Timothy's Thoughts

F or each of the first ten chapters of Extending Art of Illusion I have created a video that demonstrates some aspect of it. One of the things I found when writing the book was that it is difficult to demonstrate animation on the printed page. In chapter 7 I give code for a tracker object that will rotate an object or objects so that the object is always pointing at one of the other scene objects, no matter where it is located in the scene. In the book I tried to show this with a sequence of still images taken from the animation. But in the video I have been able to show the video of a head with eyes that follow an object as it moves around the scene. Not only that, but it is possible to show that these changes are occurring even as the scene is being edited. Below is the list of videos: Chapter 1: Use a Script to Add a Cube to Art of Illusion Chapter 2: Storing and Loading Chapter 3: Position Objects on Floor Chapter 4: Point at Objects Chapter 5: Resting One Object on Anot...

A fter the second edition of Extending Art of Illusion went to press my attention turned once again to the question of getting it into the hands of readers. Outside of people called Mom, people don't generally buy books just because someone wrote it. I've purchased a few books just because I knew the author, but I don't buy second and third books "just because."  Those of us who love books need a reason to buy a book. No, that's not right. We want a reason to buy a book. We are begging authors and publishers to give us a reason to buy a book. We want to see a book and say, "If I buy this book this is the knowledge I will gain or the story I will enjoy." We are cheering for authors to provide us with a good book. It's in that context that I make the case for people to buy the latest edition of Extending Art of Illusion . I stopped to ask myself why anyone would need this book. It may seem like it is a little late to be asking that question. O...

R obots don’t sin. Of course we’ve all seen movies where some robot makes decisions concerning right and wrong, but the reality is that robots just run programs. The brain of a robot is nothing more than a device that reads data and writes data. It’s actions are controlled by what that data tells it to do. Robots don’t have a soul. If a robot does something that it shouldn’t do, we may shut it down. We may repair it. We may throw it in the landfill. But we don’t do that out of a sense of justice. If there is anyone held responsible for the evil done by a robot it is the designer, the programmer, or the operator, not the robot. Robots don’t sin because they have no capability to decide to go against their programming. But if the inability to decide to go against their programming keeps a robot from sin then that implies that anything that can sin can decide to go against their programming. I mention this because I recently heard someone claim that “freewill is a myth.” Their basis for t...

P olitics in America according to social media is nasty. We’re divided along party lines and there are a lot of angry people yelling at each other. You would think that there’s no way to bridge the divide, but all of us have friends who are on the other side. We may avoid certain conversations when we are with them, but somehow we get along. Why? If the other side is so bad, then how is it that our friends can’t see that? Could it be that the two sides agree on much more than they care to admit? Here are twelve things that Republicans and Democrats agree on. Mass murder is evil. A strong economy is good. Children should be protected. The strong should not be allowed to prey on the weak. Cops who break the law should be prosecuted. Skin color doesn’t make one person better than another. Protecting our environment is important. Non-citizen criminals should not be allowed into our country. Individuals should be able to express their opinion. The police have a responsibility to ...

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...