[GEM-dev] how close are we...

[tigital]

On Monday, July 21, 2003, at 03:31  AM, Daniel Heckenberg wrote:
>  
> Fonts.  I've been letting that one sort itself out.  I'll see whether 
> the latest checkins work on windows sometime soon.
>  
> Big one:
> Documentation. 

...i think this is the biggest too, because we are way behind on it ;-) 
  I'm not sure what we should do about merging the extant docs with what 
chris has been doing, and IOhannes' "GEM primer" is also nice, but 
really all three of these docs cover the same basics, and a more cogent 
distillation could result, perhaps with a more "designed" look...also 
might be nice to have some overall intro, or at least links to, info 
about image processing, because the use of things like convolutions and 
filters is pretty intimidating to the uninitiated (and there has been 
mention that GEM should have a "teaching" function)...

...there are plenty of other doc/example things that could be done to 
make introduction to pd/gem concepts more playful, such as an example 
multi-movie player with multiple effects and blending (which I already 
have something like)...along these lines, we've talked about doing 
"abstractions", but none have really appeared:  I'm thinking about 
things like:
- a camera abstraction that would make movement more like a "normal" 3d 
engine/game (ie. pitch, roll, yaw):  but do we go sin/cos and suffer 
gimbal lock, or have an all out quaternion setup?
- vertex manipulations via the OpenGL wrappers that would do similar 
things to the geos newWave, ripple, rubber, etc.
- perhaps general tutors for the OpenGL wrappers (ala nehe's stuff)?
- fonts as particles, or individual control over sub-string characters
- other things that haven't even occurred to me ;-)...we all use GEM 
somewhat differently, so we could all use some example that exhibits 
methods of working that aren't elsewhere covered...

...besides the above, does everyone like the example patches?  From the 
questions we get about use, it's sometimes hard to see that newbies 
actually look at them, but just the same they should be a robust set of 
examples...also, I just compared the help files with actual source 
files, and here's a list of objects that don't seem to have help files 
built:
GEOS
cuboid
newWave
ripple
rubber
slideSquares

MANIPS
polygon_smooth

MARKEX
abs
m_control?
multiselect?
reson?
strcat?

PARTICLES
part_info
part_render
part_vector?

PIX's
pix_background
pix_backlight
pix_blur
pix_buffer (read/write?)
pix_chroma_key
pix_color
pix_colorreduce
pix_compare
pix_convert
pix_crop
pix_delay
pix_depot (get/put?)
pix_dot
pix_duotone
pix_dv
pix_emboss
pix_grey
pix_info
pix_levels
pix_lumaoffset
pix_mix
pix_motionblur
pix_pix2sig~.pd or pix_pix2sig.pd?
pix_posterize
pix_rds
pix_roll
pix_scanline
pix_sig2pix~.pd or pix_sig2pix.pd?
pix_snap2tex
pix_test
pix_tIIR
pix_yuv

...so I guess we all have a little bit of effort to put forth 
here...plus, existing objects such as gemwin, pix_film, pix_texture, 
and others have undergone major changes, so they also need to be 
reviewed/updated...

...beyond that, some of my "soon todo" list includes:
- adding other model formats
- fullscreen motion blur
- "snap to tex" that results in a further processable image
- quicktime vr (is there anything like this on linux?)
- vertex/fragment programming/shaders

...enough of a job to keep us busy for awhile!

l8r,
jamie
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