As is standard for Geant4 Planned Features documents,
(1) means expected to be done in first half of year
(2) means expected to be done in second half of year
(*) means may get to this in second half of year or may take longer
Multi-threading: Adapt visualization manager to handle multi-threaded simulations (1/2)
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Documentation: Major overhaul of visualization documentation (1/2)
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OGLFile: new driver to produce image files in batch jobs where there is no graphics card present (1/2)
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iOS and Android Devices: Develop visualization solutions for these devices (1/2/*)
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OpenInventor: Continue development of SoXtViewer (1/2)
Supports save and restore viewpoint and save and replay fly-through (originally motivated by beam line applications).
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New Transparent Visualization Tool: Develop new tool to support high resolution transparent visualization with abilty to rotate and zoom, able to show, for example, trajectories and hits within a HEP detector - (2/*)
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gMocrenFile and gMocren: Continue development (1/2)
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GDML: Add visualization attributes to this exchange format
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Key tasks for which we do not have manpower:
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Change from current flat format to hierarchical format in VRML - (*)
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Visualisation of GPS source - (*)
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Integrated visualization of field lines - (*)
Electric, magnetic, maybe even gravitational.
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Full support for visualization of boolean shapes - (*)
Boolean operations on polyhedral representations of Geant4 solids for visualisations were improved in 9.3. But it is still not a general solution. It is a workaround based on finding a good way of shifting one solid relative to the other by a small amount. The most serious computational problems arise when faces coincide. We have had a simple shifting algorithm in place for many years; in 9.3 this algorithm became a little more sophisticated. In a test it fixed 96% of failures. There remains a stubborn 4%. (The effect of a failure is to prevent visualisation of the boolean solid, except with the ray tracer driver, which does not rely on polyhedrons.) We might be able to make the shifting workaround yet more sophisticated but, ideally, we really need a comprehensive solution, a daunting re-write and improvement of the basic facet-intersection algorithms.