There's no "standard" coordinate system, so the choice is arbitrary.
However, an examination of the Transporter mesh in Elite revealed
that the mesh was designed for a left-handed coordinate system. We
can compensate for that trivially in the Elite visualizer, but we
might as well match what they're doing. (The only change required
in the code is a couple of sign changes on the Z coordinate, and an
update to the rotation matrix.)
This also downsizes Matrix44 to Matrix33, exposes the rotation mode
enum, and adds a left-handed ZYX rotation mode.
This does mean that meshes that put the front at +Z will show their
backsides initially, since we're now oriented as if we're flying
the ships rather than facing them. I considered adding a 180-degree
Y rotation (with a tweak to the rotation matrix handedness to correct
the first rotation axis) to have them facing by default, but figured
that might be confusing since +Z is supposed to be away.
Anybody who really wants it to be the other way can trivially flip
the coordinates in their visualizer (negate xc/zc).
The Z coordinates in the visualization test project were flipped so
that the design is still facing the viewer at rotation (0,0,0).
Experimented with different orders of rotation for wireframe viewer.
Made perspective projection the default behavior. Removed animation
parameters from the stored Visualization when it's not animated.
Also, tweak the perspective projection scaling to fill out the area
a bit more, and change the visualization editor to use the grid's
size when setting the path dimensions.
Also, note gimbal lock.
Added a new category "sprite sheet", which is essentially a more
generalized version of the bitmap font renderer. It has the full
set of options for col/row/cell stride and colors. (Issue #74,
issue #75)
Added a flag that flips the high bits on bitmaps. Sometimes data
is stored with the high bit clear, but the high bit is set as it's
rendered. (Issue #76)
Also, fixed the keyboard shortcuts in the Edit Visualization Set
window, which were 'N' for both "New ___" items. (Issue #57)
Added "show undocumented opcodes" checkbox, so you can choose
whether or not to see them at all. (Issue #60)
Added formatter call for the instruction mnemonics so they get
capitalized when the app is configured for upper-case opcodes.
(Issue #59)
Fix a bug where the instruction chart and ASCII chart were writing
their modes to the same setting, stomping each other.
Also, pluralized a button in the file concatenator.
For nonzero values we were leaving Z=prev, which is wrong when Z=0
because the AND result might be zero. Now if Z=1 we leave it alone,
but if Z=0 we now set it to Z=?.
Test 1003-flags-and-branches was testing for the (incorrect)
behavior, so we're now running into a BRK. This is fine.
We're generating names that nothing links to. The names aren't
guaranteed unique, so they're of dubious value anyway.
Also, fixed the Atari 2600 visualizer script filename in sys defs.
Should be solid/transparent not white/black. Added a blue color
to the palette to use for sprites, as white + transparent disappears
completely on web pages with a white background.
Black + white + grey seems fine for playfields.
The tool allows you to cut a piece out of a file by specifying an
offset and a length. A pair of hex dumps helps you verify that the
positions are correct.
Also, minor cleanups elsewhere.
Defined a simple monochrome bitmap format, and created some pieces
for a Tic-Tac-Toe game. Wrote a tutorial that explains how to
visualize them.
Also, updated some comments.
If you have a single line selected, Set Address adds a .ORG directive
that changes the addresses of all following data, until the next .ORG
directive is reached. Sometimes code will relocate part of itself,
and it's useful to be able to set the address at the end of the block
to what it would have been before the .ORG change.
If you have multiple lines selected, we now add the second .ORG to
the offset that follows the last selected line.
Also, fixed a bug in the Symbol value updater that wasn't handling
non-unique labels correctly.
As with still images, animations are rendered at original size and
then scaled with HTML properties.
Also, fixed the blurry scaling on animation thumbnails. I couldn't
find a way to do nearest-neighbor scaling in the code-behind without
resorting to System.Drawing (WinForms), so I added an overlay image
to the various grids.
Visualization animations are now exported as animated GIFs. The
Windows stuff is a bit lame so I threw together some code that
stitches a bunch of GIFs together.
The GIF doesn't quite match the preview, because the preview scales
the individual frames, while the animated GIF uses the largest frame
as the size and is then scaled based on that. Animating frames of
differing sizes together is bound to be trouble anyway, so I'm not
sure how much to fret over this.
This adds a new class and a rough GUI for the editor. Animated
visualizations take a collection of bitmaps and display them in
sequence. (This will eventually become an animated GIF.)
Fixed the issue where changes to tags in the set currently being
edited weren't visible to the tag uniqueness check when editing other
items in the same set.
We now generate GIF images for visualizations and add inline
references to them in the HTML output.
Images are scaled using the HTML img properties. This works well
on some browsers, but others insist on "smooth" scaling that blurs
out the pixels. This may require a workaround.
An extra blank line is now added above visualizations. This helps
keep the image and data visually grouped.
The Apple II bitmap test project was updated to have a visualization
set with multiple images at the top of the file.
(1) Added an option to limit the number of bytes per line. This is
handy for things like bitmaps, where you might want to put (say) 3
or 8 bytes per line to reflect the structure.
(2) Added an application setting that determines whether the screen
listing shows Merlin/ACME dense hex (20edfd) or 64tass/cc65 hex bytes
($20,$ed,$fd). Made the setting part of the assembler-driven display
definitions. Updated 64tass+cc65 to use ".byte" as their dense hex
pseudo-op, and to use the updated formatter code. No changes to
regression test output.
(Changes were requested in issue #42.)
Also, added a resize gripper to the bottom-right corner of the main
window. (These seem to have generally fallen out of favor, but I
like having it there.)
Added comments, renamed files, removed cruft.
Stop showing the visualization tag name in the code list. It's
often redundant with the code label, and it's distracting. (We may
want to make this an option so you can Ctrl+F to find a tag.)
First swing at a visualizer for Atari 2600 sprites and playfields.
Won't necessarily present an accurate view of what is displayed on
screen, but should provide a reasonable shape for data stored in
the obvious way.
The Adventure playfields looked squashed, so I added a simple row
duplication value.
Also, minor improvements to visualizers generally:
- Throw an exception, rather than an Assert, in VisBitmap8 when the
arguments are bad.
- Show the exception in the Visualization Edit dialog.
- If generation fails and we don't have an error message, show a
generic "stuff be broke" string.
- Set focus on OK button in Visualization Set Edit after editing,
so you can hit Enter twice after renaming a tag.
Various changes:
- Generally treat visualization sets like long comments and notes
when it comes to defining data region boundaries. (We were doing
this for selections; now we're also doing it for format-as-word
and in the data analyzer when scanning for strings/fill.)
- Clear the visualization cache when the address map is altered.
This is necessary for visualizers that dereference addresses.
- Read the Apple II screen image from a series of addresses rather
than a series of offsets. This allows it to work when the image
is contiguous in memory but split into chunks in the file.
- Put 1 pixel of padding around the images in the main code list,
so they don't blend into the background.
- Remember the last visualizer used, so we can re-use it the next
time the user selects "new".
- Move min-size hack from Loaded to ContentRendered, as it apparently
spoils CenterOwner placement.
Report visualization generation errors through an explicit
IApplication interface, instead of pulling messages out of the
DebugLog stream.
Declare that GetVisGenDescrs() is only called when the plugin is in
the "prepared" state, so that plugins can taylor the set based on
the contents of the file. (This could be used to set min/max on
the "offset" entries, but I want special handling for offsets, so
we might as well set it later.)
Bitmap fonts are a series of (usually) 1x8 bitmaps, which we arrange
into a grid of cells.
Screen images are useful for embedded screens, or for people who want
to display stand-alone image files as disassembly projects.
Various improvements:
- Switched to ReadOnlyDictionary in Visualization to make it clear
that the parameter dictionary should not be modified.
- Added a warning to the Visualization Set editor that appears when
there are no plugins that implement a visualizer.
- Make sure an item is selected in the set editor after edit/remove.
- Replaced the checkerboard background with one that's a little bit
more grey, so it's more distinct from white pixel data.
- Added a new Apple II hi-res color converter whose output more
closely matches KEGS and AppleWin RGB.
- Added VisHiRes.cs to some Apple II system definitions.
- Added some test bitmaps for Apple II hi-res to the test directory.
(These are not part of an automated test.)
Thumbnails are now visible in the main list and in the visualization
set editor. They're generated on first need, and regenerated when
the set of plugins changes.
Added a checkerboard background for the visualization editor bitmap
preview. (It looks all official now.)
The Visualization and Visualization Set editors are now fully
functional. You can create, edit, and rearrange sets, and they're
now stored in the project file.
Implemented Apple II hi-res bitmap conversion. Supports B&W and
color. Uses essentially the same algorithm as CiderPress.
Experimented with displaying non-text items in ListView. I assumed
it would work, since it's the sort of thing WPF is designed to do,
but it's always wise to approach with caution. Visualization Sets
now show a 64x64 button as a placeholder for the eventual thumbnail.
Some things were being flaky, which turned out to be because I
wasn't Prepare()ing the plugins before using them from Edit
Visualization. To make this a deterministic failure I added an
Unprepare() call that tells the plugin that we're all done.
NOTE: this breaks all existing plugins.
Added some rudimentary bitmap creation code. Got a test pattern
generated by the plugin to display in the app. (Most of the time
required for this was spent figuring out how bitmaps are handled
in WPF.)
Got parameter in/out working in EditVisualization dialog. Did some
rearranging in PluginCommon interfaces and data structures. Still
doesn't do anything useful.
Basic infrastructure for taking a list of parameters from a plugin
and turning it into a collection of UI controls, merging in values
from a Visualization object. Doesn't yet do anything useful.
WPF makes the hard things easy and the easy things hard. This was
a hard thing, so it was easy to do (with some helpful sample code).
Yay WPF?
Updated documentation for non-unique label changes. Added a new
section to tutorial #1.
Updated examples to use non-unique labels and variable tables.
Tweaked the EditLabel radio button names.