news.
2003.06.03. Version 0.7.1 has just been released. This version is mostly just faster: adaptive time stepping has been implemented, the core algorithm has been optimised, and some improvements due to Ascher and Boxerman have been added. This version is two to three times faster than 0.7.0.
2003.04.25. The website has been revised. I'll be filling in more screenshots and movies as I finish rendering them over the next week or two.
2003.04.23. Version 0.7.0 has been released. This version has no Boost/uBLAS dependencies, fixes a major simulator bug, and is also scale invariant (i.e., refining a mesh produces essentially the same results, with no changes to the simulator parameters).
I've run this latest version at a record size of 200x200, which required about an hour to simulate one second worth of animation on a 3GHz machine. Fortunately, speed is much more reasonable for smaller mesh sizes. And this is definitely the fastest version yet: 20 times faster than 0.6.0 for a 100x100 animation.
2003.04.11. I've returned to development, and fixed a major bug with damping forces in the simulator. Stability should be greatly improved. I've also replaced Boost+uBLAS with my own custom sparse matrix class, just to avoid having to deal with some of uBLAS' recent changes and incompatibilities. I'm returning to more active development on the project now, and I'll hopefully iron out the remaining bugs in the next few weeks.
2002.09.20. I've finished implementing the modified conjugate gradient algorithm now, and I've also implemented sparse matrices and done some basic optimisation. The speed boost is huge - a 10x10 animation, which took three hours using the old algorithm, now runs in realtime. I've tried running the program with sizes up to 100x100. For sizes below 40x40, the speed is quite reasonable, but larger sizes are still too slow to be practical. It has now been released as version 0.6.0 on SourceForge.
2002.08.21. I've done a little recent development. I've shifted from the Matrix Template Library to Boost's uBLAS library, with the result that I've been able to port to Visual C++ 6.0. The new release (0.5.1) is out, and is ready for download from SourceForge.