11.1 Properties of locus lines and surfaces

By right-clicking on a locus and then selecting ’Settings’ you can bring up the settings-dialogue.

Basically, three properties can be controlled:

• how many supporting points you have
• the starting point for the parameters
• the distance of the supporting points

Often you will have to experiment a bit to get good values. With a modern computer (1.5 GHz cpu and 64 MB of video-ram) you can choose a value of 100 supporting points. Note that in this case Archimedes computes 100x100 = 10 000 points for the surface. If you use a value of 200, Archimedes has to compute 40 000 points, so be careful with that value.

In detail there are some more settings that can be made:

The function is incontinuous

If you check this, a simple test for jumps is made.

Automatically adjust x/y to circles/segments/sliders:

If one of the points driving the locus is on a circle or segment or if the traced object is a circle or segment, you might want to use the whole object. If so, check this option. For lines or objects on lines, this option is initially disabled. If a locus is driven by a slider, this option will cause the locus to adjust to the domain of the slider.