geomview-memory fountain

[Paul Mossip <mossip at vizlab.rutgers.edu>]

Greetings,
   We are using geomview to view a OFF file type and then single frame render
onto video tape.

#1   I have noticed that if you sent multiple OFF files (through the named
pipe (-M) system) that the memory taken up by each geom is never released.
Our OFF files are approx 400K and I will send up to 213 of them through the
pipe (with geomstuff)  If I watch geomview's memory usage in top I can see
that it expands about 400K each time I stuff a new geom.  It clearly looks
like geomview never free's the old geom's memory.  After about 70-100 geom's
and geomview now has taken around 30M-40M it will dump core.  
   In an attempt to see if the problem was in just the named pipe(ie named
pipe structurally couldn't free an old geom) I implemented a second system in 
the command language.

a long file like this.

( progn(< frame00xx.cmd))     #frame is a off geom named "new-geom"
( merge-ap "new-geom" appearance { -shading smooth} )
( update-draw "Camera")	      #force update of screen
( ! " animate -r")            # record one frame on our system
( delete "new-geom")
...
and so on.

even with the explicit (delete "new-geom") geomview took about 400K per frame 
and would grow huge.  I would like to know if you think that you are freeing
memory (or if it is impossible), or the code area that deals with this so that
I can take a look at it.

bug#2
  when running geomview under twm and 4Dwm geomview does not always properly
get the focus of mouse input.  using the mwm I was able to get the proper
behaviour most of the time (but mwm's click in window to type drives me nuts,
as well as you cannot tell the window *exactly* where to go with -wpos)

thing#3 
  If you change the lighting(from the default) it is not saved when you save
the state (mainly since lights are not defined in your command language) Is
there a hack to be able to load different lights or is this on your todo?

Overall we are very impressed with the performance of the geomview package (we
used the minnieview package before) and we hope to be able to use this to
render most images instead of having to raytrace them with art.

-Paul Mossip
Research Assistant: Rutgers University (CAIP Center)
Internet: mossip at psi.rutgers.edu
UUCP:     {..backbone..}!rutgers!psi!mossip