SGI: Development

nice thanks for the update. good to see something is maintained steadily

Hi J !

Thanks for this little piece of software that gives another interest to our old machines

I was thinking about another trick to make the reader's experience smoother in low-end machines. Would it be possible to add another file reading option, I mean that three pages could loaded in the memory: the current one, the previous and the next one ? In that case, transition to those surrounding pages would be faster when flipping pages, while keeping the memory requirement to a reasonable amount.

BX

BetXen wrote: Hi J !

Thanks for this little piece of software that gives another interest to our old machines

I was thinking about another trick to make the reader's experience smoother in low-end machines. Would it be possible to add another file reading option, I mean that three pages could loaded in the memory: the current one, the previous and the next one ? In that case, transition to those surrounding pages would be faster when flipping pages, while keeping the memory requirement to a reasonable amount.

BX

You're v welcome!

When I added per-image viewing I did consider implementing the 3-file configuration you're suggesting, but I think to do it properly you'd have to use threads to read the files in the background while the main X event loop does its thing. Unfortunately, I have no idea how threads work. Or maybe workprocs, but I dont think that's what workprocs are for. Anyhow, it got too complicated and time-consuming for my tiny brain so I just blundered ahead with what we have now

That said, I did stumble upon an ugly bug in the file loading this morning. If comix doesn't have record of a previous CBZ/CBR file and you have per-page memory handling set, comix crashes when displaying a menu. The menu appears over the underlying opengl surface which forces a redraw, which currently needs image data to be present. But there isn;t any, as there's no record of a previous file. To make things worse, the menu-display crash happens before the file-dialog is posted so it's impossible to load a new file... It makes comix 0.3.3 significantly less useful than I had hoped it would be

Will be fixed in 0.3.4.

J.

Hello All,

This new version of Comix fixes the horrible menu display/file loading bug in 0.3.3 and introduces basic CBZ creation. You can now point Comix at a directory filled with JPEGs and it will compress those files into a shiny new CBZ.

Known bugs:

- random issues where unpack directory isn't cleared causing a newly opened comic to be 'added on' to previous comic.
- sometimes 1st page doesn't show properly, or Comix crashes on initial image load.
- CBZ creation dialog doesn't check hard enough whether your JPEG source directory exists or if your output name is sane.

Comix 0.3.4

- Menu display/file loading bug fixed
- Menus are now placed in overlay planes to remove image flicker
- Dialogs are _not_ placed in overlay places as they look horrible there
- Basic CBZ creation
- Option to wrap comic at begining and end
- Code cleanup

Long time. No new Comix tarball. But now I'm working on 0.4 and am bumping into my limited understanding/experience of OpenGL/C++.

I'm trying to implement the 'change background colour of the image window' feature by using the glClearColour/glClear pair of OpenGL functions in Viewer.C.

What I'm seeing is that glColorClear/glClear works fine on the first run though the code. ie. the image panel is set to grey (or whatever other colour) when Viewer::setBgColour() is called from Viewer::ginit(). However, when Viewer::setBgColour() is called from the right-click activated pop-up menu on the image viewer panel... nothing happens. I have a feeling it might be due to the relevant OpenGL context not being active, but I'm not sure how to go about fixing it as the context does seem to be set in the VkOpenGL::cb_* parent-class callbacks.

Any help and explanation as to what I'm missing and/or doing wrong here would be appreciated.

J

Still stumped by the glClearColor/glClear issue, but have ticked off one more thing from the TODO list while I wait for help.

Comix 0.4.1
- added 'jump to page X' feature. Press 'j' to use.

J.

Am away from my SGIs through Jan 4 but will definitely be seeking to contribute to this effort thereafter...

Yay!

For anyone who may not have memorized it yet, the Viewkit developer's guide is here.

By a strange coincidence I have the Linux version of Viewkit that SGI released through ICS for a mere $200 about 15 years ago. ICS still has a webpage for Viewkit here, but they no longer list it as one of their available commercial products...

Hey all,

Some minor progress was made on Comix over the holidays:

Comix 0.4.2
- improved configuration file handling
- adressed some of the issues with the temporary/unpack directory handling
- fixed a bunch of small things

For extra IMD-ness add:


to your ~/.Sgiresources file and log-cycle or run:

Hey all,

Figured out the OpenGL issue, but am now back to C++ hurting my head. Sigh.

latest code:

even tho viewkit is c++ you don't have to use c++ for your parts if you get along better with c. speed will be on your side in that case

jimmer, 0.4.2 would not build for me, I had to add #include "UI.h" and #include <iostream> to both UI_callbacks.C and UI_methods.C, which then worked...

Also, would you be so kind as to paste in the result of -ls -l /usr/lib32/libvk* for me? Thanks a bunch my viewkit library seems to be borked...

Hey Vishnu, when I fire redbox up again, it'll be amongst the first things on the TODO list.