[PD] Data structures - delete specific scalar?

João Pais jmmmpais at gmail.com
Sun May 20 15:44:43 CEST 2018


Just thought of this after sending the previous mail. I can't try this  
hack, but it might work. To delete a scalar:
- get the scalar's x/y coordinates
- use mouse messages to select and delete anything over that pixel.

Drawbacks:
- will delete anything else over that pixel (affects the selectable area  
of any scalar)
- the canvas will need to be traversed again before getting a pointer (as  
the scalar list will need to be redone)

It might work, but only under certain circumstances.

Joao

> as I recall, in a mail Miller said that it wasn't easy to implement a  
> "delete" (or "previous" etc.) methods, because it would mix up the  
> pointer structures. But most likely I'm remembering incorrectly.
>
> The lag with scalars is a real thing, as with any other canvas with lots  
> of gui objects running in tcl/tk - including that in scalars you have  
> extra lag if you move the mouse over them, even without clicking.  
> Switching off the mouse detection on demand would make things faster.
>
> I have a patch with more than 33548 scalars, and it takes several  
> minutes to open in my desktop; on my laptop, it just stays there with  
> cpu at 100% without opening.
>
> Best,
>
> Joao
>
>> Thanks for your testing!
>>
>> The lag appears on my computer already with the patch i sent with the
>> 1050 scalars. It shows when i open the patch, create any object, say a
>> [float] and try to move it around.
>>
>> With more scalars it can become even worse. You can test it with the
>> attached patch. First select width and height and then click create. It
>> creates a rectangle made of width x height one-pixel-scalars.
>>
>> With about 100 x 100 pixel, clearing the patch becomes increasingly
>> slow. With 640 x 256 pixel, it took more than nine minutes on my
>> computer to clear the subpatch or even to close the window, so be  
>> warned! ;)
>>
>> The reason for the lag is afaik, that all interface objects are
>> constantly redrawn by Tcl, so it is not limited to scalars.
>>
>> best, ingo
>>
>>
>> On 05/19/2018 11:23 PM, Roman Haefeli wrote:
>>> On Sat, 2018-05-19 at 17:00 +0200, Ingo Stock wrote:
>>>> On 05/19/2018 11:56 AM, Roman Haefeli wrote:
>>>>> Yeah. It's not very elegant and gets expensive pretty quickly. I
>>>>> was
>>>>> wondering about alternative strategies, like moving non-used
>>>>> scalars
>>>>> out-of-the-way and later re-use them. It's cumbersome to implement,
>>>>> but
>>>>> probably less drastic than the clear-all-and-rebuild method.
>>>>
>>>> Can only answer to this: There are several methods to make scalars
>>>> invisible. Anyhow, in my experience the method to clear the subpatch
>>>> and
>>>> recreate everything works quite well and is imho the clean approach
>>>> to
>>>> do it, as all the scalars are redrawn every frame any way.
>>>>
>>>> There are other limits to the use of data structures. Depending on
>>>> your
>>>> computer, when you get above 800 scalars or so, the patch becomes
>>>> laggy.
>>>
>>> Thanks for your considerations. That is exactly the kind of info that I
>>> was looking for. I don't share the experience with the limit of 800,
>>> though, but this is presumably related to the computer/CPU.
>>>
>>>> Consider the attached patch:
>>>
>>> Nice and illustrative example patch.
>>>
>>>>  On load 1050 scalars are created, which is
>>>> already quite heavy on my computer.
>>>
>>> I'm not sure I understand correctly. Just having the patch open is
>>> heavy on your box? Or interacting with it?
>>>
>>>> Anyhow, deleting a scalar by
>>>> clicking on it works fine, using the clear and redraw method.>>
>>>
>>> It works fine for me, too. Then I measured the time it takes to redraw
>>> different numbers of squares. It seems computation time is roughly
>>> proportional to the number of redrawn objects (1: 0.08ms, 500: 3.9ms,
>>> 1000: 7.6ms). So there is a penalty of this method with larger numbers
>>> of scalars.
>>>
>>>> Hiding scalars by making them invisible doesn't help with the lagging
>>>> problem. Therefore i would recommend the clear and redraw method any
>>>> day. ;)
>>>
>>> I don't experience any lags by making specific scalars invisible. It
>>> takes 0.007ms to make a single scalar invisible within a subpatch of
>>> 1050 squares. See my modified version of your patch.
>>>
>>> Roman



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