Developer @ Chaotic Box

Please note that "attributes" is now a reserved word as of REALbasic 2008r2 and since some of my open source code uses "attributes" as a property name it will fail to compile. This will be fixed in the next revision of each affected project but for now a simple search-and-replace should fix the issue if you are affected.

April was a bit of a blur and although I can't offer any release dates I did want to post an update of things coming down the pipe.

First, I've put quite a bit of work into my OxMath Classes, (finally) adding 2D and 3D line segment "bounds" classes and a way to control the fudge-factor for certain point and line intersection tests to counteract rounding errors.

Another big OxMath addition is all new animation path classes and interpolation methods. The paths are based on cubic-Hermite curves for predictable results (paths always pass through control points) and provide distance-based samples and direction normals. Basically these classes let you easily animate an object along a path at a constant rate while simultaneously returning the current path direction - click the thumbnail for a preview. Naturally, the path classes come in both 2D and 3D flavours, and the low-level interpolation methods used to grab parametric curve values between anchors are also globally exposed.

I'm also considering releasing a plugin I wrote a while back based on the public-domain stb_image.c source. That code is a tight cross-platform image loader capable of reading PNG, JPG, TGA, BMP and PSD files - though in most cases only a subset of features are supported, no interlaced PNGs or progressive JPGs for example. Even though the loader is somewhat limited, I've found it to be ideal for loading external assets such as game textures. The plugin itself doesn't touch the Rb Picture class, but instead returns a custom class that essentially just wraps raw 8-bit image data (oddly enough, the class and plugin are named ImageData). This may not seem all that useful in general, but anyone using OpenGL in Rb via declares or plugins knows what a pain in the arse it is to get OpenGL-compatible image data out of the standard Rb Picture object. I'm still on the fence as to whether or not to release this however, as it will take some work to make it presentable and I'm currently only maintaining a Mac OS X target. So please let me know if you're interested.

That's about it for now - I'm also working on an update to my oft-neglected eDrum MIDI Mapper shareware so don't expect any open source updates till that's released.