Wave Simulation
Version 1.0
Copyright (C) 2002 David C. Banks
banks@csit.fsu.edu

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Short Summary

Type "make" and then run "waveSimulator".

Has been tested under 
   Operating System    Processor
   ------------------  --------------------
   Irix 6.5            MIPS R1200
   Linux Redhat 7.3    Intel Pentium 4

Application requirements
   Open Inventor 2.1   http://oss.sgi.com/projects/inventor/
   OpenGL              http://oss.sgi.com/projects/ogl-sample/
   GLX                 http://www.sgi.com/software/opensource/glx/
   X11R6               http://www.x.org/
   Motif               http://www.opengroup.org/desktop/motif.html
                       http://www.x.org/resources.htm

Documentation requirements
   GNU make            http://www.gnu.org/software/make/make.html
   ImageMagick convert http://www.imagemagick.org/
   Adobe Acroread      http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/
    (PDF spec)         http://partners.adobe.com/asn/developer/acrosdk/docs/filefmtspecs/PDFReference.pdf


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Purpose of the software

This software simulates waves generated by an oscillator.
Properties of the oscillator, the medium, and the grid can be 
controlled by clicking and dragging on 3D widgets in the scene. 

The software was developed to support a multi-disciplinary
graduate course titled Interactive Computational Simulation,
taught within the School of Computational Science and 
Information Technology (CSIT) at Florida State University,
Fall 2002.

When real-time input governs a simulation as it is running, the 
result is sometimes called "computational steering" and the system 
is sometimes called a "problem solving environment". The idea is 
that a user can experiment with the simulation in order to gain
insight into a physical problem.


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Technical details of the software

The code is written in C++. It was originally developed for SGI 
(formerly Silicon Graphics, Inc.) computers running Irix (a 
version of the Unix operating system) with the X Windowing 
system. It was modified to run under the Linux operating system.

The code that is concerned with 3D graphics uses Open Inventor,
a graphics library developed by SGI and released as open source 
software. Open Inventor uses Open GL, a graphics standard 
developed largely by SGI, which later sold the patent rights to 
Microsoft.

The code concerned with the window's menu bar uses the X toolkit 
"xt" and the Motif window manager toolkit "xm". A GNU version of 
Motif, called Lesstif, is available for systems running Linux.


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Using the software

As the simulation proceeds, its state depends on parameters 
such as

  oscillator   : position, velocity, amplitude, frequency, phase
  fluid medium : waveSpeed, damping
  grid         : dimensions

These parameters can be specified

  * from the command line
  * from a parameter file
  * through user interaction with 3D controls (draggers)
    in the scene


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Documentation

The code is self-documenting, in the sense that it can be 
formatted to include images that illustrate its various sections. 
The tool that formats the code is GNU's "enscript", which 
produces output in the Adobe "postscript" language suitable 
for postscript printers.  The postscript document can be 
converted to pdf (portable document format) for viewing by 
Adobe's free "acroread" viewer.

To generate the documentation, type 

  make doc

at the command line. The resulting pdf files will be created 
in the doc/ subdirectory.

The images are generated by the c-shell script

  figures.csh