LaserBoy is known to compile and run in Mac OSX!

[james]

You mean mouse support. It has a GUI. It's just keyboard driven at the moment. Yeh, maybe that too. The issue with that and some other features is that I want to keep the whole thing generic C++ and platform independent so it compiles and runs on everything. SDL has mouse support, but I'm not so sure how that translates to a touch screen; like for a tablet.

[ImageLight]

How long before The Drama starts though ........

It just did...

Hey James what's shakin dude...? Welcome back ..

Mark

[colouredmirrorball]

You mean mouse support. It has a GUI. It's just keyboard driven at the moment. Yeh, maybe that too. The issue with that and some other features is that I want to keep the whole thing generic C++ and platform independent so it compiles and runs on everything. SDL has mouse support, but I'm not so sure how that translates to a touch screen; like for a tablet.

I don't necessarily mean mouse support. It would be neat of course, but I can live with keyboard only. My main problem with it is that the interface is all over the frame, in a multi coloured and not very good readable font (but I'm glad at least you got rid of the feature where the colour would change with each keystroke!). Also the controls are for a Qwerty keyboard, but I'm on an Azerty so I need to figure out what each key does.

[buffo]

Welcome back, James. Nice to see you're still working on LaserBoy. Can't help you with the new Mac version though; the last time I messed around with a Mac was when I still had my Amiga (and ran the ShapeShifter emulator to simulate a Quadra).

Sorry to hear about your hip - hospitals suck. Hopefully they'll get it right this time.

Peace...

Adam

[james]

Azerty keyboard? I'll have to look that one up. The only other time I ever ran into anything unusual was with a guy who had a keyboard for German. As far as the colored menus go.... If you hit the [Enter] key they appear and disappear. So they are there to tell you what keys do what, but they get out of your way. If you really wanted to, you could do a screen capture of the menus and make bitmaps out of them, so you could see the menu apart from the running application. After a while, if you are doing repetitive actions, you will probably memorize at least some of the keys. And some effort was put into choosing keys based on their position on a qwerty board. The way the keyboard gets read in the software is by ASCII value, so I'm pretty sure, if you can figure out how to make a particular glyph on your keyboard, it should be properly captured and do the right thing.

There is a file called LaserBoy.bat (for Windows) that calls the app with the width and height of the windows that it opens. This exact same principal applies to the Linux or Mac executable as well. So if you have a nice high resolution monitor, you can fill it up with the LB display and the text isn't such a big part of it.

It might sound like a bit of a pain, but I guess there is always the possibility of using a cheapo USB keyboard that fits the IBM 101 qwerty standard. Maybe that won't work as long as you have Windows setup to read the key matrix for some other layout.

The thing about mouse control is that the display window can be opened to be just about any size and its primary function is to display vector art, which is easily scaled to size. Any kind of graphical overlay for a mouse would have to be in real pixels and would not scale. Then there is where to put it and all of the code to figure out where the mouse is over the top of it. It could certainly be done. It's just a matter of how and there would be no gradual transition to such a thing. It would be a total rewrite of the whole interface.

I haven't done a whole lot to add anything to LB for quite a while. I just fixed a few bugs and with the help of that guy from Moscow, I got it to compile and run with no problems in Mac OSX. I have a plan to create a slight variation of the wave file format that would allow the use of just stereo to control the X and Y galvos, with markers in the least significant bits to indicate blanking and end of frame marks. It would require a special wave player to detect the blanking bits and generate another channel or some other synchronized output. But it would open back up in LB with blanking and properly framed.

One thing I would like to know more about is using the C-Media USB sound device in Mac and how to play waves that are more than 2 channels. I know it can be done. Another guy uses a thing called Sound Flower, that is a free Mac app that routs audio. He used Reason to play the wave routed through that. Reason is expensive! There must be something free and simple to play multi-channel waves on a Mac.

[colouredmirrorball]

Try Reaper. I think it works on a mac and it has a decent price (and you get a month free license that never expires) and generally it is a great DAW.
Thanks for the clarification on the GUI. I know you are busy and don't have time to write a how to, but could you please give a quick list of the most important features? So I know what I'm looking for when trying to work with the program.

[JohnYayas]

You could try Spaghetti Draw which does support mouses.

[james]

Probably the most important thing to know about LB is a thing I call LaserBoy_space. That is the 3D numerical environment in which all of the art "lives". It is a memory model of the exact way things are represented in the ILDA file format and it also translates perfectly (binary / digitally) to wave. It is a coordinate system of signed 16 bit integers. So all of the coordinates of any point location within this space will be from -32767 to +32767 in X, Y and Z. In binary 16 bits, you can count from -32768 to +32767, but I wanted to keep the center of space the point 0,0,0. So LaserBoy knows to look for any coordinate of the value -32768 and simply adds 1 to it to make it -32767. The reason is that you can negate this number and get +32767. If you try to negate -32768 as a 16 bit signed integer, you get -32768! Not good! So, whenever LB is asking or showing a coordinate value, it will be in this space.

There are two menus of some importance to look at: the menu you get when you hit [Tab] from the main menu and the one you get when you hit x. These are the places you find all the settings for the way LB works. If you change any of these settings and you want LB to remember your changes, you can go to o from the main menu to output a file and choose type wtf. The default name for the wtf file is LaserBoy.wtf. That is a list of all of the current settings values that gets loaded every time you run LB. You can also save it by different names for different reasons and i (input) those files during the run of the program to change all the settings at any time.

Some of the values in the settings are going to be relative to the coordinate system mentioned above.

I took some time to separate the various functions of LB into similar categories. Menus k and l (L) are for drawing, coloring, editing art in the frames. Menu k is somewhat more focused on the individual vector marked with the "spider". NOTE: If you want to blank, unblank or color a single vector, then both the egg and the spider need to be on the same vertex! A vector is the line defined between two consecutive vertices; the anchor and the destination. All of the business of color and blanking are stored in only the destination end of a vector. So it is written in the ILDA file format.

Menu l (L) is more about whole shapes, the segment selection from the "egg" to the "spider". These markers appear as traveling cursors on the vertices and are moved with the [{ and ]} keys. You can also select whole lit segments individually or in sequence with the u, i, and o keys.

In a lot of cases, lower case does one thing and upper case does it in reverse. But in some menus, lower case effects only the current visible frame and upper case effects all of the frames in the set.

I guess it probably makes some sense to ask you what you want to do. Are you planning on using LB to make waves for playback on a modified sound card?

BTW, you can also use many different CAD drawing programs (with a mouse!) and save your art as DXF (with color). If you put those files in the dxf folder inside of the LaserBoy folder, you can open them in LB. You can also make a directory full of DXF files in the same place and open all of the files as a frame set. They will open in alpha-numeric (ASCII order) by file name.

The only area of your hard drive that LaserBoy can see is inside of its own directory and all of the various file types must be in their own appropriate named folders. This is also part of the platform independents issue. It's a pain to navigate a file system in a generic way in C++. Plus this keeps all of your stuff in one place. You could have a USB hard drive with executables for Windows, Linux and Mac and move it from one computer to another and always be able to run LB exactly the same way on any of these systems. For the sake of avoiding any confusion, it's probably best to not use spaces in file names.

I would be glad to elaborate on any of this.

[james]

colouredmirrorball, from a post I read in another thread, I gather that you have only one color.

You can work with full color RGB art in LaserBoy and create a wave with a specially calculated signal in the 6th channel. It's a matter of settings in LB to put a monochrome control signal in that channel that might be TTL or analog modulated based on a few different methods of combining the RGB values into an average.

[james]

cant do it, dont have an itunes account to dl xcode nor do i want to make one

What's the connection to iTunes? I don't think you need that to dl Xcode, Cmake, libSDL or Boost C++.

I'm not a Mac user, but I have heard that the GNU GCC is on the OS installation disk.

You don't really need the C/C++ development environment either. You just need the GNU GCC utilities for the command prompt.