Release Notes and System Requirements for OVT version 3.0

New Features

Now works on Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux, with identical functionality.
OVT is installed using an installer software. There is no need to separately install VTK or Java (except on Linux, where Java needs to be pre-installed). Root privileges should not be required on Mac OS X and Linux.
Ability to use online orbit data via NASA's Satellite Situation Center's (SSC) Web Services.
Ability to use online/offline solar wind and magnetospheric data using NASA Space Physics Data Facility's (SPDF) OMNI2 data.

Notes

Change of OVT data directory: Miscellaneous data (settings, cache, imported orbit files, IGRF model constants etc.) are installed to, written to (e.g. when importing satellite orbit files), and read from a directory .ovt/<OVT version number>/ and its subdirectories ("mdata", "conf", "docs" etc. ), located somewhere under the user directory. Previous versions of OVT may have used the application directory and subdirectories under it for the same purpose. OVT should/might still be able to read the corresponding files from the corresponding subdirectories under the application directory if the file(s) can not be found under ".ovt" (and its subdirectories) under the user directory. The user is adviced to be aware of this to avoid confusion on which files are actually being read by the OVT. This can be an issue if installing OVT into the directory of an old OVT installation. Check the Data directories in the User Guide.
Solving problems with downloading OMNI2 data: NASA SPDF has changed the location (the URL) of its OMNI2 data files since OVT 3.0 was published. Therefore OVT by default tries to download OMNI2 data from the wrong location. See the User Guide for solutions and workarounds concerning this problem.
Updating OVT with a newer version of IGRF: A new version of the International Geomagnetic Reference Field (IGRF) has been made available after OVT 3.0 was published. The new version can be downloaded in a compatible format (a single file). To manually install it, simply replace the old version of the file mdata/igrf.d under the OVT data directory with the new file using the same filename and restart OVT.
Warning: Beware that Windows may, depending on its settings, hide recognized file extensions (e.g. ".d" in "igrf.d"). This can lead to the user setting the wrong filename without realizing it and subsequently to OVT not finding the updated file.
Updating OVT to support both GEI (J2000.0) and GEI (epoch-of-date): There is an available non-installer update to OVT that replaces the GEI coordinate system with support for two different variants of the GEI coordinate system and that implicitly increases the accuracy of some coordinate transformations. See User Guide for instructions on how to do this.
UNSOLVED PROBLEM: Can not run OVT on macOS Ventura (version 13), and presumably not on any later macOS version: The only known mitigation is using a virtual machine. See User Guide for information.
UNSOLVED PROBLEM: Can not run OVT on some Windows 11 installations. OVT does seem to work on a freshly installed Windows 11 in a virtual machine.

System Requirements

Linux:

Requires 64-bit Linux with OpenGL support available and enabled. Requires a pre-installed version of Java Standard Edition 8. Successfully tested on openSUSE 13.1 and Ubuntu 14.04.

Mac

Successfully tested on Mac OS X 10.09+.

Windows:

Admin rights (via User Account Control) should be needed. Successfully tested on Windows 7 (64-bit), Windows 8.1 (64-bit). Also appears to run on Windows 10 and some installations of Windows 11 (reason for Windows 11 failures is unknown).