Topic: TOTALLY NEW FEATURES IN LASERBOY!

[meandean]

  Still sounds clean... Now for some wave header reading code cleanup.
If you show wave header stats on plain stereo waves in LB, it does not
report the play time and total samples correctly, even with the minimal
44 byte header. Need more adaptive wave reading code for stereo.

[James]

Agreed.

Thank you for the continued testing. That is invaluable!

TODO:

Wave header reading cleanup.
NEW wave header reading.
DXF POLYLINE color breakup for drlava.
Check into the 255 vs. 256 palette color issue.
Separate the UI message from the application code.

I also want to make some more enhancements for the purpose of analyzing unformatted wave.

In the near future, I think a palette creator / editor would be nice.

Any more ideas?

James. 

[drlava]

Spending some real time in the laserboy frame editor.. :O

I found one thing that made me go 'neat!'  the . command advances based on the last point spacing and direction when at the end of the frame... cool!

Request for the k menu:

Ctrl + X Y Z move box to * +/- 100

100 could be least_significant_distance instead, for a little flexibility.

By the way, good program James X)

[James]

That is part of what I call the "Pop and Rotate" drawing scheme.

You can place the egg on the zero-th vertex and the spider on the last vertex by tapping the '|' and '\' keys (pipe and back-slash).

If you have the spider on the last vertex in the drawing, tapping the '.' (dot) will "Pop" another vector off the end that is an exact match of the previous last vector. Then you can 'f' or 'F' rotate (CCW or CW) that vector around it's anchor. If you place the zero-th vertex on the line of your drawing and the first vertex on the line a bit farther along, you can "Pop and Rotate" your way around a curvy drawing. The nicest thing about this is that not only is it fast and accurate, but it also produces a drawing that has (mostly) equal length vectors. This optimizes and projects with excellent even energy density.

You can change the length (magnitude) of the last vector by pressing and holding 'm' or 'M'.

If the spider is not on the last vertex in the drawing and you tap the '.', it will split the vector in half, placing a new vertex at the mid-point.

If the vector that the spider is on has no magnitude (it is the same location as its anchor) then you can not rotate it or change its magnitude, but you can linearly displace it with 'x' 'X' 'y' 'Y' or 'z' 'Z', thus giving it magnitude and direction.

Degrees of rotation per key hit is in the settings menu, as is linear points of displacement and percentage of magnitude.

See! Not having a mouse isn't the end of the world!

James. 

PS I don't quite understand your request.

Up to this point, I have avoided the use of Ctrl and Alt keys because I'm not sure how they work on a Mac!

Any clues would be greatly appriciated, as that would expand the use of the keyboard by a factor of almost 3!

[drlava]

That is part of what I call the "Pop and Rotate" drawing scheme.

You can place the egg on the zero-th vertex and the spider on the last vertex by tapping the '|' and '\' keys (pipe and back-slash).

If you have the spider on the last point in the drawing, tapping the '.' (dot) will "Pop" another vector off the end that is an exact match of the previous last vector. Then you can 'f' or 'F' rotate (CCW or CW) that vector around it's anchor. If you place the zero-th vertex on the line of your drawing and the first vertex on the line a bit farther along, you can "Pop and Rotate" your way around a curvy drawing. The nicest thing about this is that not only is it fast and accurate, but it also produces a drawing that has (mostly) equal length vectors. This optimizes and projects with excellent even energy density.

You can change the length (magnitude) of the last vector by pressing and holding 'm' or 'M'.

If the spider is not on the last vertex in the drawing and you tap the '.', it will split the vector in half, placing a new vertex at the mid-point.

Degrees of rotation per key hit is in the settings menu, as is linear points of displacement and percentage of magnitude.

See! Not having a mouse isn't the end of the world!

James. 

PS I don't quite understand your request.

Up to this point, I have avoided the use of Ctrl and Alt keys because I'm not sure how they work on a Mac!

Any clues would be greatly appriciated, as that would expand the use of the keyboard by a factor of almost 3!

Cool!
Yeah, not having a mouse isn't so bad, especially if you have a Gateway Anykey programmable macro keyboard also! That was a finger-saver today.

What my request is (in your menu notation, don't you get it?   ) I'll explain in plain english:
I want to be able to select a range of consecutive vertices and move them all at once.
In fact, it would be nice to have the option to do the whole slew of frame menu transforms on a vertice range.
Now re-read the menu notation and it should make sense.
To me, Ctrl and Alt make sense to use, Macs have open apple and close apple...

[James]

You can move, scale and rotate whole continuous vertex selections in menu 'L'.

You can scale and rotate them according to their own geometric center or a fulcrum that you can place anywhere; even outside of 16-bit 3D integer space!

Degrees of rotation per key hit is in the settings menu, as is linear points of displacement and percentage of magnitude. These also apply here.

You can copy a selected section of the drawing and reverse the drawing order of selected vertices.

James. 

PS WOW! Finally someone is getting something out of all of this!    :

[drlava]

You can move, scale and rotate whole continuous vertex selections in menu 'L'.

AHA menu L, but the XYZ in menu L just says move * not box to *.

[James]

Ha! You found a menu typo!

Look for that in the next release!

THANKS!!!

James. 

BTW that's the "egg" and the "spider"!

[James]

A neat feature of this drawing and editing environment is that it is truly 3D. You can move, rotate and scale vertices or whole segments with respect to Z.

Another fairly new feature is that you can pick any vertex in a drawing and make it the first. The rest of the drawing will reorder itself after that.

James. 

[drlava]

Ha! You found a menu typo!

Look for that in the next release!

THANKS!!!

James. 

In case you're wondering what I'm working on, here's a very preliminary preview:

[James]

I like it!

Looks like a nice scanner to color mod alignment test.

Looking foward to seeing where this goes.

You know you can bond lit segments together into drawing objects by swapping out the inner object blanking for lit black! That way you can force the order of points drawn, even when it goes through an optimizer.

James. 

[drlava]

You know you can bond lit segments together into drawing objects by swapping out the inner object blanking for lit black! That way you can force the order of points drawn, even when it goes through an optimizer.

James. 

Yes, but this would mess up the single-color players that only pay attention to the blanking bit, according to the ILDA spec.  Not that there are many of those...

[James]

With wave output, there is no difference between blank and black.

With ILDA, you can do all of your effects and optimization first and then, at the last minute, convert black to blank, just before you save it as ILDA.

James. 

[drlava]

Yes, I am aware of this technique.

[James]

Have you figured out that you can change the color of the display background so that you can see black?

James.