Message #235

From: Sebastian <sebm2@yahoo.com>
Subject: Re: gravitation3d.com
Date: Sat, 08 Apr 2006 09:13:06 -0700

whoa!!! I say.

— Roice Nelson <roice@gravitation3d.com> wrote:

> Melinda, you are such a great motivator :) Thanks
> for your positive
> response and excellent feedback. The other upbeat
> responses were great too,
> and made me think there is enough interest from you
> guys to warrant further
> work on this. Plus my good friend Charlie joined me
> in the effort, which
> has made this even more fun to work on. I just
> posted the next incremental
> version we’ve made
> (www.gravitation3d.com/magiccube5d), and have some
> inline
> responses and additional comments.
>
>
>
> *Inline Comments:*
>
>
>
> > * The wireframe representation does help one to
> see the structure though
> > it may be harder to select stickers. BTW, the 4D
> stickers look *very*
> > cool! With a wireframe design I’d personally
> prefer side-by-side
> > cross-eyed stereo views otherwise you can only
> make out the structure
> > while rotating it, but I know that is not for
> everyone.
>
>
> I don’t think it would be too difficult to do a
> side-by-side stereo version,
> and so I will hope to do that at some point for you.
> My personal stereo
> preference is the LCD goggles (I got mine at
> www.eDimensional.com). I’ve
> made Gravitation3D work with those and it’d be cool
> to do the same with
> this. The bummer is that they don’t work with
> windowed programs, and making
> it a usable full-screen mode program might be a bit
> of work.
>
>
>
>
> > * The 3D drag rotations clearly applies all of one
> axis rotation before
> > the other which makes it different to predict what
> will happen. I
> > suggest that you use the quaternion code that I
> use in the Java version
> > which makes it so that each drag increment always
> does what you
> > naturally expect.
>
>
> I definitely agree. The current mouse handling code
> was just pulled from
> Gravitation3D. (I will add this suggestion to the
> to do list, but will give
> it lower priority than the other items that need to
> be done first to make
> this a workable puzzle.)
>
>
>
>
> > * Instead of axis drop-downs for 5D rotations I
> would suggest a
> > lower-triangular grid of 15 small rotate buttons.
>
>
> Charlie had wanted these quick buttons as well, and
> I agree with you guys.
> The drop down combos are a bit cumbersome. Charlie
> has already started
> doing this. I think he is planning to have 10
> buttons (xy, xz, xu, xv, yz,
> yu, yv, zu, zv, uv) and to make it so left button
> clicks rotate one way and
> right button clicks the other. It would be good to
> allow rotations using
> only sticker-clicks too, but I think also having the
> buttons for convenience
> would be nice.
>
>
>
>
> > * I suggest that toggling of individual faces
> should operate on their
> > rotated logical positions rather than on their
> colors. IOW, like MC4D
> > does with the outside face.
>
>
> I agreed very much with this idea too, and this is
> now implemented.
>
>
>
>
> > * I understand that you wrote this mostly as a GUI
> feasibility study but
> > I encourage you to give some serious consideration
> to working out a UI
> > and implementation of a twist. I know that will be
> a huge task, and that
> > once you do that you’ll be all but compelled to
> turn it into a workable
> > puzzle and then compelled to solve it but it would
> still be way cool to
> > see some twists regardless of whether you ever
> take it further.
>
>
> I got a big smile reading the sentence about being
> compelled to do this
> stuff. It’s so true and I wonder why that is
> sometimes.
>
>
>
> I also wanted to let Remi know that even though
> there is no option to save
> the projection settings yet, Charlie is also
> planning to work on that.
>
>
>
> *Here are the changes done besides those already
> described above*:
>
>
>
> Charlie optimized the hell out of my nD vector
> class. The Debug version
> sped up by a factor of 12 and the release version by
> a factor of 4! Things
> are much smoother looking now.
>
>
>
> I added sticker highlighting, in the form of making
> the 4-cube lines thicker
> when you mouse over stickers. If you hold down
> shift with a sticker
> selected, all the connected 4-stickers of that
> 5-cubie will highlight. This
> is really nice for gaining more intuition about the
> puzzle and how it is all
> connected together (idea totally stolen from MC4D).
> At the very center of
> the puzzle, a bunch of stickers overlap, but there
> is currently no good way
> to highlight specific ones.
>
>
>
> Proof-of-concept twisting: If you right or left
> click any sticker, you’ll
> see face twisting. Unfortunately, this is not fully
> functional right now
> because I have not yet developed exactly how to
> choose the axes for twisting
> (more on that below). Right now, I just picked a
> couple of axes. However,
> you do get to see twisting and the mess of a
> scrambled puzzle :) A
> scrambled screenshot is at
> www.gravitation3d.com/magiccube5d/scrambled.png.
>
>
>
> Unfortunately, I broke allowing n^5 for n != 3. It
> should not be too bad to
> fix at some point, but I wanted to get this other
> stuff working first
> without worrying about that.
>
>
>
> *User Interface for the Twists:*
>
>
>
> I’d like to get the group’s input on twisting
> control. I’ve been thinking
> about it off and on this past week and have what I
> think is a decent plan. But
> the best approach is really not clear and feedback
> would be nice.
>
>
>
> To start off (sorry if this is obvious given the
> recent set of emails), I
>
=== message truncated ===

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