Table of Contents

• Software in This Repository
  • COVISE and OpenCOVER
  • Other Software
• License
• Support & Mailing Lists
• Getting Binaries and Automated Installation
  • macOS
  • Windows
• Getting the Source Code
  • UNIX and Command Line
  • Working with Git
    • UNIX
• Building COVISE and OpenCOVER
  • Build Requirements
  • Optional Dependencies
  • Tracking Dependencies
  • Directory for Third Party Dependencies
  • Building on UNIX
    • Building only OpenCOVER
    • Building only Oddlot
  • Building on Windows
    • Building with VS Code
  • Changing CMake Settings
• Building Documentation
• Invoking COVISE
  • UNIX
  • Windows
• Source Code Organization

Software in This Repository

COVISE and OpenCOVER

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 macOS.

Other Software

Also included in this repository are OddLOT, an OpenDRIVE editor, as well as vrmlExp, a VRML97 and X3D exporter for Autodesk 3ds Max.

License

If not stated otherwise, the source code in this repository is licensed under the LGPL v2.1. See lgpl-2.1.txt for details.

Support & Mailing Lists

As a user of COVISE, you might get answers to your questions on the covise-users mailing list. Please direct any questions related to installing/building/using COVISE there.

You can receive notifications of changes to COVISE on the covise-commits list.

Getting Binaries and Automated Installation

If you need OddLOT only, please have a look at https://github.com/hbanzhaf/docker_covise.

macOS

There is a Homebrew formula for COVISE. If you have it on your system, then you can simply

  brew install hlrs-vis/tap/covise

This will install COVISE, OpenCOVER, and OddLOT with all their dependencies.

Windows

Windows binaries, which include COVISE, OpenCOVER and OddLOT, can be found on the COVISE download page. A separate installer for the VRML exporter vrmlExp is also available on the same webpage.

Getting the Source Code

UNIX and Command Line

Getting COVISE is as easy as

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

Update your existing copy to the current version by

  git pull -r
  git submodule sync --recursive
  git submodule update --init --recursive # update submodules to latest required version

Working with Git

UNIX

  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

Building COVISE and OpenCOVER

Build Requirements

The script scripts/install-deps.sh will help you to install the dependencies provided by your Linux distribution (Debian/Ubuntu and RHEL/CentOS).

• C++ compiler: C++11

  On Windows, we currently use Visual Studio 2022 (VC17). GCC 5.3 and newer should work.

• CMake: 3.1 or newer is required, but currently we suggest CMake 3.7 or newer

• XercesC:

• Qt: Qt 5 or 6 is required by the graphical user interface. Not everything, most importantly OddLOT, works with Qt 6 yet.

  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, 3.4 or newer highly recommended for the VR and desktop renderer OpenCOVER

Optional Dependencies

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

dependencies on Redhat8: dnf -y install xerces-c dnf -y install xerces-c-devel

dnf -y install glibc-static

dnf -y install libXi-devel dnf -y install glibc-utils

dnf -y install glut dnf -y install glut-devel dnf -y install boost dnf -y install boost-devel

dnf -y install cmake
dnf -y install cmake3

dnf -y install qt5-qttools-devel dnf -y install qt5-qtscript-devel dnf -y install qt5-qtsvg-devel dnf -y install qt5-qttools-static dnf -y install glew-devel dnf -y install libtiff-devel dnf -y install qt5-qtquickcontrols dnf -y install qt5-qtdeclarative-devel dnf -y install qt5-qtlocation qt5-qtlocation-devel

dnf -y install boost-chrono dnf -y install boost-date-time dnf -y install boost-filesystem dnf -y install boost-iostreams dnf -y install boost-locale dnf -y install boost-program-options dnf -y install boost-regex dnf -y install boost-serialization dnf -y install boost-system dnf -y install boost-thread dnf --enablerepo=PowerTools install qt5-qttools-static dnf --enablerepo=PowerTools install libGLEW dnf --enablerepo=PowerTools install glew-devel

dnf install http://repo.okay.com.mx/centos/8/x86_64/release/okay-release-1-1.noarch.rpm dnf install gcc-gfortran dnf --enablerepo=PowerTools install libstdc++-static dnf --enablerepo=PowerTools install boost-static dnf install python3-pyqt5-sip dnf install fuse-devel

Tracking Dependencies

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

Directory for Third Party Dependencies

COVISE is set up to automatically search for third party libraries in subdirectories of a directory pointed to by the environment variable EXTERNLIBS. You should install e.g. OpenSceneGraph into $EXTERNLIBS/openscenegraph, and it will be discovered during the build process.

Building on UNIX

  cd covise
  source .covise.sh #set environment variables
  make #invoke cmake followed by make

This command sequence sets environment variables necessary while building COVISE, invokes cmake for the COVISE project, and builds COVISE with OpenCOVER.

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.

Building only OpenCOVER

  cd covise
  source .covise.sh #set environment variables
  COVISE_CMAKE_OPTIONS=-DCOVISE_BUILD_ONLY_COVER=ON make #invoke cmake with provided options followed by make

Building only OddLOT

  cd covise
  source .covise.sh #set environment variables
  COVISE_CMAKE_OPTIONS=-DCOVISE_BUILD_ONLY_ODDLOT=ON make #invoke cmake with provided options followed by make

Building on Windows

Also on Windows, you should work from a command prompt:

   REM set COVISEDIR to location of your COVISE checkout
   set COVISEDIR=c:/src/covise
   REM set EXTERNLIBS to correct location of all your dependancies
   set EXTERNLIBSROOT=c:\src\externlibs
   cd %COVISEDIR%
   REM call winenv.bat with appropriate archsuffix for debug or release (tamarau for Visual Studio 2012 and zebu for 2015)
   call %COVISEDIR%\winenv.bat zebuopt
   mkdir build.covise
   cd build.covise
   cmake-gui ..
   REM open Visual Studio - either directly or with the button from CMake GUI
   devenv

To create a permanent link to a covise command prompt edit and execute Scripts/installCoviseCommandPrompt.bat

Building with VS Code

This is an experimental alternative to Visual Studio. You need VS Code with the C/C++ Extension Pack and the CMake Tools expansions installed. You also need the MSVC compiler and one of the supported generators (Ninja, Visual Studio). An additional dependency is https://github.com/nlohmann/json which should be installed like COVISE's other dependencies in the EXTERNLIBS directory. To configure and build COVISE:

open the COVISE directory with VS Code
use the command palette (ctrl + shift + p) -> Tasks: Run Task -> Configure COVISE
fill in requested information
select a compiler via the CMake extension (button in the bottom bar or via the command pallete -> CMake: Select a Kit)
run CMake with a build configuration (button in the bottom bar or via the command pallete -> CMake: Configure)
build (button in the bottom bar or via the command pallete -> CMake: Build)

After this setup VS Code's default integrated terminal is configured to load the environment required to work with COVISE.
Additionally debug configurations to launch COVISE and OpenCOVIER or to attach to a process are provided under VS Code's debug section. InteliSense should be enabled if you are using a generator that can export compile commands (Ninja).

Changing CMake Settings

You can influence which parts of COVISE are built by editing CMake settings in ${COVISEDIR}/${ARCHSUFFIX}/build.covise/CMakeCache.txt. This might help you work around build problems.

cd ${COVISEDIR}/${ARCHSUFFIX}/build.covise
ccmake ../..

• COVISE_BUILD_ONLY_COVER: build only the OpenCOVER VR/desktop renderer without the COVISE visualization pipeline
• COVISE_BUILD_ONLY_ODDLOT: build only the road editor OddLOT
• COVISE_BUILD_DRIVINGSIM: enable the driving simulator components of OpenCOVER
• COVISE_USE_VIRVO: disable support for direct volume rendering
• COVISE_USE_CUDA: disable use of CUDA
• COVISE_CPU_ARCH: set optimization for the CPU in your computer

After changing any of these settings, you have to restart the build process.

You can also provide initial CMake options by adding them to the environment COVISE_CMAKE_OPTIONS before calling make.

Building Documentation

COVISE retrieves documentation from the web server at HLRS. But you also can build the documentation locally. You need the following tools:

• pdflatex
• latex2html
• doxygen
• graphviz
• epstopdf

Then you can:

cd ${COVISEDIR}/doc
make

Invoking COVISE

UNIX

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

  covise

Windows

COVISE can be used without installation, provided you take the same steps as for building:

   REM set COVISEDIR to location of your COVISE checkout
   set COVISEDIR=c:/src/covise
   REM set EXTERNLIBS to correct location of all your dependancies
   set EXTERNLIBSROOT=c:\src\externlibs
   cd %COVISEDIR%
   REM call winenv.bat with appropriate archsuffix for debug or release (tamarau for Visual Studio 2012 and zebu for 2015 Update 3, 2017 or 2019)
   call %COVISEDIR%\winenv.bat zebuopt
   covise
   opencover

Source Code Organization

• 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

  • src/oddlot: OpenDRIVE road editor OddLOT