BOVE is a recursive acronym meaning BOVE Ordered Vertices Engine. I could have chosen any starting letter for the acronym, but there was a reason for chosing the B. The reason is that the friend of mine who gave me the project idea is called Francis Bove, and so in honour of his idea I've decided to settle for the name BOVE.
Easily, because I went to the trouble of creating an install shield to do the job for you. Just download the zip file from the download page and extract it to some temporary folder. Then just double click on setup.exe and follow the instructions. Need I remind you NT/2000 people to log on as administrator?
For the program to work properly you should have a graphics card capable of supporting at least 16-bit colours and you should be running Windows 95, 98, NT, 2000 or XP.
Q. When I uninstall BOVE I am asked whether I want to remove "ColorPick.ocx". What should I do?
The ColorPick control was written by me and is installed with the BOVE files. It's the triangular control that is used in the color dialog in BOVE. Unless you have another program written by me that uses this control (not even I have one yet!) then the chances that someone's used my control for a program installed on your machine is very slim and you might as well delete it.
If you mistakingly keep the file and you really wanted to get rid of it, then you can either remove the registry entries by hand using regedit.exe (groan!) or simply reinstall BOVE in the same directory again and remove it again (the Microsoft way!)
Note: If you want to reduce BOVE to the bare basics then you can just copy Bove.exe and uninstall everything else. BOVE will still work without crashing except that you won't be able to choose a color (or read the lovely help pages!)
Q. What kind of people might use BOVE?
It was Francis Bove's artist friend who wanted to build a BOVE object with each side representing a member of parliament. Apparently this sculpure of ceramic was planned to hang in the foyer of the Modern Tate Gallery, although I could imagine it taking centre-stage at any manufactoring engineering exibition if the thing ever got built!
Apart from the original intention of the program, there are some other possible uses for it. The most obvious one is for the modeller who wants a sphere of exactly so many vertices or polygons, for memory or performance considerations. A modeller might also like to use the BOVE objects or parts of them as basic elements in modelling and CAD A Computer Aided Design program is the general name given for modelling software packages. programs. One good reason for this is that the vertices are evenly spread out and thus there is constant resolution in the curvature of BOVE objects. In other words, BOVE objects result in the best use of vertices in acheiving the highest curvature resolution.
Away from the modelling scene, BOVE may be of use in demonstrating electrostatic Many elementary physical particles have an electrostatic charge like the electron or proton. If all particles in a system have the same sign they will repel each other. repulsion, although I can imagine there are many more suitable programs for the job.
The tool may however be very interesting for geometricians, mathematicians, solid state physicists and even molecular chemists due to the symmetry of the shapes. Anybody who finds BOVE interesting for their line of research, please write me an email and I'll put you on my site.
Q. Are any future versions of BOVE planned?
No, not yet, although I have some ideas for how I could use the techniques in BOVE to help create or manipulate geometry. One idea is to confine the charged particles to more complicated objects than spheres that would be created in another modelling package and imported. Then the user selects the number of faces she would like to represent the object. This way, a series of representations of the imported object would allow for different LODs Level Of Detail. In areas of graphics where high performance is critical (i.e. in games), there may be many objects to be rendered in a particular view. Objects furthur away need not be rendered as accurately as those closer, so it is sometimes worth creating a set of objects at different resolutions, or different LODs, to save wasting time drawing detail when it isn't needed. which are useful in 3D simulations and games.
Also, before I embark on any bigger application of BOVE's workings I'd like to see what you think of it. Any ideas would be welcomed as to how BOVE can be made more functional or just better. Get those ideas posted to me at joe@joekemp.net.