Oshango

14th September 2004 22:11 UTC

Texer 2 Wishlist
Some random things I would like to see in the Texer 2 APE.

1. The ability to rotate each iteration(n) of the texer image. So if I have a line made out of ten points, and each point being a texer image, each point could be rotated n+n degrees. As it is, the top of the image always faces the top of the screen. It would be nice if say I made a circle out of 12 points, that the top of each texer image could be made to face the origin point, or face away from the origin point, or any degree in between. Another application is for making simple tentacles with a spiral shape. It could use a variable like, picr (picture rotation). Note, this is different from using a dynamic movement for rotation since the entire screen is not rotated, but rather the individual points of a line or curve are rotated.

1.a. So regular 2D rotation would be great. Rotation on x,y,and z axis would be really nice. With this you could very rapidly piece together a texture mapped cube; not to mention the endless effects that could be generated from having this ability. picxr, picyr, piczr.

2. There is the ability to Load examples. I would like to be able to Save examples as well. Perhaps making a file with a .txr extension.

3. There is a great 3D base included with Texer 2. It might be nice if this were updated with a basic light source. It might just have a few variables: x,y,and z cooridinates, color, intensity, and falloff. To keep things simple it could be a basic omnidirectional light rather than a spotlight.

3a. This might be frowned upon by the hard-core coders, but I think it would also be nice if the basic 3D base were built-in to Texer so that the 3d to 2d conversion and the rotation matrices were hidden in the background. This would clean up the visible code a great deal, making it a bit more like 3DS Max for instance. You type in your coordinates (or functions), x,y,and z, and you don't need to worry about conversions and rotation matrices. That is all happening in the background. Of course, hardcore programmers should still have the ability to code the whole thing from scratch, but for those of us who just want to plug in our geometry and path data, seeing the nuts and bolts of the 3D base isn't really neccessary. Additional tools that might be built in would be like cubic and quartic equation solvers, thus making texer 2 a bit more like Mathematica.

4. I would really like texer 2 to look in the same folder as the avs preset is in (as well as the main folder) for the texer image. As it is, my avs folder is bogged down with texer images. It would be much nicer if these texer images were neatly tucked away in the folders with their respective packs. It is also much less likely that someone will delete your texer image if it is in its own folder with the pack it belongs to. If the texer image is in the pack folder it belongs to then there is no question as to whether or not you want to keep it on your harddrive. Another use for this could be, if you wanted to imply that others could use your texer image in their own work, then you could have your installer put the texer image in the main avs folder. If the texer image is meant only for the one time use in your particular pack, then it should be in the pack folder. Tuggummi's Texer Resources for instance would still go in the main folder.

EDIT--
I forgot one more.
5. I know the png wish has come up before, but this would be nice since the inverse of the transparent color could be used as a mask for the individual texer points. A work around for this that would still be able to use the bmp file format would be the ability to load a second black and white bmp as a mask. So you could load your main image and a separate mask image. Actually, option 2 would be better and it wouldn't require trying to figure out how to parse the png files. Being able to mask each individual point would be very nice. As it is, if you don't want individual points to blend into each other then you have to use replace, but this makes it so your texer image has to be a rectangle. If you could have an alpha mask then you could have any shape you like and not have them blend in to each other. The z-buffer could equal i. The point first drawn would be in back and the last point drawn would be in front, or perhaps the z-buffer could have its own variable for more flexibility.
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Other than that I would just like to say that I really like Texer 2. Its definitely my favorite APE. I appreciate the time put into creating it. Thank you.

Oshango

Mr_Nudge

20th September 2004 04:14 UTC

With your image rotation idea, using picr( (i'm assuming a degrees value goes here) ), would it be more useful as a 2-part function so you can set the rotation of each point sepreatly or just a single point, so it would be picr(#,degrees) where "#" is a single point, or you could put "n" instead of "#" to assign "degrees" to all the points.

Oshango

20th September 2004 05:04 UTC

This is how I had invisioned it, though I imagine your way would probably do the same thing or something similar.

//Rotate every point 180 degrees
picr = $PI


//Rotate each point individually with a parametric function. The first point drawn would have no rotation, and the last point drawn would have the full rotation. Replace 2*$PI with the function of your choice. i can be replaced by cos(t) or sin(t), whatever, where t is a counter.

picr = i*2*$PI


//90 degree offset of above
picr = (i*2*$PI)+.5*$PI


//Rotate individual points discretely
picr = $PI * equal(counter,0)
+ .5*$PI * equal(counter,1)
+ 2*$PI * equal(counter,2)
+ .75*$PI * equal(counter,3)
+ 1.5*$PI * equal(counter,4);
counter=counter+1;

You could write the above as individual if statements as well.


Basicly, anyway that you can work with the x and y coordinates per point you would be able to work with the picr variable per point.