[ f l o w ] - status

s t a t u s
s t a t u s d o
in no particular order

Need-to-do resulting from Qt2/RH6.1/BMRT2.5/Papi upgrades:

When only one light is in the LightGroupWidget, things get funky.
Finish up color widget (deal with colors outside normal range)
Focus throwing is not the same. Lots of subtle changes in Qt2 are causing side effects. Blar.
Redo preferences panel to reflect changes.
implement new Papi features.

General flow stuff:

clean up (i.e. completely rewrite) otho window GL drawing and mouse picking.
mouse movement in an ortho window w/ automatic GL refresh prevents QTimer events from occurring. Create a GL render object that controls the updating of GL windows.
infinite light may not be display listed.
kill shader preview PIDs
organize GL drawing
polish save/load, add autosave.
rework polygon input
deal with unfound shaders
fix particle shader to copy/paste
completely rewrite camera class and camera animation
complete lights. Finish spotlight, implement ambient. Implement uberlight? Allow arbitrary light shaders? How can I intelligently do GL lighting if this is were the case?
add unary '-' operator to PFloat class.
don't give every primitive its own GL material. Allow create/delete like RM shaders. Not having a hierarchy for push/pop is going to be a hassle, tho.
write network client & add server code for distributed rendering.
design and implement keyframe animation - how best to do this?

b u g s
where's the damn raid?

frozen mouse thing seems to be back.
Crash sometimes occurs with the XF4.0 NVidia drivers when a new scene is loaded, but only when AGP is enabled. It never occurs when run under the debugger, so tracking it down will be next to impossible. Most likely a driver bug.
system sometimes gets confused when actions are deleted - particles aren't drawn and screen refresh slows way down. This is rare, and has been around for a while, but I can't figure out what could be causing it.
window placement is screwy. I'm not getting good values from Qt, and the kludge is inconsistent.
my NumInput widget is causing X selection problems because of auto-select on focus entry. This needs to be fixed or at least kludged. I like the auto-select.
color sometimes gets normalized when switched in surface shader widget.

n o t e s
keep in mind...

RiPolygon wasn't a very good choice for polygon input. 'Professional' RIB exporters (Polytrans, Maya) output PointsGeneral, so RiPolygon is only really useful for Font3D and AC3D. Find some code somewhere for a standard file format loader. Don't want to write my own.

i d e a s
hmmm...

Make shader list jump to desired shader by keystrokes. How would this work with all the focus throwing I do?
Should I allow particles to use displacements?

d o n e
one step closer to never being finished...

Been playing around with speed optimizations for the GeForce2. glPush/PopMatrix is slower than I would expect and the camera-face routine is pretty slow, so drawing textured quads is far slower than points or lines now.

Bought a GeForce2 today. Damn, this thing smokes. It's breathed life back into my dual 333, and because it handles OGL so damn fast, it easily points out other bottlenecks in my code. I can't believe how hard this thing rocks.

Fixed the infinite loop problem - looks like it was caused by signals being emitted during changeItem().
Fixed the 'highlighted but not active' issue with a newly added action.
Been working on a curve editor that will hopefully make it into flow in the near future.

Played around with QPalette stuff - got rid of all the old stuff. Now everything uses the same palette.

The Qt 2.1 betas are much better than the 2.0 series. Most of the GUI stuff is stabilizing.
Implemented textured quads for primitives. The perspective hack for lines works very well.

Code output is back. A configuration file is used to read in template code and output source for a stand alone particle demo. GLUT template works, and I'll make an attempt at an XScreenSaver template soon. Demos uses billboarded textured quads and it looks pretty sweet. Some of these things will make killer screen savers.

Kludged the 'frozen mouse' thing. This was yet another Qt2 'feature' - if you double click a file dialog over a QGL widget to open a file, a mouseReleaseEvent is sent to the QGL widget. Bogus.

A lot of bugs have turned up due to subtle changes in Qt2 widget behavior. I hate this crap.
The new color widget is just about done.

1999 Status Notes