DevLog

Click here to see How to Make a Fabric Simulator

Click here to see How to Make a Fabric Simulator Part 2

Yesterday and today I made some long needed changes to Curtain‘s code. Most of it is behind the scenes stuff. The most noticeable change will be how it interacts with the mouse. It should now be a lot smoother and when the user is tearing (right clicking), it wont just tear at points it sees the cursor at, but it’ll tear ALL points between the cursor’s current and previous positions. Meaning it’s now a lot easier to slice the curtain in half with just one swipe.

You might also notice changes in the speed since the majority of the changes are optimization. You’ll only notice it if Curtain was laggy or slow for you before this update. To try out the newly optimized Curtain, check it out here. You can also check out its source here or here. To see a list of updates, jump to the end of the post.

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Ok. Maybe I couldn’t get some stuff done. Over the summer, I’ve made about 17 different applications, all of which I felt wasn’t really worthy of publishing. Most of them were experiments anyways, which I did learn a lot from.

I did finally finish something for release though. A few days ago there was a video on YouTube made by a person named Scott Manley (click this sentence), showing a time lapse of asteroid discoveries since 1980. I thought that this was neat enough to make a 3D version (provided there was enough data, and there was) of the simulation.

After about a week and a half of putting together various formulas and spending entire days trying to find missing parentheses and other major but hard to find typos in the code, I came out with a 35 second video showing asteroid placement in relation to orbits close to the sun (click this sentence too).

I hope to clean up the code and possibly open source it later (no promises). All of my resources can be found in the description on vimeo. If you don’t like vimeo and would rather YouTube, click here.

On Sunday of last week, I had a pretty neat idea. I was looking around the internet, and ran into some sort of gaming glove. I thought “Hey! That’s pretty cool.” I had something different in mind, and found that this glove didn’t have the capabilities I’d hope for. I was thinking of something like a wiimote but in the form of a glove.

I remembered seeing Johnny Lee’s videos of his wiimote hacks. He set up his wiimote to receive input from external infrared lights, and to track it while doing several neat things like head-tracking or a multi-touch projector white-board. This was all very impressive, considering he was using very cheap supplies to accomplish these things. He also made a finger-tracker using an infrared light array (grid of lights), and some reflectors taped onto his fingers. I eventually came to the idea of using an IR light with the webcam. I understood that cameras have a tendency of picking up infrared lights, unlike our human eyes. I grabbed a TV remote, wrote a quick script, and it worked greatly!

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Remember yesterday, I said “If tomorrow also provides the convenience of a snow day, I’ll take advantage of that as well…”? Well, today happened to also be a snow day (woohoo!), and I did as I told you. I worked on Chase’s Engine. I’m currently at about 744 lines of code, so I’ve made some progress since I started the conversion. Yesterday’s version included support for handling coordinates, polygons, and models in 3D space. It also had some transformation functions (translate, dilate, and rotate) for coordinates and polygons.

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Good day! Over the winter break, I began working on Chase’s conversion over to C++. Today, I’ve had the convenience of a snow day, so I took advantage of it and proceeded to work on Chase’s Engine. Note, however, I haven’t really made any *real* progress. I will count this as a day though, since a lot has been done in the conversion.

The conversion isn’t done yet. I’ve got all the coordinate, polygon, and model classes converted (although certainly not finished in terms of features), as well as the transformation functions. If tomorrow also provides the convenience of a snow day, I’ll take advantage of that as well, and hopefully get Chase’s C++ engine up to an equivalent of Chase’s Processing (the API for Java!) engine.

I’ve uploaded a picture of my colorfully written rough draft for how my .h and .cpp files should work out. My compiler (Dev-C++) has an awfully convenient feature which allows me to place individual files in their own folders unlike the Processing IDE, as far as I’m aware of. You can check out the picture by clicking the image to the left/top of this post’s text. Feel free to give me any feedback or comments.

I didn’t have much time last night to fully revise Explode’s code. So today I finished that job. I revised a lot of the comments, converted the coordinates from float to PVector datatype, PVector is a class object in Processing’s API, which allows programmers to easily manage vector coordinates in 2 or 3 dimensions. I combined two calculations done to find the new coordinate of each particle into one, among other changes.

I also updated Galaxy, but I’ve yet to document the actual app on here. If you’ve seen the app before (on OpenProcessing), you’ll find that there’s a noticeable change now.  The speeds are inverted. Instead of being faster on the outside and slower on the inside, it’s now faster on the inside and slower on the outside. I also did similar changes to Galaxy as I did to Explode. Coordinates converted to PVector, and revised comments and code.

It’s been pretty hard in keeping up with programming. I’m taking Drivers Ed, which is taking up a good part of my day, and I’m often exhausted by the time I return from school.