locale-related issues where fixed, including the parsing of version numbers for modules, or the default selection of the user interface locale on MacOSX, or the parsing of font metrics in fonts such as TeX Gyre Adventor.
• A performance regression on the welcome screen has been fixed.
• The Search tab in the documentation now works.
• Animated textures (e.g. animated GIF) remain after activating stereoscopy, and no longer leak memory.
• Fixed clicks in widgets (buttons, ...) and in groups of shapes.
• Fixed an annoying "back and forth" bug in the Pan and Zoom module.
• Fixed Lens Flare module when mipmapping is disabled in the preferences, and more generally the loss of some textures or the appearance of OpenGL errors when texture preferences are changed.
• Fixed a bug where clicking on a tao:// link might cause Tao Presentations to consume 100% CPU and making no progress downloading the link.
• Fixed a bug where Tao Presentations requested a Stereoscopic HD licence for stereoscopic modes splitting an HD display in two.
• Fixed a bug in the document description array indexing feature A[B].
• Fixed load_text with absolute paths.