Archimedes Geo3D needs hardware accelerated 3d
graphics. In case your graphics adapter doesnīt support this, rotating the scene and
dragging will be slow and ’bumpy’. This will be the case in particular under linux when
mesa-software-rendering is used.
Why does the command-line not contain all constructions?
In the first version
Archimedes was for synthetic geometry only. For typical problems (like in textbooks
used at school) an input line was introduced to version 1.2. The most important
commands are available, and more are to come in the future.
Why isnīt there a built-in CAS?
There are several reasons for this. One of them is
speed. To display a locus-surface, thousands of object-positions must be ’played
through’. Symbolic calcuations are too slow for that. Eventually there will be interfaces
to established CAS. Even now the syntax for expressions is compatible to CAS like
Maxima or MuPAD. To get the partial derivatives of a heightfield you can simply copy
the expression (right-click into the textbox, as ctrl-c will result into copying the current
image to the clipboard) and paste it in Maxima. Now add ’diff(’ before and ’,x)’ after
the expression and get the first partial derivative. This can be pasted into Archimedes
afterwards.