For the brown_and_blue_flower_shape pattern, and a few other patterns, get a rapidly flashing texture - this results from rounding errors when the file was saved and re-opened e.g. saving 7/3 as 2.333333 with not enough decimal places of precision - fixed
Other patterns - for a few of the tube based patterns, you can get similar looking flashing patterns for 20 sided tubes, e.g. double cup funge. Not sure what the cause is, but as a work around, the flashing goes away if you change to a smaller odd number of sides for the tube, say 11. Another example - crazy_star_cogs - pattern keeps flashing for 12 sided cogs. Fine if set to an odd number - for this upload changed it to 15. Flashes for every even number if set to rounded corners.
Edited all the pattterns to eliminate the flashing effects. This effect didn't show up, or was less prominent, when the patterns were played on slower machines which couldn't play such smooth animations for these patterns.
Movie for zigzaggy colourful flower links to page 10 (which doesn't exist) - similarly if you click the link for the page from the movie for the last pattern in each page (just the movie) links to the next page instead of the one it belongs to - fixed.
Sometimes doesn't pause the pattern when you go to File | Save As, also if you select a pattern from the drop list, if it takes a moment or two to load, you see it briefly as it should be at the time saved to the file, then it jumps forward a second or two to the position it is after the time it took to load it. Fixed - the timing now starts after the load has completed rather than before it starts - time tracking pauses during load of the file.
Found a thread synchronisation bug that lead to failed file saves (with error messages to say the save couldn't be completed) in rare situations while making the web page gallery of Lissajous patterns - potentially it could also lead to access violations in rare situations though that didn't happen in the testing - fixed
back to What's new
If you halt construction of the web page while it is in the middle of making a movie for one of the pages, then you end up with a fragmentary movie with only some of the frames made - and if you then remake it with the option to leave movies
in place if they exist, result is that the web page is remade with a fragmentary movie in it.
Fixed by adding a message to ask the user if they want to delete the fragmentary movie when they halt the web page construction.
In Vista, when the screen saver was running, you would see flashes of the windows on your desktop appear briefly while it was playing - fixed. Other minor Vista bug fixes.
Some of the patterns changed very slowly, or not at all, especially noticeable for the screen saver - made new versions which are more dynamic for those.
When you save the Lissajous pattern as a flash movie, animated gif etc, if the pattern was spinning, the saved animation just had the wave drift (change of shape), didn't spin - fixed.
Various minor bug fixes in the layout of the web pages.
April 15th 2008
When you save an animated gif, then it seems to stop for a while not doing anything after the frames have all been made - added a message to the window at that point saying "Saving" so you can see what is happening - it is saving the finished animated gif at that point.
Also get error messages sometimes due to previous version of .gif not deleted before making the new one - especially if you halt it mid construction - fixed.
Help may not show up for some installed browsers (e.g. Maxthon) - fixed.
Fixed a number of very minor bugs and glitches.
January 2008 - Release of Lissajous 3D version 2.1
Fixed a number of very minor bugs and glitches and improved the layout of the windows and the way the user interface works in many ways.
Fixed some bugs that show up when run on systems with multiple monitors, with the various multiple monitor options. For instance, that it only shows up on one of the monitors if you have the secondary monitor set to the left of the primary monitor (negative coordinates in the multi- monitor space).
Some web pages shown from Lissajous 3D by file association didn't show up if you have Mozilla FireFox as your web browser - this is because I forgot to add a file://localhost/ prefix - which FireFox needs for local files, but Internet Explorer doesn't mind about one way or the other.
Fixed another major bug though most users will rarely encounter it - if you use the option to make a web page of flash animated jpegs or pngs then after a dozen or so movies of some length (sooner if the movies are very long), you may find that you start to get messages from the WinMing library to say that it can no longer save the movies. This clears up when you close the program and start it up again - but only to recur again another dozen or so movies later. The bug was the indirect result of a bug in my port of the old version of the Win Ming flash generation library to windows, now fixed.
Mar 20th 2006
After some particular screen saver patterns are shown, the ones following may change less than they usually do - what happens is that they no longer spin, only transform. Also when you open one shape after another from the main program then after opening a non spinning pattern, the others from then on may no longer spin until you press the button to set it spinning again. Fixed.
Sometimes in the random succession of patterns, you see the same pattern again soon after you last saw it in the screen saver - fixed.
Feb 24th 2006
Occasional access violation message for some patterns if you resize a window and then after that, change to full screen then back to normal again - fixed.
The recent files list sometimes didn't record newly opened files to add to the history - fixed.
If you customised the web page layout for the option to show all the Lissajous figures as thumbnails, it forgets the page intro and end note when you next redo the page. When this happens you can easily recover it by using the revert button to revert to the last used options for the pages - but you had to recover it again every time you remake the page, which shouldn't be necessary. Fixed.
It was also easy to forget to revert to the old options if one had changed something in the web page layout for anothre page - that's fixed too. see the new Always revert option in the What's New section..
Feb 16th 2006
Bug fix in the new 2.0 release - if you save a spirograph with drifting waves, and then reopen it you may find that the waves are no longer drifting. That is, until you show the spirograph window when if it is set to auto remake the spirograph the waves will start drifting again.
Fixed - also the bug only affected reading from the file. The drifting waves were actually saved so previously saved files with drifting waves will read fine.
Feb 12th 2006
When Lissajous first started up with a slow to draw picture, it would sometimes momentarily show a frame with random patterns on it unrelated to the figures (just an undrawn frame). Fixed.
April 8 2004
The screen saver would show more distant shapes in the pattern in front of the nearer ones on a few displays (though the window version of the program showed them just fine) - fixed. Also not displaying with appropriate colours in displays set to 256 colour palettes (the older display mode, still available on modern monitors) - fixed.
Not exactly synchronising the tunes and the shapes when both are set to play for the same length oftime - fixed.
Also some glitches when running FTS in the background to accompany the screen saver - fixed.
No tool tips shown for the screen saver settings dialog - fixed.
Doesn't randomise first file played by screen saver\par when set to play random scene - done.
When you use the arrow keys to change the time in the shape window, it has no effect on shape - done.
November 28 2003
When you show the about window it may sometimes show strangely - problem was that the window wasn't always in the position that it seemed to be on the screen when it first appears - fixed.
Occasionally you might find that when you click and drag on the shape to turn it nothing happens - fixed.
November 27 2003
Fixed some bugs in the Images | Animation frames , including one that can cause an access violation when the dialog is first shown.
With the colour wheel, if you set the brightness or saturation to 0 then the hue gets set to 0 for red - which is perfectly valid of course, but it means that if you then set them back to a non zero number the colour has got changed from whatever it was before to red. So better if the hue doesn't get changed - fixed.
If you scroll the hue beyond 600 then it resets to a value in the range 0 to 600. We don't want that here as the hues need to be able to go up to any number such as 3600 etc to go around several times for rainbow effects. This only affected use of the spin controls to change the hue - fixed.
The colour patch in the colour wheel is supposed to be shown with a dotted border when you click on it as a sign that you can use its keyboard shortcuts (see its tool tip help) such as Insert, Delete in combinations with Ctrl and Shift to change the hue, saturation or brightness. Shortcuts were working fine but wasn't always shown with the dotted border when it should be - fixed.
November 5 2003
Fixed a bug that caused an access violation (handled) when you open a file in LJ format.
November 3 2003
Images | Image Size and Save Image | Save Image As had got disabled - fixed.
Images | Animation frames - the animations had also got disabled - not animating, just showed a single frame - fixed.
Monday October 6 2003
Bug fix - if you set a shape spinning using the mouse with it set to the trackball type of spin then save it, then when you re-open the shape you find it is no lnger spinning. The reason is that it wasn't saving the time increment for the trackball spin quaternion, which was only recorded internally and nowhere in the interface. Added this to Move | Spin Methods - fixed.
Saturday September 6 2003
Fixes a bug in the tool tips that can cause a fluttering hourglass when a window is first shown and another one that can cause access violations for users with Windows 98 + Explorer 5.x. See the Fractal Tune Smithy Bug Fixes page for 5th Sept. for details
Monday July 15
Fixes a few bugs. Main thing - a few check boxes that had no effect. Also the preview of the frames that show in the Images | Animation frames movie only showed correctly if the image was square. Other images were saved correctly - but shown as stretched horizontally or vertically in the preview. A few other really minor fixes which I can't even remember now. Also uses the most recent builds of the dlls to make flash movies. This fixes a potential memory leak when saving flash animated pngs. Finally, the keyboard shortcuts F!, F2, F3 etc had stopped working - fixed..
Thursday July 10
Improvements in the layout and in the messages you see when you first run the program - as it was you could easily switch to full screen when you started up the program because the window title bar used to read
"Lissajous 3D - Press Enter to switch to / from full screen" - but if the window is small then you just see the first part: "Lissajous 3D - Press Enter..."
Follow that instruction and you go into full screen mode, and don't know how to get back again. It now says Lissajous 3D - to switch to / from full screen press enter . So hopefully users will no longer get mystified about how to get back to windowed mode.
A number of other small bug fixes and additions or changes in the layout
Saturday June 21
Important bug fix!
When you run Lissajous 3D for a fair while, or for a shorter while on a fast computer, eventually you find other programs can't start, with "out of memory" error messages. When Lissajous 3D exits the problem persists, and the only solution is to reboot.
Fixed. Happened because the hand cursor for the main window got reloaded for every frame rather than once only, each time loading a new copy of the cursor. Nothing to do with OpenGL. This doesn't show up in memory leak tests - when the application exits Windows is supposed to free any memory allocated in this fashion automatically. Presumably it did, so probably something else is involved as well, maybe indeed memory fragmentation. Whatever it is, it is fixed now.
Lissajous 3D users should re-download it to make sure this problem doesn't happen.
Sorry about this!
Updated the version number to 1.1 to alert users to this fix
Some debugging of the skins.
Wednesday June 18
The option to change gradually from one material to another along the length of a ribbon can now also be used with tubes.
(technical note - this is done by another mod of the gle_with_time_out.dll )
Handled exception may occasionally occur after you show and then close the page setup dialog for one of the tube based shapes. Under investigation - may be fixed with this upload. Also added a shorter time out for the picture for the Page Setup dialog, preset to 1 second but configurable by user. See Opts | Animation Time Outs | Maximum time to take to paint the picture in the Page Setup preview
Bug fix 1.01 Friday June 13 2003
After you have been showing animated curves that use 3D tubes in Lissajous 3D (such as the hexagonal cross section 3D Lissajous and the pearl necklace above) you may sometimes get an out of memory message when you launch another program - fixed
This seems to be because the Gle library used to draw tubes does many small allocations and frees in rapid succession. It was fixed with a modifiction of the gle library to use recyclable memory rather than fresh allocations for each new frame. Lissajous 3D has no memory leaks so that wasn't the problem. Technically, the issue is that the heap may get fragmented causing fragmetation of the RAM memory available if you do many allocations of varied size in rapid succession. The modification used won't affect any other programs running as the library is already renamed to gle_with_time_out.dll .
Inicidentally, if you get this same problem with other programs, Free RAM XPPro is useful to help keep RAM defragmented (freeware)