Spaghetti update

[James Lehman]

Like I said; the only piece of information you don't have with an ILDA file is where to dump the opaque paint. TTF is a perfect example because it is 2D vector outlines of possibly multiple closed areas, with hollow, empty areas inside. Look at these glyphs ... B8%&. And it works! Forget about guessing, make up a way to determine where it is. Make a new standard! Just make sure you take a good look at all of the standards that have preceided this one, that have anything to do with this train of thought...

and don't F*** It Up!

James.

[carmangary]

My software uses ILDA files so all of that is out of the question.

[James Lehman]

My software uses ILDA files so all of that is out of the question.

Huh?

ILDA files have already been used to define more than just where the laser goes!

First of all, ILDA files can be 3D! That right there is more!!!

What if you pick a color index that is for the flood fill color and place just one point inside every filled region?

I don't know what "out of the question" is!!!

James.

[carmangary]

My software is not for editing frames. It is for putting them together with music for shows. The basis of my software is to use existing ILDA frames/files so I only deal with standard ILDA file formats.

[James Lehman]

My software is not for editing frames. It is for putting them together with music for shows. The basis of my software is to use existing ILDA frames/files so I only deal with standard ILDA file formats.

Oh!

OK.

Sorry.

James.

[drlava]

afaik, ttf solves the problem by using outline 'rotation' direction. If a circle is painted cw, it is filled, but ccw circle is open if it is inside a cw painted circle, it creates a donut. Tricky part is that if the smaller ccw circle is by itelf, it is filled.

[carmangary]

Oh!
OK.

Sorry.
James.

But, it would be something cool for you to do with the laser boy software. I thought about it last night while I was sleeping and pretty much figured out how to make it work. You can determine a shape by looking for lit line segments whose ends meet (or come very close). Then you can determine if a point is inside or outside of that shape by drawing a line from the point to every point around the radius of the shape. If line encounters an odd number of segments or points it is inside the shape. If it enconters and even number it is outside the shape. With this information you draw the shapes in reverse order: top first then bottom. When drawing the bottom you determine if the segment you are going to draw crosses or is contained in a shape segment from the top frame. If it does, you determine the intersection and then blank from the intersection to the inner most point. It is a little more involved if the segments cross from outside to inside to outside but the same principle is involved.

Anyway, with that information you should be able to code it up in a day or so. I'm not going to do it at this point because it is computationally intensive (slow) when it runs but mainly because I don't currently allow effects to be applied to multple layers. In the future I will but not now.

[carmangary]

afaik, ttf solves the problem by using outline 'rotation' direction. If a circle is painted cw, it is filled, but ccw circle is open if it is inside a cw painted circle, it creates a donut. Tricky part is that if the smaller ccw circle is by itelf, it is filled.

That sounds familiar when from I was looking into drawing text in my application. Another thing with fonts is that on a computer screen you just draw them normally from bottom to top and the overlap as they should. No extra work. But with a laser display the lines have to be terminated at intersection points. It takes a lot of computations to determine if any given segment crosses a set of other segments.

[DZ]

Do you know of any other laser show packages that have this feature?

Pangolin, I've uploaded a short clip of masking to google video, as soon as it finishes its processing, I'll post the link.


It's done! http://video.google.com/videoplay?do...87712112&hl=en

[carmangary]

That is impressive. Could you describe what the process of configuring it to do that is? Does it do it in real time or does it have to process things before it displays them? Any info you can give me is helpful.