Future Improvements 🚀

[tzanio]

What cool features will you like to see in GLVis in the future?

Ideas:

• Support for controlling line width, particularly in anti-aliased mode (options -lw and -mslw)
• Post Mac and Windows binaries on website
• Release a signed version of the Mac app (see the VisIt script)
• Multi-touch support for phones and tablets
• Correct transparency, see [WIP] Improved transparency with dual depth peeling #166
• Improved performance: parallelize with OpenMP and/or MPI?
• Add a simple GUI, see https://github.com/wjakob/nanogui, https://github.com/ocornut/imgui
• Cutting plane control with 3D "gizmo" instead of keys (see below)
• Better shaders: tessellation, compute shaders, GPU acceleration, see https://github.com/jakubcerveny/hogtess
• Improve tessellation performance (see below)
• Support user-provided shaders
• Support Vulkan, Metal?
• Support multiple functions and operations on the same plot (see below)

Done:

• Live version of glvis.js on https://glvis.org/live
• Support for websockets, so the JS version can be used as drop-in replacement for the native GLVis server Modularize glvis-js and add npm package config glvis-js#1 (comment)
• Live demo of MFEM examples on its website, https://mfem.org/examples/
• Electron app, or other way for easy distribution
• Multi-threading support replacing fork()

👇 Discuss

[tzanio]

cc: @kanye-quest, @tomstitt, @jakubcerveny, @v-dobrev, @jandrej

[jakubcerveny]

Improve tesselation performance (e.g. with OpenMP) and increase the tesselation limit. Right now larger solutions are very undertesselated by default. Also, the low default is enforced repeatedly when updating the solution.

[jakubcerveny]

Cutting plane keyboard control should be replaced/supplemented by a CAD-like 3D "gizmo" that would allow controlling the cutting plane with the mouse.

[tzanio]

Support multiple grid functions and visualization operations (e.g. cutting planes) on the same plot, see #150.

One option could be a mode where GLVis can export the currently visible triangulation in a file plus an option to read and combine such triangulation files, cc: @v-dobrev

[tzanio]

Add support for controlling line width, particularly in anti-aliased mode (options -lw and -mslw)

[termi-official]

There is quite a big amount of code duplication between the vssolution and vssolution3d classes as well as between vsvector and vsvector3d. I think it is worth to refactor the duplicate code into base classes.

[CsatiZoltan]

Support VTK mixed meshes composed of elements with different polynomial degrees (e.g. Q2/T1, as in the attached mesh file).
mesh.zip

[termi-official]

What is the exact idea regarding the implementation of a simple GUI? Just replacing the colorbar and text with actual UI elements or do you have something more specific in mind?