Cathy's Weblog

For the past week I have been attending the GCD. Lots of really neat stuff that I learned while there. However, one of the most valuable things during this time was a chance to meet with Vlad about the c3dl project. I showed Vlad what we had and some of our concerns.

Mark, one of the developers for the project, had some concerns about how the animation looked and how it seemed to drop frames once in a while. Mark had a few ideas about this and thought it had to do with error checking on his arguments. As soon as as I showed it to Vlad, he had an immediate answer for me. Two words: Garbage Collection (GC). The hiccup that we saw in the animation was caused by GC. The other thing I learned was that doubles were garbage collected (something that should change soon). Since most of our information (vectors, matrices, etc) are store as doubles, garbage collection on doubles are even more noticeable.

Vlad had mentioned that this is likely going to fixed with the changes currently being made to JS.  In the mean time, we should continue to work on making our code as fast as possible.  Our scene is still very small so I wonder how a bigger scene would affect performance.

The Canvas 3d Library site (http://www.c3dl.org) is now officially up and running. The site was built by the PHUG group and they did a fantastic job of making it look good.

I’m really excited about the possibilities for our project. Currently we are not able to provide actual samples of Canvas 3D right on our site as it is not supported by today’s browsers. One day when it is supported, I think it would be really neat to just have samples built using our libraries right on our page. For now we’ll have to settle for quicktime captures (coming shortly)

Several things are happening today that I’m really excited about. The first is that our website is now up and running (see this blog post about it). The second is that we are now ready for our 0.1 release! Here is a screenshot of what you would see when you run it (the cubes are not static though… they will spin!) :

Ok… I know… its just 4 boxes. Nothing fancy. However the really neat part of this is not in the ability of to animate 4 cubes but rather the simplicity of how this can be accomplished using our API. Using the API, you can create the scene, the 4 spinning cubes and do the animation in under 30 lines of code.

Things that we need to do in the next little while:

Documentation – like many programmers, we really don’t have very good documentation in our code. We need to get our api documented so that people can actually do something with our API

Tutorials – Simple tutorials would be really useful. I have always found reading API documentations to be dumped into the deep end of a pool and then being asked “can you swmi?” Simple examples showing different uses of the API would be really helpful in showing its usage.

Code cleanup/review – the programmers working have a lot of background with C/C++. Not so much with javascript. What we could use is another eye to help us with fine tuning the API. Are we coding in the most effective way possible? Are we on the right track? What would make this easier to use? Do we need to abstract away more (there is still the need to use vectors in some of our calls for directions and so on… do we need to make it even more intuitive?)

This is our first really big step and we would welcome any feedback that we can get.