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It works for me.

6 (31.6%)

It does not work for me.

1 (5.3%)

I'd be willing to help test it.

6 (31.6%)

I'm not interested in testing it.

1 (5.3%)

I might be willing to help test it.

5 (26.3%)

Total Members Voted: 14

[Angle]

I'm going to try and dedicate myself to that full time after I finish this last week of college.

[Angle]

Alright, so It's a bit alter than I'd intended, but now I'm going to try and devote some time to this. Can you give me and anyone else who might be reading this an update on the current state of development and what needs doing right now?

[Anvilfolk]

The prototype server is working, prototype Agora lib is working, but now we need a Java client and don't have it. I've toyed with OpenGL (through libGDX) so we could have nice shapes moving around, but couldn't get PNG transparency working decently, and am busy with other things at the moment.

[Eagleon]

I'd like to work on this some during the weekend, since money-stress and moving-stress and stress-stress and ohgodI'moutofcoffee-stress is gone, and I have a working linux distro again with internet to do my own tests. I'll poke through what I can on github and refamiliarize myself with what you've been doing. Thank you for keeping this alive, anvil

[Anvilfolk]

Awesome I'm doing terrible with finding some nice java library for pretty graphics, for the client itself, so I dunno. I think there's some way to fix the OpenGL problems somehow, but I've spent a few hours to no avail.

I'll need to find some more time for this, but my evenings have suddenly become really busy with other things

[Eagleon]

Awesome I'm doing terrible with finding some nice java library for pretty graphics, for the client itself, so I dunno. I think there's some way to fix the OpenGL problems somehow, but I've spent a few hours to no avail.

I'll need to find some more time for this, but my evenings have suddenly become really busy with other things

I've never worked with OpenGL directly (oh god the abbrevs and utter lack of documentation), but I do know libGDX has lots of very nice wrapper classes for working with graphics (edit: thinking specifically of the PolygonSprite and other sprite classes, which support transparency and clean modification of scaling, rotation, translation, etc as well as packing into PolygonSpriteBatch, which could be faster). It was actually a library I was eying for the java side of things to begin with, since it does OpenGL ES and deploys to android or even iOS so easily if you've set things up right, and is nicely integrated with box2D and Bullet for fancy physics if we want to go that route. I can start pushing everything into GDX's classes to get something on screen at least maybe if I don't mess things up further

Ubuntu failed me for internet - it doesn't like my wireless one bit, and isn't afraid to drop connection at random for hours at a time to say so! I spent hours Sunday trying to figure out what was happening, but it's been impenetrable. Running ethernet isn't an option unless I want to thoroughly piss off my roommate. Are you still running the test server? I can work on this for about half an hour before work every day, and that should get me back to contributing on a consistent basis, but if anything I'd think linux would like my laptop's hardware even less.

[Anvilfolk]

Are you on a laptop? Take a look at disabling USB power saver settings. I've heard those can be big problems, but I'm honestly not sure how to fix them. I think it varies from laptop to laptop, but might be findable in the BIOS somewhere.


Anyway - the reason I was trying to get regular openGL to work is that we would be able to do some nice animations, like circles representing arguments opening up into nice rectangles with rounded edges. I assumed, erroneously, that OpenGL would be nice to vector-like graphics. It's not. We probably just want to go with minimal animations at this point, and just get a prototype out the door :\

[Eagleon]

Are you on a laptop? Take a look at disabling USB power saver settings. I've heard those can be big problems, but I'm honestly not sure how to fix them. I think it varies from laptop to laptop, but might be findable in the BIOS somewhere.

I've been trying to get my desktop running as a server of my own to understand that part of things better. At this point I'm expecting less trouble setting that up than I've gotten with ubuntu's seeming disdain of wireless internet I understand it, ethernet is faster, there's hundreds of wireless adapters out there, no one makes linux drivers because it's an extra thing to support, but arglblgergkguhgff. fbuhfv.

Anyway - the reason I was trying to get regular openGL to work is that we would be able to do some nice animations, like circles representing arguments opening up into nice rectangles with rounded edges. I assumed, erroneously, that OpenGL would be nice to vector-like graphics. It's not. We probably just want to go with minimal animations at this point, and just get a prototype out the door :\

There's probably a way to do it using regular openGL. I should probably learn GL ES or parts of it, because yeah, it's a lot more flexible to be able to do these things yourself without being tied to a library. I definitely wasn't trying to discourage you from that if you have the knowledge already. Just got excited seeing a toolbase that I've used and more or less understand

You could do the same sort of thing with PolygonSprite as far as I can see, using getVertices() and a tweening method to translate each one out towards your target shape, making and destroying new sprites each update. Punch a box-hole in the polygon, or decompose it into two tied at their edges if their math can't deal with holes, and you have a border. Or leave it alone and source your texture from the node's text data, and you have the interior. Playing around with TextureRegions, you should be able to make the border maintain rotation and scale to avoid weird distortions if what you're using is a meaningful pattern like wood or something like that.

But yeah, if nothing else, it's completely possible to drop GDX's classes into something that works directly with OpenGL to build closer to metal, or I wouldn't be suggesting this.

[Anvilfolk]

I'm sure there is, but I had the hardest time getting what seemed to be the obvious method to work, and gave up after putting two days in it.

The basic code is there, but I hadn't looked at PolygonSprite! Feel more than free to pick up the code and make something work. I'm still super busy at the moment

To be honest, as long as we keep a nice separation between the data and the visualisation, it doesn't matter how we implement the initial parts. We can always reprogram the visualisation at some point. At this point I don't think it even matters that we have something that looks decent. Just something that works

[Angle]

Are we using an outdated version of libgdx? I see in the code there's a point in ArgumentRenderer where we use 

Code: [Select]

ImmediateModeRenderer imr = new ImmediateModeRenderer10();, but when I look at the libgdx api, I don't see ImmediateModeRenderer10, I see ImmediateModeRenderer20.

[Anvilfolk]

Those have to do with what version of OpenGL you are using. To test things out I wanted immediate mode, which if I recall correctly is deprecated in the earlier versions of OpenGL and unavailable in the latest ones.

OpenGL does not seem to be the best idea anyway. It's far too low-level and we should try to find a nice vector graphics library for Java. I wasn't able to do so, unfortunately. Work's been an absolute nightmare for the past couple of months, and is likely to stay pretty demanding for the next few months/years, but I'd like to get back on track with this if I can find some spare time :\

[Angle]

Well, I'm going to try and do some work on this, (for real this time, I swear!) so you don't need to worry too much. I'll see about figuring out what to do with the graphics. Is there anything else that needs to be seen to in order to progress?

[Anvilfolk]

Not really, I think the intermediate architecture is, at the very least, at prototype strength. I tested it a bunch, and I think all of the data is transferring nicely. It just needs to be put into visual format. I'm not entirely sure what the best way to do that is, to be honest, but there you go

[Angle]

Does the client network with the database properly yet? It doesn't look like it has any code for that.

[Anvilfolk]

JAgoraLib is that one that does all the communications. It should have a few functions for grabbing information from the server!

It's used in TextClient.java, which is a simple text client for testing and debugging purposes, i.e. no graphics