COVISE, the collaborative visualization and simulation environment, is a modular distributed visualization system. As its focus is on visualization of scientific data in virtual environments, it comprises the VR renderer OpenCOVER. COVISE development is headed by HLRS. It is portable to Windows and UNIX. We do regular builds on x86_64 Windows, Linux and Mac OS X.

If not stated otherwise, COVISE and OpenCOVER source code is licensed under the LGPL v2.1. See lgpl-2.1.txt for details.

Getting COVISE is as easy as

  git clone https://github.com/hlrs-vis/covise.git --recursive

• C++ compiler: C++03 or C++11

  On Windows, only Visual Studio 2012 is tested.

• CMake: 2.8.10 or newer should work

• XercesC:

• Qt: Either Qt 4 or 5 is required by the graphical user interface.

  For Qt5, you need the following modules:

  • Qt5Core
  • Qt5Network
  • Qt5Xml
  • Qt5Widgets
  • Qt5OpenGL
  • Qt5WebKit
  • Qt5WebKitWidgets
  • Qt5Gui
  • Qt5Svg
  • Qt5PrintSupport
  • Qt5UiTools
  • Qt5Script
  • Qt5ScriptTools

  On Ubuntu 14.04, you should be able to install the required packages with this command: sudo apt-get install qttools5-dev qtscript5-dev libqt5scripttools5 libqt5svg5-dev libqt5opengl5-dev libqt5webkit5-dev

• Boost: 1.52 and newer should work, following boost libraries are required:

  • chrono
  • date-time
  • filesystem
  • iostreams
  • locale
  • program-options
  • regex
  • serialization
  • system
  • thread When any of these are missing, you will only get a generic message, that "Boost" is missing. Thus beware! Ubuntu 14.04: sudo apt-get install libboost-all-dev

• Python: Python 3 is required for the GUI vr-prepare and for the scripting interface

• GLEW: Used for OpenGL extension handling in Virvo (direct volume rendering) and OpenCOVER

• OpenSceneGraph: 3.2 or newer is required

• JPEG Turbo
• VTK Version 6 is required.
• Flex and Bison Lexer/Parser generators, required to build VRML plugin.

CMake will show lists of met and unmet optional and required dependencies. You should check those and install additional prerequisites as needed.

  cd covise
  git pull -r #-r requests a rebase of your changes to avoid trivial branching
  git submodule update --init --recursive # update submodules to latest required version

  cd covise
  git submodule update --init --recursive # update submodules to latest required version
  source .covise.sh #set environment variables
  make #invoke cmake followed by make

COVISE and OpenCOVER are built by two separate CMake projects. This command sequence sets environment variables necessary while building COVISE, invokes cmake for the COVISE project, builds COVISE, and then continues with invoking cmake for the OpenCOVER project followed by make.

After an initial build, it is possible to invoke make from within subdirectories of covise/src.

No installation is required: you can use COVISE directly from the build tree.

   cd covise
   common.bat
   mkdir build.covise
   cd build.covise
   cmake-gui ..
   devenv
   cd %COVISEDIR%
   mkdir build.cover
   cd build.cover
   cmake-gui ../src/OpenCOVER
   devenv

Add .../covise/bin to your PATH.

  covise

• cmake: cmake files

• doc: documentation and tools for creating documentation

• config: configuration examples

• scripts: support scripts for building COVISE

• share: architecture independent files: textures, shaders, example data, ...

• src: source code

  • src/3rdparty: 3rd party source code

  • src/tools: various programs related to building or using COVISE

  • src/kernel: COVISE core libraries

  • src/sys: COVISE core executables

  • src/module: COVISE visualization modules (algorithms)

  • src/OpenCOVER: VR renderer with its plug-ins

As a user of COVISE, you might get answers to your questions on the covise-users mailing list. You can receive notifications of changes to COVISE on the covise-commits list.