Timothy's Thoughts

Update: I'm happy to say that after writing this post I made the decision to revise the book and it is now available for purchase. In the process, I developed a cloth simulator plugin for Art of Illusion. I include it as part of the book as an example of a use of Art of Illusion Distortions. W hen a reader of Extending Art of Illusion contacted me about the possibility of updating the Art of Illusion scripts to Groovy, I became concerned. Firstly, because he wasn’t able to download the source code from the location specified in the book. Broken links on a webpage are one thing, but broken links in a book can be costly. Secondly, because I haven’t attempted to keep up with all of the changes to Art of Illusion that have taken place since the publication date of the book. There hasn’t been enough demand for the book to justify a revised edition. To address my concerns, I went back through the examples I included in the book—rebuilding with latest Java compiler and using Art of ...

U sing a resource file in Eclipse is possible. While writing a blog about how to develop Windows programs using Eclipse and C++ I ran into a problem that I needed a tool for, namely to quote C++ code in the blog. So, I wrote a little program in C++ using the techniques I was discussing, but later I decided it would be an ideal project to rewrite using a resource file (.rc). There are a few things you have to do to get it to work. First, Eclipse doesn’t provide the slick resource file editor that you find in Visual C++. This means that to edit the .rc file you will need to use a text editor. This isn’t particularly hard to do, but I did find myself questioning whether I was gaining anything by using the resource file over just making the calls I needed in the C++ code. One thing that I can say that I don’t like is that you must use #define in the header file rather than defining constants with static const or as an enum . Second, the .rc file has to be compiled using a special compile...

E clipse CDT (C/C++ Development Toolkit) is perfectly fine for developing Windows applications in C++. But you might be asking, why would I want to do that when Visual Studio is so readily available? I started down this path because I spend most of my time with the Eclipse IDE (Integrated Development Environment) running on my machine and often with multiple workspaces on both Windows and Linux, but the C++ code I develop isn’t intended to run on Windows. But ever so often I will develop a simple tool with a Graphical User Interface (GUI). Since I’m familiar with Eclipse, I would prefer not to have to switch to another IDE just for a simple tool. But one thing you notice when you look at an IDE like Visual Studio is that it generates a significant amount of code for you and it makes use of various libraries, but how much of this do you really need? I assume you’ve built with the Eclipse CDT. If not, follow this guide first: https://www.codeproject.com/Articles/14222/C-Development-usi...