Tuesday, August 13, 2013

Programming continued... vol 4

Have to start working now, so maybe last update in some time.

Latest improvements:
  • plugin system :)
  • ops with geometry operations
  • 3D view
  • viewer Op options for style overrides, also enables sorting of viewed table
Plugin system is a must in any program worth it's weight, so with some fiddling and hatchetwork I pulled this off. Program now checks the /plugins directory at startup and loads .dll libraries that comply with Op interface. From app side this works nice and easy, plugin development on the other hand is, in lack of better word, interesting. To make use of my nice knobs or in fact any other functionality in main app, all source files must be also added to plugin project. This gets them to compile but each plugin is as big as the application itself! Each file references functions in other files and makes this whole thing a bloody tangled mess. I believe it could be possible to make plugins that don't need to clone the whole program to work. At least other people can make this work...Clearly my lack of programming skills is showing its face here :)

In addition to ops with tables, new ops that create or modify geometry are now in place. Started coding a simple library of geometric primitives also, so that generic functions could be used on all of them for inserting vertices etc.

3D view is working as a proof of concept at the moment. Nothing special there and no 3D ops yet. Works on OpenGL.

Viewer Op is now officially an Op and so came functionalities. One can do style overrides, enable sorting of data tables and force points and lines to show constant size and width.

Ahaa, almost forgot! ComboBoxes and other knobs can update their content, for example Combo that lets user select a column for some operation now updates its values from input.


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