Here are the changes between public beta 7b and final 3.00 release.
1) Fixed a problem in polygon lighting which no transformations are
used.
2) Added traps for negative square root, negative or zero log
and illegal mix of patterned and layered textures.
3) Removed +Q10, +Q11, Quality=10, and Quality=11 options. Too many
users
thought that cranking up the value would make their scene better.
Radiosity is now turned on with +QR or Radiosity=on and turned off
with -QR or Radiosity=off. Radiosity should be used with caution.
Only scenes designed to use it should attempt to use it. There are
many parameters that control radiosity that need to be carefully
adjusted.
4) Faster compression for PNG output.
5) Line numbers are now properly reported in error message after or
during a #while loop.
6) Fixed problem with // comments ending in CR with no LF
7) SPECIAL NOTICE!!! Fixed bug in camera's angle keyword. BEWARE!,
old images using "angle" will look different. The length
of the direction vector was not calculated correctly on perspective
camera. Other camera types or those not using "angle" are not
affected.
To convert old angle values, change any old angle A to this...
NewA=degrees(atan2(R*tan(radians(A/2)))*2) where R is the length of
the
camera's "right" vector which is usually 4/3. All sample scenes have
been updated already.
8) Fixed prism bug when the first height was larger than the second
height
9) X-Windows ONLY: Fairly major rewrite of video code to support dynamic
colormap allocation for those visuals that use colormaps. This means
that POV-Ray will never use a private colormap unless you
specifically
override the default visual. This also means that POV-Ray will not
have
the slow start-up when using colormapped visuals, and there won't be
any
color flashing problems when another color-intensive application is
already running. However, if another application is using all of the
colors in the default colormap, and there isn't a decent range of
colors
available (colors close to black, white, red, green, and blue), POVRay
will do a poor job of the preview.
10) Fixed bug with multiple halos using already declared halos
11) Fixed bug that occured when a CSG object had no texture
Here are the changes between public beta 7 and beta 7b.
1) Fixed a serious problem in declared image_map and bump_maps.
2) Fixed a serious problem with translated or rotated planes
which affected many scenes.
Here are the changes between public beta 6 and beta 7.
1) Various bug fixes and changes to Windows, Linux and other
platforms that are too numerous to list here.
2) Added warning when camera is inside any non-hollow object.
3) Fixed bug in prism that crashed pov3demo\atmos\atmos2.pov
and prism CSG bug.
4) Fixed fractal object bounding box problem.
5) Fixed matrix bug
6) Automically adjust the right and up vectors if the orthographic
camera is used (if orthographic is used after all other camera
parameters you'll get the same area as perspective camera; see docs)
7) Fixed several halo bugs. (appereance is now independent of any
transformations applied to the container object)
8) Fixed blob bug (individual component textures were not transformed
properly, i.e. they were not transformed with the object)
Also fixed black spot problems. And opacity problems.
9) Fixed bug in height field (holes that sometimes appeared; fixed gap
between adjactent height fields; surface acne that sometimes
appeared)
10) Fixed bug in random stream allocation
11) Fixed bug in fog code (fog acne and floating point exceptions)
12) Fixed substr bug.
Now will accept last character in string.
13) Fixed polygon problems where valid polygons were improperly closed.
14) Fixed bug in lighting code in distance based attenuation
15) Fix problem with TTF accent centering.
16) Fix problems with PNG file output added some more error checking.
17) Fixed image map memory leaks
18) Fixed plane shearing bug
19) Fixed cylindrical blob crack bug
20) Fixed lathe bug (too many intersections)
21) Fixed halo dust coloring bug (colors were ignored; see updated docs)
22) Fixed ground fog bug (the density formula was wrong)
23) Fixed bug in spotlight
24) Fixed negative log problem.
25) Prohibit slope_map when used in a pattern that can't use it.
26) Allow escaping the comment ';' character in INI file settings
Use \; for literal ;
27) Fix problem with Grayscale + Alpha PNG output
28) Force histogram grid size to divide into image size evenly
29) Various parsing speed-ups.
30) Fixed atmosphere and halo dust color bug (now a color can be
specified for the atmosphere and halo dust that is used to filter
light coming from light sources; see docs for more detail)
31) Probably other stuff too.
Here are the changes between public beta 5a and beta 6.
1) Several INI files were accidently forgotten in the earliest
archives. They have been included. [MS-Dos Only]
2) Numerous changes have been made in the scene files.
3) The DOS4GW.EXE DOS extender is no longer necessary. The new CauseWay
extender has been linked into the executible. See USER_WAT.DOC
for complete details. [MS-Dos Only]
4) Fixed a problem with scaled declared spotlights.
5) The docs say that in addition to using +/- style switches on the
command line, you can also do Option=value style options not only
in INI files but on the command line as well. However under some
circumstances an equals sign won't work on the command line.
We will allow Option#value as an alternative to using Option=value.
6) Fixed problem with animation file numbering when a path is specified.
7) Fixed problems with default extensions on output files. Also if
you specify just a path it will append a default name. For example
POVRAY +Imyfile +ft +O\povray3\outdir\
it will read myfile.pov and output \povray3\outdir\myfile.tga
because +O had a final \ meaning it was a directory.
8) Fixed problems with default colors in brick, checker, and hexagon
pigments. Fixed comma problems with these patterns when using
pigments, normals or textures rather than colors.
9) Memory leaks have been fixed in lbuffer.c when using radiosity
and in histogram.
10) Fixed "eccentricity" keyword to work in halo {dust... } statements.
11) Fixed a problem with transparent image_map or the "once" keyword
when used in layered textures.
12) Fixed a bug in #switch #case #range.
13) Fixed problems with mosaic preview and radiosity preview at
very high resolutions. Perhaps fixed other high-res video problems.
14) Many changes to halo. See documentation for details.
NOTE:Earlier 3.0 scenes may need to be adjusted.
15) Added "atmosphere" keyword to light source statement. By default
light
sources do interact with the atmosphere. If "atmosphere off" is used
with a light source it is ignored by the atmosphere.
16) Fixed problem with transformations to fog affecting the up
direction.
Fixed bug that occured when -f +c was specified.
Fixed bug with negative atmosphere distance.
17) Fixed bug with polygons/prisms and multiple holes. Now any number of
closed polygons/prisms can be used in a polygon/prism statement. You
get a hole where an even number of polygons/prisms overlaps (Note
the
new syntax described in the docs).
18) Fixed bug in camera vector calculations made when look_at was used.
Fixed bug in camera parsing if the location and look_at are equal.
19) Fixed bug in blob/lighting code
20) Fixed problem with redeclaring previously declared identifiers
21) Added new #ifndef directive
22) Added multi-component glyph support to ttf
23) Added random number math functions "seed" and "rand".
24) Added transformations to sky_sphere
25) Fixed bug with subsets of cyclic animations
26) Changed behaviour of hollow statement in CSG objects
27) Added %p output path string to shellouts.
See docs.