And the Dogwaffle of the Future

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Forum: CG News
Posted By: doghat
Post Time: 04-01-2011 at 09:17 PM
Text:

CODENAME HOWLER – The Dogwaffle of the Future

Development on the next generation of code base is well under way. "Howler" is
a big change for the product and will likely show up under a new brand name and
at a new price point.

This is a "back to school" process for us, as with version 4. We are taking a
look at all our fundamental algorithms, deciding where we want to go for the
future of the product. A lot has changed in the market over the last few years,
and we want to stay on the cutting edge. But computer graphics programming
isn't the super-secret science it used to be, pouring over technical papers and
textbooks. These days, every 5th grader knows how to rasterize a polygon, and
you can Google just about anything you want to know.

So, we're going over old code and updating some things to more standard
implementations. Gaussian blur is one example. We've managed to greatly speed
up this important function, which is good, as many parts of the program depend
on it. Not only that, but we've added an alternative to Gaussian blurring that
can be done in realtime. The user will have the option of which algorithm to
use. We're taking every opportunity to realtime "anything that will realtime."

We also decided that since we're a Windows only application, to go ahead and
have an interface that is more consistent with Windows 7. PD Pro started out on
the Amiga operating system, but the majority of users have never touched an
Amiga, so we are making some changes in that department, eliminating what some
would consider 'archaic' and addressing some Windows 7 quirks along the way. We
worked hard in version 4 to be compatible with Windows 7, and now we have some
time to work on smaller issues.

One example is the look of our buttons. They'll have a more glassy look to them
now. In another case, we're reversing the "Ctrl C/P" and "Alt C/P" keyboard
shortcuts because people are more likely to use the program to edit images than
they are to be making use of our custom brush system. These are a few small
examples of the changes we are making.

Another thing we're doing is rationalizing our interface. In the old days,
controls on dialog boxes were crammed together to make the most of low
resolution screen. The trend over the years has been toward higher resolution
screens with more white space and more elbow-room and readability. We're
updating some of our older panels with more white space, and tightening up some
of our newer ones to make them all more consistent, so they have more elbow-room
and still work nicely on netbook sized screens.

There will certainly be new features as well. One of them is a new low-level 3D
API we are adding. New 3d features can be built to make use of it. Right now
the API consists of fast gorraud shaded triangles, a transformation matrix
(that's a fancy way of moving points around) and some math functions to aid in
the creation of 3D programs, and it can grow with future demands. We also have
a fast feathered sphere that can be used for particles and that sort of thing.

We chose a software API so that in the future, features can be added that most
hardware API's don't support. Hardware API's are built strictly for performance
and sometimes need to sacrifice quality, whereas we want to have a fast API, but
not at the expense of features or quality. If a developer wishes to write for
Direct 3d, our regular API still works with just about any language that
supports COM. One could write a 3d function in VB.net and WPF (Windows
Presentation Foundation) that fully supports Direct 3D and XAML. We've also
added programmable control over our brush system with simple brush down/move/up
commands, so a 3d program could use our painting system as a 3d painting tool.

While it's too early to talk about release dates and big features, I hope this
has given a taste for what's to come in the future, and there's surely more to
come...

Dogwaffle/ PD Pro Digital Painter version 5 information and demos can be found at http://www.squirreldome.com/pdpro/Index.htm

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