[Newbies] Antialiased Morphs?

[Bert Freudenberg]

On Jan 31, 2007, at 15:17 , Sebastian Nozzi wrote:

> Hello people,
>
> as you know I have been playing with Rome a bit. My question is:
>
> Can I use RomeCanvas to make a Morph (or, for instance, ALL of  
> them) anti-aliased?

In principle, yes, though it's going to be a lot of work.

What is much better supported is Balloon rendering (the engine behind  
Squeak's Flash player). Basically, you just send #asBalloonCanvas to  
a regular Canvas, set the antialiasing level (up to 4), and draw.  
See, for example, WatchMorph. Create one, and enable AA in its halo  
menu.

> Has someone made efforts in that area? (Tweak maybe?)

Yes, the Rome-Tweak package contains a RomeTweakCanvas that mimics  
CTransformCanvas, which is normally used for Tweak rendering. It's  
much easier to do than for Morphic because Tweak has a much cleaner  
graphics model. You can toggle its usage on and off, it's got a nice  
quality boost. The plan was to use this while transitioning to a pure  
RomeCanvas, but this effort has stalled.

> If not, I would be willing to investigate the possibility  
> (antialiased graphics is a must for me).
> Correct me if I'm wrong, but I would need to see that all the  
> drawing operations of FormCanvas are supported, right? Or how would  
> you proceed?

Yes, but there are many places in Morphic that rely on the canvas  
being a FormCanvas, and even direct bitblt operations.

> P.S. Is this the right place to ask these questions? Or is there a  
> Rome mailing list?

This isn't exactly newbie stuff, so I'd rather take this to squeak- 
dev. There is no Rome list, as far as I know you are the first one  
trying to use it for Morphic rendering.

- Bert -