irclog2html for #brlcad on 20051020

01:49.25 *** join/#brlcad louipc (n=louipc@Toronto-ppp221485.sympatico.ca)
01:49.35 louipc how's it going?
01:59.34 *** join/#brlcad thumPer1052 (n=edward@host-66-205-107-201.classicnet.net)
02:01.06 thumPer1052 good evening gentlemen
02:03.11 thumPer1052 When I use 'shaded_mode 2' brl-cad renders invisible objects.
02:03.35 thumPer1052 That is objects which have been subtracted.
02:03.55 thumPer1052 Is this the state of the software?
02:04.30 louipc neat
02:04.51 thumPer1052 well...
02:05.00 louipc I'm not sure...
02:05.08 thumPer1052 neat that it does ANY opengl
02:05.31 thumPer1052 is that what yours is doing?
02:06.05 louipc shaded_mode 2 is a rendering option?
02:06.15 thumPer1052 yes,
02:06.21 louipc that never happened to me when rendering
02:06.53 thumPer1052 turn on Z clipping Z buffer and lighting
02:07.02 thumPer1052 then enter 'shaded_mode 2
02:07.07 louipc I'm just downloading the new version now - I have the first open source version
02:07.09 thumPer1052 and redraw something
02:07.14 thumPer1052 ahh
02:07.51 louipc what is that mode supposed to do?
02:08.34 thumPer1052 instead of wireframe, you get solid rendered opengl
02:08.59 louipc ah ok
02:09.17 thumPer1052 dosen't seem to work very well though
02:09.31 thumPer1052 I think they're just starting on the opengl stuff
02:09.54 louipc it worked ok for me before - but I have an old version
02:10.42 thumPer1052 brl-cad itself works great
02:10.49 thumPer1052 this feature is new
02:11.02 thumPer1052 or at least hasen't been developed very far
02:12.13 louipc ooh you mean they added a solid view of the model for editing?
02:12.24 thumPer1052 yeah
02:12.39 louipc nice
02:12.50 louipc yeah I never used that
02:13.14 thumPer1052 it's not very useful yet, but I'm sure they'll sor tit out
02:13.22 thumPer1052 er sort it out lol
02:13.56 louipc lol
02:15.50 brlcad thumPer1052: it's the state of shaded_mode 2, which is very much just an experimental test
02:16.13 thumPer1052 ok, thanks. Thats what I suspected.
02:16.13 brlcad the wireframe is actually opengl too
02:16.53 brlcad archer does it "correctly" as does the new modeler
02:17.14 thumPer1052 Thought maybe it was a bug that was being corrected.
02:17.22 thumPer1052 archer?
02:17.23 brlcad it is a bug :)
02:17.58 brlcad and might get corrected .. not clear whether it's worth the effort or to make sure it's okay in the next generation interface
02:18.22 thumPer1052 the new modeler is in cvs?
02:18.25 brlcad archer is an intermediate visualizer/modeler based on mged
02:18.34 brlcad yes, it's in a branch though
02:18.34 louipc new ui?
02:18.56 brlcad it has a different new ui, yes
02:19.10 brlcad both archer and the next generation modeler
02:19.14 thumPer1052 I'm learning to like mged
02:19.26 brlcad don't worry, your learning isn't going to waste :0
02:19.28 louipc sounds exciting
02:19.29 brlcad er :)
02:20.04 brlcad everything you do in mged should be accessible in the new interface, it'll just have a better user interface
02:20.14 thumPer1052 kewl
02:21.35 thumPer1052 what about annotations?
02:21.52 thumPer1052 er visible ones
02:26.49 brlcad that's already being worked on :)
02:27.34 brlcad the ability to store plot files in the .g file too (sort of related)
02:31.45 thumPer1052 I was looking at the source, and it is well commented, and pretty clean.
02:31.51 thumPer1052 but there's a LOT of it!
02:32.19 brlcad patches welcome!
02:33.34 thumPer1052 How do you come to terms with a project this big?
02:33.56 brlcad focus on some small part of it
02:34.35 brlcad it's rather modular and contained, relatively very well organized given it's size
02:35.15 brlcad you learn more and more as you go along
02:35.37 thumPer1052 I guess start by understanding the database?
02:37.12 brlcad depends really
02:37.15 brlcad what do you want?
02:37.20 brlcad what do you want to do?
02:37.30 brlcad what do you want to have/make/create? :)
02:37.35 thumPer1052 not sure yet...
02:37.39 brlcad :)
02:38.34 brlcad step 1 would be to read the very short "volume I" overview of BRL-CAD
02:38.53 thumPer1052 k
02:39.12 brlcad if you're interested in code, the next step would be to read the HACKING file in the source
02:39.32 brlcad from there, it really depends on what you want
02:40.51 thumPer1052 As a user, what I'd like to see is the ability to output a 2d vector file. Like we discussed the other day.
02:41.02 brlcad "Volume I" is simply: http://brlcad.org/overview.html
02:44.22 brlcad the TODO and BUGS files list some good places to start too ;-)
02:44.33 thumPer1052 thanks
02:45.00 brlcad 2D vector file.. hmm
02:45.42 thumPer1052 like a vector option to rtedge
02:45.51 brlcad if you know your C, I'd jump right in to rtedge's source code, modify it to output vectors instead of pixels
02:46.47 brlcad should be some extra book keeping, a few extra rays to calculate dimensions of requested objects
02:47.22 thumPer1052 most of the heavy lifting has probably already been done.
02:47.57 thumPer1052 May have to do some line/curve fitting
02:48.56 brlcad right, mostly it has (setting up the view projection, firing rays to interrogate geometry, storing hit results, computing rays hitting an edge)
02:50.23 brlcad you have a 2D grid and knowledge of exactly what object is at every grid cell -- so computing lines/curves using the edge/pixel values is a direct neighbor search
02:51.30 brlcad find all neighbors that are of the sme current cell edge type and you have points in 2D that could be fit to a polynomial/line/curve/whatever
02:52.08 thumPer1052 hmmm
02:52.24 thumPer1052 might be more straight forward than I thought
02:54.42 brlcad getting a vector out of rtedge really shouldn't be hard at all, getting dimensions might be slightly harder since you need to know how/where to orient/display the dimension data onto the vector image
02:56.34 pra5ad whoa dejavu
02:56.35 pra5ad =)
02:56.51 brlcad yeah, and you might get that pra5ad guy to help you out ;)
02:57.07 pra5ad u know i woulda coded something up, but lee shot it down
02:57.15 pra5ad something about already knowing topology..
02:58.03 brlcad the topology isn't known until you evaluate the boolean
02:58.22 brlcad and evaluate the implicits
02:58.35 brlcad neither of which is done for free
02:58.46 thumPer1052 yes, I see that...
02:59.17 brlcad you have to either raytrace, where you evaluate both boolean and implicits at once, or you tesselate, where you evaluate the boolean an an explicit form
02:59.42 brlcad he's probably thinking the latter, which I'd say looks like crap for a vector
02:59.57 pra5ad *shrug*
03:00.14 thumPer1052 innacurate also
03:00.20 brlcad plus you have to tesselate.. which .. can be painful
03:00.42 brlcad until someone fixes/replaces/improves the tesselation
03:00.51 pra5ad whoa dejavu again
03:00.57 brlcad werd
03:01.13 pra5ad according to mgmt i can't provide external support
03:01.15 pra5ad =)
03:01.20 brlcad hehe
03:02.25 brlcad telling you, just have to work on something useful a few hours a week and deliver a report on it or deliver it to someone "important" .. then you'll be stuck working on it :)
03:02.44 brlcad which means you won't be available to work on other stuff as much, of course
03:03.12 pra5ad meh
03:03.28 *** join/#brlcad mahesh (n=mahesh@12-217-228-235.client.mchsi.com)
03:03.32 pra5ad has been since ultimatum
03:03.55 pra5ad enjoyed the ftd presentation?
03:04.15 brlcad yeah, it was fine
03:04.24 brlcad the flower were pretty
03:04.48 pra5ad the stems confused me
03:05.16 brlcad see, there's something that's seriously needed
03:05.31 brlcad something better than boolean and/or trees
03:05.47 brlcad or probabilistic trees even
03:05.57 pra5ad i was discussing with ``Erik a way to combine both
03:06.02 brlcad it's not at all unlike the requirements of a shader language
03:06.13 pra5ad oh?
03:06.29 brlcad almost identical in many ways
03:06.48 pra5ad i dont get the whole flowchart business
03:07.12 pra5ad i visualize the 'tree' as a TREE
03:07.13 brlcad the next logical progression is to proper flowcharting, which isn't currently used
03:07.31 pra5ad the whole system of systems paradigm
03:07.35 brlcad it's a simplified flowchart with most of your regular flowchart operators missing
03:07.48 pra5ad but it's not supposed to have direction
03:07.55 pra5ad where's the flow
03:07.57 pra5ad and what is it
03:08.08 brlcad but even once/if there was a full flowchart, you run into the issues that programming languages ran into
03:08.47 brlcad sure there is flow .. they treat it as states, but the more advanced it gets, you need logic -- iterative logic for starters
03:09.07 brlcad if X then if Y then Z else A else B
03:09.21 brlcad multivariate states
03:09.54 pra5ad hrm
03:10.01 brlcad what's totally unrepresentable, though, is parallel dependent evaluation
03:10.14 brlcad where flowcharting falls apart
03:10.21 brlcad and that will eventually be needed
03:11.03 pra5ad so why not get a bunch of ppl together and discuss this once and for all
03:11.21 pra5ad lol
03:11.25 brlcad i should just write a report or something
03:11.35 pra5ad i swear noone knows wtf is going on
03:11.38 pra5ad how codes work
03:11.41 pra5ad ... sigh
03:11.48 brlcad discussions just turn into long drawn out nothings
03:15.23 brlcad howdy mahesh :)
03:15.43 mahesh hey, had some questions for you
03:16.31 brlcad ask away
03:17.15 mahesh instead of trying to plugin mpi stuff into the existing code, do you think I should just write a completely new one?
03:18.09 mahesh so that i wont have to worry about those complicated stuff done to handle multiprocessors
03:18.56 pra5ad hmm where would u need iterative logic?
03:19.02 brlcad initial gut feeling is that you should go with the existing as it takes care of quite a lot of details that you'd otherwise have to handle (like setting up the view grid, collecting results)
03:21.39 brlcad pra5ad: strictly speaking, you don't need iterative when asking a single node to evaluate (though you certainly could and one could argue that is the natural way to describe them)
03:22.03 brlcad they could all be recursively evaluated, functionally, etc too
03:22.27 brlcad it's a state machine, we're querying state at different conditions
03:22.29 pra5ad u cant mimic this using probabilities?
03:22.45 pra5ad keep maintaining the tree
03:23.08 brlcad depends what "this" is
03:23.15 pra5ad iterative logic
03:23.30 brlcad much yes -- that's what's done now
03:23.44 pra5ad whats missing
03:23.58 brlcad there are plenty of states that do not fit well like that though
03:24.44 brlcad parallel dependent evaluation is an easy one that comes to mind just because it doesn't even fit into a static state machine (which all our ft's are)
03:25.21 brlcad I could try to fake it with probabilities, but there are easily cases where the probabilities would be either meaningless or flat out wrong
03:26.20 brlcad and regardless, it's still a matter of whether or not that even is a "natural" way to describe the state and state failures
03:26.34 pra5ad u'll have to explain 'parallel dependent evaluation' tomorrow
03:26.50 brlcad seems rather natural to say "if this happens followed by this and this, then that happens some of the time"
03:27.53 brlcad think of some parallel code executing with interdependencies between them, locking whatever
03:28.32 brlcad try to flowchart the logic
03:28.32 pra5ad ah time dependancy
03:29.15 brlcad time/state/events/pcdh's/pkcurves/whatever
03:31.37 brlcad mahesh: if it's getting too confusing, please let me know :) I'm sure something can be done to help by either making a simplified rt with some aspects removed, or by explaining
03:32.28 brlcad mahesh: if you really think starting fresh will help, I'll still support you, but I do think you'll end up doing more work in the long run and we'd still want to merge the stuff in with rt eventually
03:40.15 brlcad mahesh: perhaps a good starting point would be to "make your own" raytracer by copying rt's existing front-end (cp src/rt/view.c src/rt/viewparallel.c) and adding it to the build (edit src/rt/Makefile.am) as 'rtp' or 'rt2' or something so you can make changes and remove stuff and still compare to the original
03:40.48 brlcad i could do that for you in just a few minutes, if you think it'd help
03:50.57 mahesh that was one more thing i wanted to ask
03:51.26 mahesh i am not that good with Makefile
03:51.38 mahesh I want to compile my program with mpicc
03:51.43 mahesh how do i do it?
03:53.00 brlcad you should be able to override when you run make
03:53.03 brlcad example:
03:53.21 brlcad make CC=mpicc
03:56.39 mahesh ok...got it
03:56.40 mahesh now,
03:56.54 mahesh do you remember the structure named server?
03:58.38 brlcad vaguely, can look it up
03:59.10 mahesh that actually stores information about each processor
03:59.23 brlcad huh?
03:59.29 brlcad not in rt, afaik
03:59.34 brlcad maybe in remrt
03:59.50 mahesh oops...wait a sec
04:00.38 brlcad rt uses a resource structure .. named "resource"
04:01.17 brlcad and one special one named rt_uniresource
04:01.38 mahesh i am sorry...thats what i meant
04:01.44 brlcad those allow for per-cpu storage of data
04:01.56 brlcad that should be thread/processor safe
04:02.38 mahesh should i use that structure?
04:04.05 brlcad sure you could, or create your own struct resource array for the nodes
04:04.54 brlcad i'd probably allocate your own for starters, just to keep it separate
04:05.05 mahesh ok got it
04:05.43 brlcad struct resource mydata[MAX_NODES_IN_CLUSTER];
04:05.59 brlcad or allocate dynamically with malloc, etc
04:08.51 mahesh thats fine....i was more concerned about alll the fields in the resource structure
04:09.58 mahesh i will go over again and ask you specific questions tomorrow
04:10.18 brlcad you'll need to init each one in the array
04:10.36 brlcad for (i=0; i < MAX_NODE_IN_CLUSTER; i++) {
04:10.50 brlcad rt _init_resource( &mydata[i], i, rtip);
04:10.53 brlcad }
04:11.01 mahesh yeah yeah...i get those stuff
04:12.12 mahesh i wonder when i will start coding some stuff!
04:15.49 brlcad mahesh: curious, what do you need the resource structures for?
04:17.05 brlcad if you mimic/replace the bu_parallel interface, you can use whatever structure/pointer you like
04:18.15 mahesh i wanted to follow the same way it is done currently. Now it is done for multiprocessors...i was planning to do for nodes
04:18.27 mahesh thats why i thought i could use the resource structure
04:20.11 mahesh you are spot on... replacing bu_parallel is what i should do
04:24.43 brlcad if you can replace bu_parallel dead on by only modifying libbu and librt, you'd actually add distributed capabilities across dozens and dozens of apps :)
04:25.26 mahesh every time you say such things, i get so excited
04:26.40 mahesh but till date, its all been flop from me
04:55.20 pra5ad u cant be serious.. migw-g++ doesnt recognize enums..
05:00.59 brlcad sure it does
05:01.21 brlcad i've compiled brl-cad with it
05:01.35 brlcad and there's at least one enum in there somewhere I think
05:03.30 pra5ad ahh there's an identifier that passes thru the linux gcc version
05:03.38 pra5ad that the cygwin one has reserved apparently
05:32.32 pra5ad =~(
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13:59.52 *** join/#brlcad Inktvlek (i=HydraIRC@81-171-3-223.dsl.fiberworld.nl)
14:00.08 Inktvlek Hello
14:00.24 Inktvlek I was wondering if there is any news on windows builds
14:00.44 Inktvlek I couldn't find it on the sf page
14:02.39 brlcad hello
14:02.53 brlcad there's an alpha build available if you're interested in testing it
14:03.13 Inktvlek yes that's ok with me
14:03.27 Inktvlek where can I find it?
14:03.39 brlcad if you run into any issues, please report them back here to me
14:03.45 brlcad http://ftp.brlcad.org/private/BRL-CAD_win32_20050916.zip
14:03.47 Inktvlek I will
14:04.26 Inktvlek thank you!
14:04.27 brlcad there will likely be a beta next month that gets posted to the site
14:04.46 brlcad http://brlcad.org under the Documents section for tutorials/documentation
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16:50.49 ``Erik *burp*
16:57.50 brlcad *burp*
17:17.21 Twingy_ *meow*
17:33.38 ``Erik don't you mean *flip* ?
17:33.51 Twingy_ *barf*
17:34.23 ``Erik http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;Q325038
17:34.38 ``Erik http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;Q172653
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