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September 04, 2004
Viva el Hot Fuss
I recently picked up a copy of Hot Fuss by The Killers. To my synth-pop biased ears, it is truly excellent.
Posted by sombrero at 01:30 PM | Comments (0)
September 01, 2004
Isometric abstraction for KoalaRainbow?
Here's some output from a little Python playing from a week or two ago:
The blocks on the right are generated by fairly explicit function calls with explicitly named colors. The only abstraction they have is the 3d point transformation function. The blocks on the left are more generic; a generic rendering class takes a list of polygons and renders them using dot-product 'visibility culling' and dot-product brightness determination (the colors are actually HSV, with the hue associated with the object, the saturation always at max, and the V varying with the dot-product of the light vector and the surface normal.) All in all, nothing fancy, and a bit silly given the fact that any 3d engine can easily render things isometrically given the proper camera transform. (The HSV I presume can be implemented with shaders, but one might ask why not just use normal lighting if you've got it.)
Anywho, back on track. I'm considering taking KoalaRainbow and actually introducing some abstractions in the drawing stage, such as supporting things like the isometric magic above. Well, that and bulking up the primitives.
The fly in the ointment is that I don't like working with Perl. Since I generally like shiny things and always want to apply visualization to everything, ideally I could develop reusable code that could be used by KoalaRainbow, and then reuse that code in my other projects. Except all of my other projects are tending to involve Python. So I'm torn. There's the chance that people will use KoalaRainbow, which is always a good thing for a project, but then it's also a dead-end otherwise from my perspective. It seems unlikely that a hybrid monstrosity would fly; I might as well just dump KoalaRainbow and go with a pure-python plugin for PyBloxsom or some other pure-python blog short of plone.
But most importantly, this ranting provides a data point for KoalaRainbow to visualize. Muahaha! Comments appreciated because they are needed for visualization too. And heck, I haven't even tried to visualize trackbacks yet, so they might be fun as well.
Posted by sombrero at 03:11 AM | Comments (3)
KoalaRainbow 0.10.1 released
The only difference between 0.10.1 and 0.10 is that 0.10.1 is less stupid about setting up its paths in the failover case for krgui.cgi. Additionally, if it still fails, it will print out slightly more information which is of use to me. If you have KoalaRainbow installed and can access the visualization lab, you do not need this release.
Files, as always, are at: http://www.onlythewind.org/koalarainbow/files/
If you have any troubles with this new release, please post a comment on this post, and I will attempt to resolve it. Comments are good because I really need actual data to visualize. (I also need posts too, so I'll start posting gibberish again.)
Posted by sombrero at 02:57 AM | Comments (1)