Near completion of Color Pattern Toolkit: IDE, engine, and font problems (part 1)

[Wilhelm Sanke]

While working on the public release of the Pattern Toolkit, by means of  
which the images of the pattern galleries "Pattern Art" and "Pattern Art 
Two" were created (see respective links on website 
<http://www.sanke.org/MetaMedia>), I encountered some new and revisited 
older problems that - at least to some degree - could be of general 
interest to the Rev community.

1. IDE aspects:

(For the latest version, I refer to Metacard 2.6.6 and Revolution 2.6.1, 
both with engine versions buildnumber 152.)

When I began experimenting with colors and color patterns I used fields 
or graphics as color units arranged in matrices of 45 x 60, 60 x 80, and 
60 x 90. As the resolution for resulting images was far too grainy I 
finally switched to a 120 x 160 matrix, which actually is the basis for 
the "Pattern Art" galleries on my website.
For various reasons - one among them (but *not* the only and most 
decisive one) because of sticking to old habits - I am inclined to still 
prefer the Metacard IDE over the Rev IDE.

Experimenting with matrices up to a 60 X 90 resolution worked smoothly 
in the MC IDE, whereas the Rev IDE had tremendous speed problems and 
problems of displaying controls and scripts in the application browser 
and property inspectors. This lead to my Bugzilla entries 2019 and 2217.

Bugzilla 2019 describes the fact that the Revolution IDE was indeed 
unable to handle stacks with more than about 2000 fields. In such a case 
the Rev IDE simply "froze". Bugzilla 2217 is about the inability of the 
Rev IDE to produce standalones from such stacks. Attached to the bug 
reports is my "RevTestStack" which can also be downloaded and inspected 
from my website <http://www.sanke.org/Software/RevTestStacks.zip> or 
from <www.sanke.org/MetaMedia>, page "Tools and Samples for 
Developments" with a commentary.

The speed problems of the Rev IDE fortunately have been resolved with 
Rev version 2.5.1 - due to the continued efforts of the Rev team to 
improve their new IDE - whereas the inability to produce a standalone 
from my 3300-fields test stack remains to the present day. See the 
commentaries of Bugzilla 2217. No problem however to produce a 
standalone from this stack in the Metacard IDE: It takes a fraction of a 
second to achieve this.

The present "field" version of the 120 x 160 matrix still works with the 
Metacard IDE as with the lower-resolution versions before, but at a 
considerably slower speed. As an example: Storing the roughly 58.000 
data items (19200 color units containing 3 color values each) in an 
two-dimensional array and custom property takes 55 seconds (on a Windows 
XP computer with 2 GHz and 1 GB Ram). Retrieving these data and 
restoring an image takes about the same time.
Such a speed however is an unsufficient working basis, as the many 
possibilities of color transformations of the toolkit usually require a 
number of repetitive sequences that individually and combined can take 
very much longer - a speed that is therefore inedaquate.

The latest Rev IDE (2.6.1) fails here more and completely: It lets you 
open the stack - takes about 30 seconds before the stack appears - but 
then you have to wait at least for two or three minutes before any 
action in the IDE is possible. Especially the MenuBar hardly responds 
and only after long waits between individual actions, which means the 
Rev IDE is totally inedaquate to handle such a stack.-

My present version of the toolkit relies on a 120 x 160 "char" matrix of 
a *single* field and uses the backcolor property of the 19800 chars. 
This implies the advantage that the stack has about 20.000 controls less 
than in the field version, but introduces at least one new problem about 
which I will report in my next post.

Storing and retrieving the 58.000 color values is now down to less than 
one second, which constitutes a workable basis for the "color pattern 
toolkit".
This speed is identical for both the Metacard and Rev IDE. However, - as 
before - it is impossible to build a standalone in the Rev IDE.-

See my next post in a day or two for the engine and font problems.

Regards,

Wilhelm Sanke, Prof.
Education and Educational Technology
University of Kassel, Germany
<http://www.sanke.org/MetaMedia>