ParaView 3.6 Deliverables

Name	Description	Owner
ParaView/Titan Chart Merger	If not already complete.
Tables	Make vtkTables a supported pipeline object type. It should have its own icon in the pipeline browser. The default view should probably be spreadsheet. Charting components (XY plot, histogram, stacked chart, etc.) should support tables as an input (other input types like rectilinear grid may be unnecessary). Plotting filters (plot over time, plot over time, histogram) should output tables. csv readers/writers should work principally (perhaps exclusively) with tables. Support reading other delimited text files. Simple conversion from tables to other data (such as collection of points).
Multicore	Multi-core desktops are becoming commonplace. It is now reasonable for a user to invest in an 8 core desktop with several GB of memory in lieu of a visualization cluster. Unfortunately, ParaView has no good way of taking advantage of the multiple cores.
D4	Time to get rolling on the next generation distributed data decomposition filter. D4 Design
More multiblock	Ability to map a partial array and have all blocks not having the array a solid color.
Simplified state/scripting	Right now getting any scripting in ParaView has a high learning curve. State files are unreadable and almost completely uneditable. To do any scripting at all, you need to learn a significant chunk of Python bindings. To make this easier, ParaView should output a much more friendly way of scripting things. Either the state written out should be much simpler (show only the things that pertain to the current view) or be able to write out a very simplified Python script to get back to the state, or both.
Foreground color	Add ability to specify a foreground color for a view (in addition to the background color). The foreground color is the default color for text, lines, and that sort of thing in 2D and 3D widgets.
Particle Support	Leverage the work from CSCS. Provide a particle representation that renders points more intelligently Spheres with size vs. squares of pixel width Optional sizing based on a scalar Appropriate alpha blending (at least when particles are small) Filters for meshless data? (Need to get customer requirements.) Sampling point cloud? Surface extraction?
Movie view	Add movie file readers that behave like an image reader the supports time. When viewed in a 2D image view with the time controls, ParaView becomes a simple movie viewer.
Temporal cleanup	Show temporal bounds of all datasets in statistics view (or elsewhere) Show continuous data set temporal bounds in info page Plot/Probe over time, results should very in Sequence, Snap, and Real Time modes
Plots along curves	Now you can plot along a line segment in space (defined by two endpoints). Users want to plot along other types of curves in space. Intersection of surface with plane. Path between two points on a plane.
Custom filter cleanup	Replace the "wizard" with a single dialog which can be used to edit all of the features at once. Reuse this dialog to implement an edit custom filter feature. Implement links in custom filters.
Shaders	Implementation in 2.6 is "experimental" and does not seem to be of any practical use to anyone. Utkarsh is working on new GPU pipeline stuff. Next generation should take advantage of that.
vtkIdType size	Currently the user must select the size of vtkIdType (32 vs 64) at compile time. This is not an ideal way to select the id size. Usually, you want 32 bit ids (for the smaller size), but when dealing with large MPI jobs, there is a chance you might need to represent global ids with 64 bits. We should look into possible ways to support selecting an Id size at run time without breaking backwards compatibility.
VisIt AVT Integration	We would like to pull VisIt components into ParaView (such as readers and filters). To this end, we would like to have an interface that would convert AVT to the VTK executives (or vice versa) so that we could leverage these without changing any code.
Statistics	Integrate Phillipe Pebay's statistics filtering and then some.
Unordered Color maps	Some data values do not have any logical order associated with them. For example, block ids and process ids have identifiers that distinguish them, but there is no real meaning between the relationship of each pair. Thus, it makes little sense to use our standard linear color maps. A much better approach would be to map individual colors to values and show these colors as blocks in the color bar. VisIt demonstrates this quite nicely (although the colors they use aren't perfect).
Better labeling	The Infovis group has made a labeler that works well in 3D. We should integrate that into ParaView.
Multithreaded UI	Right now, the UI pretty much works under one thread. When a pipeline update occurs, pretty much everything comes to a halt while the update happens. Likewise, a long render could cause everything to wait. We would like the ability to run pipeline updates and rendering on different threads so that the UI remains responsive.