Upgrade: To the new niivue mono repo

[pwighton]

NiiVue has undergone breaking changes in anticipation of it's 1.0 release. Upgrade FreeBrowse to use the new niivue.

https://github.com/niivue/mono

[pwighton]

Working branch here

[pwighton]

Issues encountered during migration:

• bug: opacity changes do not update in 3d view for volume 0 niivue/mono#67
• bug: zooming zooms in on an arbitrary location rather than the crosshair location niivue/mono#68
• request: consider unifying the colormap interface niivue/mono#69
• bug: Single 2d view doesn't fill entire canvas niivue/mono#70
• bug: URL-referenced meshes in an nvd document don't load their overlays niivue/mono#71
• feature: Allow setColormapLabel() to accept a built-in colormap name niivue/mono#73
• bug: mgh file format byte order niivue/mono#81
• bug: A URL-referenced volume in an NVDocument renders blank when the document omits calMin/calMax niivue/mono#83

Open PR's to niivue-mono

• [FIX] allow mesh overlays to be referenced by url niivue/mono#72
• [ENH] setColormapLabel() by name niivue/mono#74
• [ENH] More events needed for FreeBrowse niivue/mono#75
• [FIX] byte-swap big-endian mgz image data niivue/mono#82
• [FIX] url-nvd without calmin calmax defined niivue/mono#84

These 3 PR are merged into the branch 20260708-more-events--and--nvd-mesh--and--labelcolormap on the pwighton fork used for dev and testing

[iishiishii]

Hi, Neurodesk webapp is keen to use freebrowse as the primary visualisation component for the app build template. Before we integrate it, we want to make sure it's running on the latest version of Niivue to prevent breaking changes down the line. Happy to look into the open issues.

[pwighton]

Hi @iishiishii, great! Thanks for offering to help! NiiVue-mono's new event model should really help with this.

The open NiiVue issues above aren't really show stoppers (the additional events needed for FreeBrowse was a show stopper, but that's been merged now). The remaining open issues are simple regressions that we shouldn't have to resolve before starting to work on the integration. I'm out of the office this week, but was planning to submit PRs for these in the next few weeks. I also haven't had a chance to test the issues that have been closed with the latest version of NiiVue mono but can do so next week.

Feel free to test the latest version of NiiVue mono with the 20260707-niivue-mono-migration branch of FreeBrowse, or submit PRs for the open issue if you like, but I think where I could really use your help is with testing and providing feedback on the interface for the integration.

The plan was to let integrators call something like createFreeBrowseInstance() and either pass it a NiiVue instance, or have it return one it created. It would then register all the NiiVue callbacks it needed to keep the FreeBrowse UI up to date, and then the integrator could manipulate the NiiVue instance directly and the FreeBrowse UI should automatically update.

Does that sound like a reasonable plan? Can you think of anything else you might need for the NeuroDesk Webapp integrations? I can try to get something together for you to test in the next couple of weeks (on the same branch: 20260707-niivue-mono-migration)

[iishiishii]

Hi @pwighton, I'm happy to run testing on the migration branch. Looks like Niivue team finished renaming NiiVueGPU->NiiVue in the latest version. I'm updating that on your branch and will open a PR.
Having createFreeBrowseInstance() function is very neat, would be great if we as well have freebrowse bundled so the app can import it like npm package.

[pwighton]

Looks like Niivue team finished renaming NiiVueGPU->NiiVue in the latest version. I'm updating that on your branch and will open a PR.

Great, thanks @ishiishii!

would be great if we as well have freebrowse bundled so the app can import it like npm package

Ah yes, very good point. I've created an issue to track this: #41