Message #5

From: David Vanderschel <DvdS@Austin.RR.com>
Subject: Fwd: Re: [MC4D] Transparency
Date: Fri, 01 Aug 2003 19:27:37 -0000

Date: Sat Apr 6, 2002 10:57 am

— In MC4D@yahoogroups.com, Jay Berkenbilt <ejb@q…> wrote:

> Sorry, I wasn’t very precise about what I meant. I wasn’t
suggesting any
> changes regarding the invisible face, but rather the
hyperstickers on the
> outside ‘edges’ of all the visible faces.
> The reason being that when you are trying to place the inside
cubelets
> of each face, part of the problem is actually verifying what
colour they
> are, since they are obscured by the outer hyperstickers. I found
myself
> wiggling it round a lot to see between the gaps.

These X resource values:

MagicCube4D*eyew: 8
MagicCube4D*stickershrink: .4

make the 4^4 cube a lot easier to see. You can put the above two
lines in the .Xdefaults or .Xresources file in your home directory.
(If you already have one, use that one. If not, .Xresources is more
standard and supported by most distributions, but .Xdefaults is almost
certain to work in any environment. It depends upon how your login
environment loads your resources – if it uses xrdb, which it should,
then .Xresources is your better bet.)

You can play around with these and other parameters. Look at the
readme files for details. I was thinking about having the system
automatically calculate values for these based on the number of pieces
per side. When I brought this up a few years ago, Don offered the
following, which I haven’t looked at recently:

> For an nxnx… puzzle, to get the stickers on a cubie to meet,
> set F=faceshrink in terms of S=stickershrink as follows:
> F = n / (n-1 + S)
> For example:
> n=3 S=1 F=1
> n=3 S=.5 F=1.2
> n=3 S=0 F=1.5
> I think it looks better with a small crack, e.g. S=.5,F=1.19.
> Other interesting values are S=.95,F=1– this makes it look
and act like
> a 3-D Rubik’s cube (as long as you don’t click on corners or
edges).
> However, most of these interesting non-standard values
> show up the inadequacy of the depth-sort algorithm, even when
> sitting still.

Good luck!

                            Jay<br> --- End forwarded message ---