VTK 5.4 Release Planning

Planned Schedule

• Preparation email: January 19, 2008
  • On the developers' mailing list
• Create VTK-5-4 branch: beginning of February, 2009
• Release VTK 5.4.0: as soon after branching as practical according to the dashboards

What's New in VTK 5.4?

New features in VTK since the 5.2 release include:

• Geovis kit
• Tree ring / icicle tree views
• Updated Utilities: freetype (now at 2.3.7)
• More than XX new C++ classes.
• More than YY new C++ tests running on most dashboards

API Changes

• API to vtkTreeMapView, vtkTreeMapLayout, and vtkTreeMapLayoutStrategy (new in VTK 5.2) have changed slightly as they have been integrated into a larger concept of "area views" (where elements are mapped to 2D areas on the screen). See Tree Area Views for a short description of the new class hierarchy.
  • Some methods previously containing the term "Vertex" now contain the term "Area".
  • For consistency with other algorithms, methods that specify the input or output arrays of an algorithm have been changed from "Set...Field" to "Set...ArrayName".
  • The method SetBorderPercentage in vtkTreeMapView has been replaced with the more general SetShrinkPercentage in the new superclass vtkTreeAreaView.
• vtkSelection is no longer a self-referential data structure that is capable of arbitrary hierarchies. It instead contains a list of vtkSelectionNode objects, which contain the actual selected elements and metadata about each selection. See Flat vtkSelection for the differences.

OpenGL requirements

Same as VTK 5.2: See this section in the Frequently asked questions (FAQ)