Not much have happened on the SVN repository, this is the pain of not having an Internet connection and not being able to do local commits with SVN…
Overview:
- Offset added in nxtCanvas
- VarMaps and Polygons
- Command line improvements
- Adaptive thresholding
- Loading RIC files from a byte stream
- Download
Offset added in nxtCanvas
A huge update has been made to nxtCanvas which emulates the NXT screen. And offset to the drawing commands have been added, so instead of always assuming the lower left corner to be (0,0) it can be anywhere on the canvas.
It is not intended to be changed manually however. The reason for adding this is because you get some ugly side effects when automatic resizing of the canvas is turned on. If you use PointOut(-1,-1) with automatic resizing turned on, the canvas is expanded and the point is drawn at (0,0). However if you do this a second time, PointOut(-1,-1) will point to another pixel than the previous call which might not be desireable.
However a more serious issue was in the editing GUI for nxtCanvas. If you for example tries to draw a line it shows a preview before actually drawing it. When you move the cursor outside the canvas it automatically resizes. However if you moved the cursor to a negative coordinate it would still keep the canvas in the same place. If you tried to draw a line to (-10,-10) this command might have been issued 5-10 times because of the live preview, causing the canvas to be rapidly expanded. Because of this the live preview has until now had automatic resizing turned off, only turning it on just before the user stopped drawing.
While this is finally working as intended now, adding that offset was a pain since it caused pretty much everything drawing related to break.
VarMaps and Polygons
VarMaps have been implemented for a long time, however it didn’t have an editable GUI. And since this is one of the most important elements, RICcreator have been pretty much useless so far. The reason that I didn’t add it until now was that I was not satisfied with the way it is implemented in nxtRICeditv2 and wanted to do this differently. However I didn’t get any ideas on how to improve it so in the end I just implemented a similar design.
VarMaps and Polygons have been implemented using the same datatype in RICcreator, so the GUI for them both is the same.
With this done, RICcreator now supports editing every RIC opcode in the enhanced firmware. Only thing lacking now is implementing fill_shape for polygon and the special copy options for RIC fonts.
Command line improvements
RICcreator supported one parameter, a filepath to a RIC file to open. You can now open several files at a time by specifying more than one filepath.
A completely new addition is converting files through the command line. By using the “-convert” parameter you can convert RIC files to PNG. It is used like this:
RICcreator -convert FROM_FORMAT TO_FORMAT filepath
If you want to convert “circles.ric” to png you use it like this:
RICcreator -convert RIC PNG circles.ric
This will create “circles.ric.png” in the same folder as “circles.ric”.
Formats are:
- RIC: ricfile, can be used for both input and output
- PNG: PNG image, only output
- C: C header file, only output
RICScript will be added when implemented. Currently conversion is done with all RIC parameters set to 0, if anyone have a good idea to how these could written on the command line speak up!
A note on the PNG export using the command line is that the nxtCanvas is set to 0x0 and then every draw command resizes the canvas to fit everything. So the resulting PNG will not be 100×64, it will be sized to contain everything drawn and the (0,0) point.
Adaptive thresholding
Thanks to the material Linus from Mindboards gave me I have now implemented adaptive thresholding in the import image dialog. I have written the algorithm myself so it is a bit slow right now.
The improvement with using adaptive thresholding instead of global ranges from almost nothing to quite a bit. However it is more difficult to get good results with it so for now global thresholding is default.
Global thresholding to the left, adaptive thresholding to the right
Loading RIC files from a byte stream
It is now possible to load a RIC file from an array internally. This makes RIC loading much more flexible. I cover this more deeply in another post though. The most noticeable change this made for RICcreator is that the default RIC font is now embedded into the program and that it is possible to convert the file into a C header.
Download
Pre-Alpha revision 130: RICcreator rev. 130 – win32.zip