Development Journal of a Raytracer

The modifiers which define the geometry of polyhedra now also have names. The UI to display the names in the tree of modifiers still is a bit ugly, but it is ok for now. The UI was the biggest problem, the rest went smoothly.

The second change I did was to the DrawOn-modifiers. The copy function for them didn't work fully, parts of the state were not copied over. I noticed when I tried to clone an object so I could create a modified one. It is fixed now.

The materials now have a variable for a name. It might seem like a small change, but it really is confusing to have a list of three materials and you don't remember which was which. Giving them names is a better way to document them.

It took quite long to implement, as I also was generalizing quite some code out. Instead of copying ~20 lines of code and changing various names and types I now just call a function template. Slowly it really gets easier to create the meta structure behind dialogs. So I now not only create dialogs from a description, I even generate the description by some generalized functions. I wonder if I will need another layer of abstraction, I think I might, if I ever really connect the object to some scripting language it could become necessary. On the other hand it might make more sense to create a new abstraction then.