Subject: Figure bug swatted

From: Dave Stampe-Psy+Eng <dstamp@watserv1>
Date: Fri, 14 Aug 92 23:13:42 -0400

Found out why the demo crashes on some machines.  This only happens
when the figure file is present at the end of the file.  I was working
to reduce memory requirements, and it started to act up on my machine.
Random corruptions of data in memory, etc.  

Well, 4 hours later, it turns out that the stack was overflowing.  Bernie's
figure-loading code is very recursive, so I bumped the stack size to 10K
up from 4K.  Still over 150K of memory free after loading the room4.wld
(which only takes 50K of memory, BTW!).  Plenty of memory for new options, 
etc.

- DAve Stampe

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From: [email-masked] (McEWAN Shane)
Date: Sat, 15 Aug 92 14:55:43 EST

Dave Stampe-Psy+Eng wrote quite eloquently:
>
>
> Still over 150K of memory free after loading the room4.wld

I've heard this room4.wld thing mentioned a number of times. What is it?
Are you planning to release it into the public domain?

And, while I'm here, has anybody got any nifty .fig or .plg files they want
to share? The metalman, bishban and the hand are getting a bit tired now. :-)
And the last time I sat down to design my own .plg file I got something that
barely resembled what I had on paper. *grin*

===============================================================================
Shane McEwan
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[email-masked]
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---

From: Chris Hand <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 15 Aug 92 13:40:56 BST

> Are you planning to release it into the public domain?

Get hold of demo4.zip from sunee.uwaterloo.ca in /pub/rend386.
You may have to comment out the line that includes metalman.fig
since it crashes on some machines.

> barely resembled what I had on paper. *grin*

I sat down a couple of afternoons this week and wrote 2 programs for
generating .PLG files.  PRISM generates prisms, given the shape of the
end (ie. tell it 3 sides and you get a triangular prism).  It will also
do "fluted" prisms, whose ends are "stars" (it builds the ends out of polys
and triangles to prevent problems with concave polygons).  I also wrote BALL,
which generates approximations of spheres (plus one or two other shapes if
you tell it to use a small number of sides).  I will probably combine these
2 and add support for specifying colours and tiling patterns.

You can actually do a hell of a lot with a unit cube .PLG (the easiest one
to do by hand!), since you can scale and rotate in .FIG *and* .WLD files.
I built a roman temple from unitcubes (scaled & rotated), a triangular
prism (scaled & rotated) and some "cylinders" (20-sided prisms scaled
lengthways) for the columns.

I uploaded PRISM.ZIP (includes source) to /pub/incoming on sunee, but you
won't be able to download it until Bernie or Dave put a copy in /pub/rend386
or somewhere accessible.

The next thing I want to write is something to generate domes (just half
a sphere, but it'll need an inside too) and arches.  Then I can really
get building!

Chris

-- 
Chris Hand, Lecturer                Internet mail: [email-masked]
Dept of Computing Science,          Voice: +44 533 551551 x8476
De Montfort University, The Gateway,  Fax: +44 533 541891  FIDOnet: 2:440/32.50
LEICESTER, UK   LE1 9BH            >> We *used* to be Leicester Polytechnic! <<