Primitive Editor
Ed Boyce is interested in using the Gallery software to present solar system simulations. (Is "solar" Sol-centeric ? ie, is there only one solar system in the universe, one solar wind, etc ? or does Alpha Centauri or Sirius produce a solar wind as well ?) To that end, a couple new features are in the worls:
* numerical positioning of objects.
- for starters a simple dialog which lets you edit the properties of a primitive.
i've been wanting to make one of those for a while. It's a relatively generic dialog with fields for position, radius, inner radius, top radius, base radius, segments, wedges, etc, in essence all the potential fields a primitive may support. The fields are only shown if the passed-in primitive supports the methods to set/get those fields. ie via "aTPrimitive class includesSelector: someSelector".
It's a bit clunky, definitely, but works so far.
- I'm not sure if i want to include Texture, Spin, etc in here.
- for seconds, we may work out a table format to input the data, altho this seems to be straying a bit from a general gallery app to me.
* "Go To" feature.
- added a menu item to all objects which reads "Go Here" and simply zooms the camera/avatar up to the object. The behaviour is similar to that of TWindow, but somewhat different in that it doesn't pay attention to the 'front' face of the object. With TWindow, the viewer always ends up aligned facing the front of the object, which is as it should be. However that's a bit unintuitive when you just see some object in the distance and want to go to it. With "Go here" it's as if you simply walked (quickly) over to the object.
- I would like to add a pop-up window listing all the objects (of interest) in the scene and allowing you to select, edit, and of course, go to them.
* Providing hooks to ODE for physics
* Ed would like to see 128-bit numbers instead of 32-bit.
- I think this is somewhat out of the scope of the Gallery project and more in the purview of Croquet or Squeak itself. itselves. themself.
* numerical positioning of objects.
- for starters a simple dialog which lets you edit the properties of a primitive.
i've been wanting to make one of those for a while. It's a relatively generic dialog with fields for position, radius, inner radius, top radius, base radius, segments, wedges, etc, in essence all the potential fields a primitive may support. The fields are only shown if the passed-in primitive supports the methods to set/get those fields. ie via "aTPrimitive class includesSelector: someSelector".
It's a bit clunky, definitely, but works so far.
- I'm not sure if i want to include Texture, Spin, etc in here.
- for seconds, we may work out a table format to input the data, altho this seems to be straying a bit from a general gallery app to me.
* "Go To" feature.
- added a menu item to all objects which reads "Go Here" and simply zooms the camera/avatar up to the object. The behaviour is similar to that of TWindow, but somewhat different in that it doesn't pay attention to the 'front' face of the object. With TWindow, the viewer always ends up aligned facing the front of the object, which is as it should be. However that's a bit unintuitive when you just see some object in the distance and want to go to it. With "Go here" it's as if you simply walked (quickly) over to the object.
- I would like to add a pop-up window listing all the objects (of interest) in the scene and allowing you to select, edit, and of course, go to them.
* Providing hooks to ODE for physics
* Ed would like to see 128-bit numbers instead of 32-bit.
- I think this is somewhat out of the scope of the Gallery project and more in the purview of Croquet or Squeak itself. itselves. themself.
posted by orion at 2:12 PM
4 Comments:
Doesn't a lot of this (editing primitive values) get covered by Brie that Howard Stearns and friends are working on at UWM? Not that you can't do your own interface, it is an open system after all. But it seems like it might be duplication of effort.
And unfortunately, using ODE for solar system physics won't work. I looked at this a long time ago (in web years!), and ODE has "unidirectional" gravity, objects don't have any attraction properties. There is the beginings of a Smalltalk physics engine already in Croquet with the 3-body demo. And there is a simple package called Manzana on SqueakMap. I vaguely remember someone else once volunteering some Smalltalk physics code to the Squeak community, and another Squeaker started to develop a Morphic interface for it, but I'm not sure what happened to it.
Where can i find more information on Brie ? I googled around and checked thru Howard's blog but couldn't find it.
In any event,
this is something i wanted to get in rather sooner than later, and it's always nice to have two ways of going about things.
And of course, it's sometimes useful to have two options on the table.
I wonder how primitive property editing will handle choosing which properties to expose to users ?
Eg, you do want #radius, but do you want #solid ? What about #handlesKeyboard ?
I was surprised when you said you were thinking of using ODE for gravitational dynamics, as i hadn't realized ODE handled that stuff! lol! Unidirectional gravity is boring! But i think the basic physics of rigid-body gravitation are fairly simple. The trickiest part is time-step integration, which there may be a decent Runge-Kutte implementation already in Squeak ?
Here is a link for Brie:
http://www.wetmachine.com/itf/item/278/catid/12
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