Andreas Raab wrote:
> On 6/2/2010 5:02 AM, Juan Vuletich wrote:
>> Andreas Raab wrote:
>>> Can you say something about what you're doing? I'm curious about what
>>> you've done to address this issue (and whether it's applicable to
>>
>> I can't say much right now. I hope you understand.
>
> I'm not sure. Do you mean you haven't quite worked it out and it's 
> just not clear to you how best to describe it, or do you mean to 
> protect your IP and don't want to talk about it in public?

I'm no big fan of IP. I don't even think such a thing exists. What does 
indeed exists is copyright of code (I'm ok with that) and math/software 
patents (I'm against them). I feel rather close to 
http://www.tinaja.com/glib/casagpat.pdf .

Anyway, this is the result of 3 years of unpaid work, and even if I want 
it all to be eventually in the public domain / MIT license (as 
appropriate), first I need:
1) Publish it with proper author attribution. It might be in a good 
magazine, or it might be as a Ph.D. thesis. Both require the work to be 
unpublished before.
2) Secure it in the public domain, so "bad guys" can't patent it.
3) Make some money, to be able to keep working on interesting stuff. 
This could be done by selling consulting services to someone interested 
in my work, provided they don't want to restrict what I can do with it.

When I have these worked out (and I welcome help and suggestions from 
you guys!), I'll be able to make it all available without restrictions.

>> What I can tell you
>> is that it is a post processing done on the rendering of a group of
>> polygons. So it fills naturally in my #exportAsPNG: method. It is not
>> too expensive, it makes my export operation about 20% slower. So, it
>> might be adapted to real-time drawing of the morphic desktop. The issue
>> is that if it is done on a morph by morph basis (so that drawing of
>> different morphs is independent as it is today), then it would avoid the
>> defect if it occurs between polygons belonging in the same morph, but
>> not on polygons belonging to different morphs.
>
> Right. Obviously, one needs to compute the full adjacency graph and 
> overlap of the polygons to address the problem. Which is one half of 
> the problem. If the input is well-structured, like for example in 
> Flash (which has all the 'internal' adjacency information for its 
> shapes) it is quite possible (though still pretty expensive) to 
> compute accurate coverage without introducing these artifacts.
>
> I remember looking at this briefly when I wrote the Balloon engine but 
> kind of gave up on it due to the other half, namely the issues of 
> horizontal and multiple sub-pixel edges. Theoretically it should be 
> possible to adjust a classic scan line algorithm to compute the proper 
> coverage but it became too messy too quickly ;-)
>
> In any case, let me know when you got something written up; I'm just 
> really curious what you're doing.
>
> Cheers,
>   - Andreas

Sure.

Cheers,
Juan Vuletich