Kaleidoscopes
Last updated at 1:28 am UTC on 17 January 2006
Kaleidoscopes
Welcome to Kaleidoscopes
Here are kaleidoscopes, regular polygons, and new stars.
http://209.143.91.36/super/630
Here are my final notes:
wiz 8/13/2003 ::
Well, this has gone well. The debugging tools are quite wonderful.
Its time to publish.
We've got enhancements.
1) a generalization of reversed. flipRotated: n . will rotate any sequence list into anyone of the two size possible rotations and reversals.
2) for quads fliprotatedBy: symbol will rotate the innercorners so that warpblt will do the appropriate reflection or rotation of a form. any of the eight of them.
3) for forms kaleidoFormed and kaleidoFormUsing: lastForm will return a form with its receiver four fold reflections suitable for tiling and making kaleidoscopes. More about those later.
4) We now have regular polygons and regular stars. These polygons have pointy handles to increase and decrease the number of sides. and a circular handle on on the vertex that controls the size and direction of the edge. The direction of the this control edge is linked to the forward direction of the polygon. The rotation handle can be used to point this edge north.
5) As an added feature these regular polygons have an improved coefficents method for smoothing. As smoothed curves they don't treat there beginning and end points as any different than a middle point (at least thats the ideal). In practice they are not perfect yet. Yet they are also a great improvement on the current smoothing method. just 5 or 6 vertices on a regular polygon and already the smooth curve looks circurlar.
6) And while we're at it well give you stars. Yes we've got stars. they work the same way as
regular polygons except they are pointed.
7) It now time to talk about Kaleidoscopes. We've got them and boy are they beautiful.
They are made up of regular polygons and bit filled wedges. The center handle allows for
updating the kaleidoscope seed from the screen. Or if your brave you can let it step thru its present seed.
7a) Caveats. Kaleidoscopes are avant garde. They were the current goal of my programing project and I've got there and its time to publish so others can oooouh... and aaaah... .And so this project can benifit from OPM (Other peoples minds. Though OPM Other peoples money would be helpful to. Would be patrons of programing artistry are welcome to help and sponsor.More can be done when roof and table are not a worry.) On to the caveats. The stepping works but seems to take thousand of milliseconds. And like the sourcerors apprentice I haven't completely figure out how to stop it. Dropping it back into the world after picking it up seems to get it steps again regardless the fact the last message it got from ME was stopStepping (is there a stopYourF*(5@!#Stepping method I haven't found yet?). And as I say steping seems to slow the frame rate to a crawl. Still if your willing for it to be the only thing happening on you screen its a so what neat screen user.
Also, I haven't figured out how to turn off the mouse up action on the seed from user handle.
So as soon as the seed is obtained by clicking another mouse up action is performed where ever the cursor is at the moment. This usually results in picking up the morph you were over when you picked the seed. Still it could be embarassing if your kaleidoScopeing over a menu. oops.
Its not all bad. If you are over the kaleidoscopes center handle (which is where you started) when you pick the new seed you immedatly get another box. This gives the opportunity for a nice feedback effect.
Othernotes to myself: next step read the change sets into a new( and current image and test to see if anything broke. The last minute cleanup and changes have a good chance of making things go bad.
Then get published.!!!
Also it would not be hard to modify the wedge classes to make wedges (actually diamond for stars so they too could be fillsed by kaleidoscopes.
Publishing has priority.
Addendum:
You also need to know that these demos were built on top of some bug fix work I'd already done.
2) Polygon handles were cleaned up so they behave better as you get down to one point polygons ( see PolygonMorph BugFixes )..
3) a ClosedCurvePolygon class adds additional smoothing to curve and was the basis for the Regular Polygon smoothing.
4) A shift action on the duplicate halo "photographs the morph image and returns an image morph in hand. This may be confusing at first (it needs to have a frame around the picture so its not mistook for a duplicate of the morph) but it give one precise control over the look of an image. Build a morph take a photo voila.!
Thats all for now.
wiz 8/14/2003 12:16
As I am having newbie learning curve trouble in discovering how to publish these changes and enchacements the change set is
copied below this line the best way to grab it would be to go into edit this page and copy the text below this line verbatim.
(sigh) that did not seem to work. probably there is a size limit to these pages.
