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Subject: 
Re: L3Lab - yet another LDraw viewer
Newsgroups: 
lugnet.cad
Date: 
Tue, 15 Feb 2000 17:05:37 GMT
Viewed: 
745 times
  
In lugnet.cad, Lars C. Hassing wrote:

Do you plan on releasing the source code?

Yes. But I would like to reorganize the code first. Remember it is still
an experimental program - all sorts of speed-up algorithms are present
in the code controlled by some flags. Many too-slow tries should be
deleted first.

Just don't get bogged down in the cleanup!  Hey, I released the LDAO source
code.  And that's some of the ugliest code I've ever coded.

Chris Dee wrote...
Well done Lars and thanks for releasing it. The mouse controlled rotation will
be a great help for checking new parts.

I especially like to have "Show all colors as transparent" ON and "Dither
transparency" OFF when rotating new parts. And random colors.
Also "Show ALL Line Type 5" is useful.

L3Lab will definitely do a lot to help with parts-inspection.  Even just being
able to rotate with the mouse will make the process so much easier!

Steve Bliss wrote...
Wow.  I'm amazed.  My ridiculous big ship renders in 18 seconds.  Regardless of
the zoom setting.  LDLite takes some 80 seconds on the same model.

Really, I think the zoom setting does matter?

Well, I only tried reasonable zoom settings, 45% to 100%.  I didn't see a
significant speed difference in this range.

<click click click> I just tried it at 1% zoom.  It only took 5 seconds to
render.

The choice of yellow as the edge-color for red was unexpected...

The edge color of 4 is 12 light-red, and I can see my light-red is
rather yellow, RGB(255, 154, 33) as opposed to LDraw RGB(255, 85, 85).
My light-red was chosen for L3P's 32+12=44 Transparent light-red (orange),
when L3P used the same colors (RGB values) for non-transparent and
transparent colors. I have changed this for the next L3P, as this
tweaking/compromising of RGB-values to fit both sometimes resulted
in inexpedient colors.

Ah.  OK.

Bram Lambrecht wrote...
2) Can I turn off error messages?  For example, it's annoying that it tells me
   I only have 65536 colors every time I start the program.

I have experienced some funny problems on my graphics board (NVidia RIVA 128ZX)
when I only use 65536 colors, so I thought I'd better issue a warning. There were
differences in the background color in the updated areas.

I just noticed that off-color background problem.  I've got an NVidia 4400.  But
I haven't seen a big enough variation to worry about it.

3) Can I change the default background color, zoom, etc?

Well, not yet. I still need to figure out what the best GUI for camera settings
would be. And I need to make a dialog for general/default settings.

IMO (not that you asked), the best GUI for the view angle (not necessarily other
view settings) is a drop-down list of predefined settings, with an additional
dialog for the user to add the current settings to the list.

5) What command line options does the program support?

Currently only a filename (used when dropping a file to the program icon)
But I have thought of -P for polling a file from LDAO.
Now you have to turn on polling in the File menu.

Polling should turn off the error messages, at least as an option (maybe -P1?)

Fredrik Glöckner wrote...
I'm stunned speechless!  Wow.

You may consider restricting the views to be -- uhm, what's the
correct term again? -- isometric?  When starting out with an oblique
view and rotating with the mouse, you may end up with a view that is
"skewed".  I think that forcing the axes to be perpendicular and
equally scaled may be a good idea.

and Sproaticus added...
This happens only (that I've seen) if you use the "Ldraw View" view, which is
slightly skewed in and of itself.  If you use any of the true isometric views
(starting from the toolbar button *after* the "Ldraw view"), the model doesn't
skew during rotation.

This is correct. The standard LDraw 3D view (which L3Lab starts with,
and which you can select with the toolbar button with the green dot)
is not an orthographic view, it is oblique. So when applying rotation
to the standard LDraw view matrix, you get a more and more skewed image.
I did think about automatically switching to orthigraphic when pressing
the mouse button, but I left it as a "feature" because it looked funny.
But I agree, it is confusing. I have now changed to code to do the switch.

Fredrik Glöckner continued...
Also, I would like to se an output of the transformation matrix of the
current view (for use in, eg., LDAO or LDraw), and it would be nice to
be able to save the current image.

You can have the matrix in Test/Statistics.
Do you want a one-liner too to paste into other programs?

Yes, that would be quite helpful.


Steve



Message is in Reply To:
  Re: L3Lab - yet another LDraw viewer
 
Thank you all for the many nice comments. Here follows replies to several questions: Michael Lachmann wrote... (...) Thanks Michael. L3Lab is built on MFC (linked statically), it hasn't any OpenGL, DirectX or other libraries. It is written in C/C++, (...) (24 years ago, 15-Feb-00, to lugnet.cad)

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