Series 4.txt

Changelog for Variance

4.4.2

	- Addressing some keyholer limitations seen originally for nested donuts.
	 - This was a fairly tricky problem to solve, with multiple parts.
	  - The larger 'cutter' was being included in the cut for inner parts, which obviously cut them away.
	   - Now, we check for 'lost' area with the keyholer; in case of a change of exposed area, we know geometry has been lost and check for full coverage of outers. Those cutters will be dropped for the re-scan, allowing for continued subtractive processing of the outers.
	  - As part of this rescan, some internal duplication of geometry is possible; this is now caught with a clean-up stage to avoid another cause of missed geometry.
	   - This fail case was seen with ILB using the ouput from the nested donut scenario.
	 - Added keyhole width property to geoCore layer, to make the keyholes larger than the internal default, avoiding loss in sliver/gap sequences.
 	- GeoCore copy/paste fix.
	- NET 6.0 migration.
	- Fixed missing progress bar.
	- DOE tile preview in layer now also crops 'drawn' to show just tile contents.
	- GTK fix for UI scrollable from Eto.Forms project.
	- Multithreading work.

4.4.1

	- ChordHandler bug fix to edge case.
	 - Rare cases would cause an early termination of the chord, truncating the evaluation. This has now been mitigated by a change in the internal edge construction.
	 - Tweaked the glancing value cutoff to better resolve coarse simulation results without dropping the chord entirely.
	- General code overhaul, reducing line count and improving readability.

4.4b2

	- DesignLibs fixes for resizing of box and text entities.
	- DesignLibs workaround for not-yet-understood fail to register layer/datatype.

4.4b1

	- Keyholer bug fix.
	- Bug fix for ray extension reading.

4.4a1

	- Various small fixes and upstream enhancements.
	- UI clean-up using groupboxes to make control behavior easier to comprehend at a glance.
	- Allow axis color to be changed.
	- Allow viewport background color to be changed.
	- External file generation control via filtering of result conditions.
	 - Allows for 'fail' cases only to be exported based on user criteria.
	> Experimental dark UI mode for Windows.

4.3.2

	- Make use of error message reporting through DesignLibs for invalid layout files which previously silently failed, or worse, crashed the tool.
	- Bug fix in GeoCore where wrong variable was used to access members of tmpCel.
	- Targetting .NET 5.0. Brings ~10% performance improvement in runtime.

4.3.1

	- Layout input enhancements.
	 - Support GZIP-compressed layout files as input to layers.
	 - Expand the list of recognized file extensions.

4.3

	- Multiple refinements to the raycaster, keyholer and boolean systems.
	 - Exposed ray extension in the ILB UI.
	- Viewport context menu now shows hotkeys.
	- Proximity bias revised to allow customizable falloff to be applied to side rays.
	 - Previously, all rays were given equal weight and this caused a reduction in the visibility effect for a number of cases.
	 - Now, there is a customizable falloff option (None, Linear, Gaussian, Cosine). The effect can also be amplified with a multiplier.
	 - Result is a weighted average.
	- DesignLibs enhancements for flattening of nested layout.
	- Context menu for layer list box. Allows various convenient actions.
	- Message boxes for confirmation when clearing a layer or resetting the tool.
	- Layer-related elements (e.g. correlation / reference controls) now update to show the layer name, to ease understanding.

4.2.8

	- Crash fix for toggling filled polygon display in the viewport.
	- Speculative fix for runtime bug that surfaced in debug sessions. Seems like a garbage collection misfire - ChaosSettings instance in EntropyEval is randomly(?) null even though caller has it defined and the instance is pre-calculated in sampler and definitely not null. Using a variable to hold a reference to see if this avoids the problem.
	- Unlock U subshape 2 horizontal offset.

4.2.7

	- Finally resolved a very minor UI irritation where the U-shape wasn't, on first using it, displaying the cutter correctly.

4.2.6

	- Viewport enhancements.
	- Bug fix to update DOE configuration with project load.
	- Drag-and-drop support for project loading.

4.2.5

	- Workaround for intel/Vulkan crashes in Veldrid.
	- Forms update to resolve Gtk issue.

4.2.4

	- Found a workaround to draw lines over polygons.
	 - Z-order wasn't doing the job, but re-ordering the draw calls works. Not ideal, but at least overlaying lines works.
	- Veldrid viewport updates to use new nugets from Eto.Veldrid upstream project.
	 - OpenGL is problematic under .NET Core on non-Windows systems due to library issues.
	 - Upstream OpenTK dropped its platform support; upstream Eto.Veldrid has responded.
	 - This approach now provides :
	  Windows : Vulkan, Direct3D 11
	  macOS : metal
	  Linux : Vulkan, OpenGL

4.2.3

	- Library updates
	- Bug fix to lens distortion.
	- Fix up some issues arising from relicensing of project.

4.2.2

	- Correlated seeds for LWR, LWR2.
	 - Required slight rework of UI.

4.2.1

	- Small refactoring to use common methods in some geometry transform/migration cases.
	- Aggressive multithreading seems to overwhelm some systems. Moving to preprocessor switches to find best balance:
	 - GEOLIBTHREADED : GeoLib
	 - GWTHREADED : GeoWrangler.
	 - VARIANCETHREADED : Variance
	 - SHAPELIBTHREADED : ShapeLibrary
	 - CHAOSTHREADED : Chaos
	 - ENTROPYTHREADED : Entropy
	 - SVGTHREADED : SVG output

4.2

	- Performance enhancements through extended use of multithreading.
	 - Runtime improvements range from 10 to 30%, depending on the situation.
	- Aligned Veldrid code with upstream.
	- Moved email handling to MailKit.
	- Moved to .NET Core 3.1 based on Eto updates.
	- Allow independent alignment of flipped shape in X and Y.

4.1.1

	- Added graphicsMode switch in launch args.
	 - d3d11 : D3D 11
	 - vulkan : Vulkan
	 - opengl : OpenGL
	 - metal : Metal

4.1

	- Viewport optimization.
	- Eto Veldrid updates.

4.1a2

	- GTK3 prototype port added.
	- Further performance work on the viewport.
	- Re-enabled obfuscation.
	- Fixed packaging issues lingering from changes.

4.1a1

	- Prototyping new viewport code (Veldrid-based).
	- Improved panning code.
	- Moving libraries to .NET standard 2.0.
	- Refactored some internals.
	 - Squashed a bug in the U-shape second subshape horizontal length clamping.

4.0.1

	- Add an option for the 'friendly' numeric output.
	- Fixed 'update' label jumping around.
	- Histograms (10 buckets) provided in summary output for each result.

4.0

	- Docs for ILB, showing overview of capabilities.

4.0b1

	- Beta shake-down.
	- Fix for rare crash on project load.
	- Revised the keyholer to iterate cuts, rather than use a single pass. This resolves multiple issues, at the cost of runtime.
	- Fixed an issue where internal tracking data for the viewport got out-of-sync with the geometry state.
	- Found a legacy re-order method in the core that can be served by GeoWrangler.
	- Fixed geometry artifacts arising from too-aggressive gap removal in the keyholer.
	- Fixed issue where keyhole edge extension may not cut through geometry, leading to geometry issues.
	- Fixed issue where the keyholer could fail (now union all cutters before running the Boolean).
	- Varous clean-ups and optimizations.
	- Refragment merged-overlap geometry.
	- Tweaked ClipperLib to experiment with preserving vertices whilst sorting out overlaps.

4.0a5

	- Moved to Eto.OpenTK for the etoViewport infrastructure.
	- Extensively reworked various parts of the geometry systems arising from keyhole/ILB research.
	 - Sliver/gap removal has been overhauled.
	 - Keyholing has been improved.
	 - Overlap processing (self-intersections) has been addressed.
	 - Boolean systems now clean up slivers/gaps.
	 - Extensive test bed used to review behavior.
	 - GeoWrangler can decompose arbitrary geometry now.
	- Background layers are now re-evaluated with updates to the foreground.
	 - Increases computation from previous approach, but more useful for ILB set-up.

4.0a4

	- Fixed contouring of negated holes.
	 - Root cause was fail of orthogonality check due to colinear points and inconsistent polygon termination based on upstream source.
	  - ShapeLibrary now ensures incoming geometry meets certain critera prior to review.
	   - Duplicate terminators are stripped; shape is terminated prior to colinear vertex strip. Next is orthogonality check, and then the terminator is removed to meet downstream expectations.
	 - GeoWrangler now owns the orthogonality checks and also now has methods to strip terminator and colinear points from geometry.
	 - Any orthogonal geometry can now be contoured!
	- Fix up UI irritations when loading a project file.
	- Geometry pipeline auto-decimates geometry if calculation strategy permits.
	 - Spacing/enclosure calculation is excluded from this system.
	- Patched ClipperLib to retain colinear vertices (if desired) during offsetting. This isn't enabled in the upstream code.
	- Further work on the sliver/gap removal code to ensure output geometry is correctly oriented and terminated.
	 - Added optimizations to avoid sliver/gap unless ILB is in use (A/B groups), avoiding runtime impact unless really needed.
	 - Verified sliver removal for simulations where keyhole geometry is inverted.

4.0a3

	- Apply sliver/gap removal to geometry inputs in calculation pipeline.
	 - Avoids impact from internal walls / artifacts; displayed input geometry will still have keyholes to avoid display issues.
	- Friendly value reporting in progress read-outs.
	- Multi-threaded CSV export implemented.
	 - Much faster compared to old approach.
	- Implemented write-during-run for external files.
	 - Significant memory saving, testing impact on runtime.
	  ! Runtime impact is severe : runs nearly at the same rate as single-threaded mode.
	  - Might be acceptable given that replay mode exists and that the contents of the viewport can be written to layout files now.
	- Restore tessellation optimization that was disabled in a3 for debug work.
	- Sampling engine implemented.
	 - Pre-samples the space (except in PA search mode).
	 - Currently for standard Monte Carlo, but may offer alternative sampling strategies in future.
	- Removed single-threaded operation from GUI.
	- Enabled export of viewport contents to GDS/Oasis, alongside the SVG feature.
	- Initial work on multi-target export from simulations.
	 - SVG remains available, but GDSII and Oasis are now available as targets.
	- Bug fix for layer name export in Oasis.

4.0a2

	- Layout loads now set the active cell according to the top cell definition.
	- Staging work for viewport export to layout files.
	 - Tracking element source for layer creation.
	- Viewport work.
	 - Decoupled the tessellated geometry from the boundaries.
	 - Optimizations through multithreading.

4.0a1

	- ILB pipeline refinements.
	- Keyholes are much more robustly generated.