What:	"virtual" circling around through the clouds

Hot points:
	- simple virtual reality "thing", of a flight-simulator kind
	- with the complete source and lots of comments/explanations
  - can take any height map and flight/pan around it
  - NO QuickDraw3D, all rendering/graphics is done by the code itself
	- includes the source for a small class library to handle full-color
	   Mac windows/user items /offscreen GrafWorlds
  - C++ classes for Dialogs and dialog (user) items; consistent OO
     design with late binding
  - on-the-fly "patching" of CDEF without even touching the trap table, or
	   any of the system code
  - animation NOT through null-events

Keywords: voxel 3D rendering, visualization, animation, elevation map, panning

Contents:
	Readme			 - this file
	New Venus	- application itself (PowerMac)
	Venus.mu  	- project to build it
	Venus.mu.rsrc - 'clut', pltt, dialog and control resources
	main.cc	     - Where the main dialog class is declared and implemented
	view_3d.cc - render a clouds map in 3D and make a view from the
	                     cockpit
  view_2d.cc - make a 'view-from-above' and do circling around
  ValueControl.* - C++ class for a slider displaying its
                       current setting
	window.h						 \ 
	SimpleWindow.cc  \  my own very simple "MacApp": a classlib for
  Dialog.*                 / handling color Mac windows and offscreen GrafWorlds
  EventHandlers.*   /
	The source code contains many comments to show what
	a particular piece of code does, as well as some tricks involved

Language: CodeWarrior C++ 7.1
System: System 7.x; binaries are for a PowerMac.

Note: Some ancillary code is provided in a binary form (as compiled libraries)
      for compactness. The corresponding source code can be grabbed from
	    the Info-Mac (/info-mac/dev/lib/gray-image-21-cpp.hqx) or
      ftp://replicant.csci.unt.edu/~oleg/ftp/grayimage-21.cpt.hqx
      See http://mozart.compsci.com/~oleg/ftp/
      for  more details.

Comments-to: Oleg Kiselyov, oleg@ponder.csci.unt.edu, oleg@unt.edu
Many-Thanks-To: Tim Clarke, tjc1005@hermes.cam.ac.uk (for inspiration)

Explanation:

	Just fire it up, click on "Go", sit back and enjoy. You may want to adjust
elevation, view position, focus, etc. gauges. Hope you'll get some
feeling that you're hovering over or flying through the clouds. If you
quit the program and start it over again, you'll get different clouds
(which might be much better and more interesting to fly around).

	Right window: a view from above, on the clouds and your plane. Left
window: a view from the cockpit. The picture changes as you circle around
or alter the view parameters: focus, elevation, etc.

	The thing flies faster on 24-bit monitors (with Direct color), where
CopyBits() doesn't need to do color matching.

  Sorry about ugly controls: I can't draw at all. Otherwise, I would've
drawn my own sliders, rather than ripping and tinkering with system's CDEFs.

	Source file view_3d.cc  in the present submission contains the
fullest description (I could come up with) of the 3D rendering
technique: with background, equations, pseudocode and the actual code
(and tricks with the fixed-point arithmetics: hey, no floating-point
numbers are in here).

	If you need further information or details, please mail me. If you want to see more
functionality added, mail me too.