Development Journal of a Raytracer

It has been forever that I really worked on the HTTPD, I have sometimes done some small stuff, but mostly to get it compiling again. Last weekend I managed to update my SuSE 11.1 installation to 11.2 (astoundingly the updater really works) and it finally seems to support my system well enough that I can work. The network is detected with the right speed (in 11.1 the network came up with 10Mb/s) and even my audio card works again.

I am still at the point to add compression to the HTTPD, but I first added something else. As I want to write web services in C++ I need some support to make it easier to create pages. The first addition was, to have a class which creates the HTML-header (containing the DTD, the title and so on). I will extend it later so I can also pass the location of CSS- or JS-files, that way I can write it down correctly once and don't need to remember or look up how to do it. Yes, I know I am lazy.

With that I extended my first test page to contain a bit more text. Next weekend I will try to finally add primitive support for compression.

I continued with the changes to the editor. Today I worked on the way I move the camera. I have a button to move around a selected object. Basically I get the difference in x- and y-coordinates the mouse has moved. Then I rotate around the selected object along the y-axis and use the x-difference to govern how far I move. After that I rotate around the object in x-direction using the y-difference in mouse coordinates. That way the up-direction mostly stays upright and it is rather easy to use and works quite well.

But all my buttons in that location react to left clicks with movement and to right click with rotations. So I had not really had a good idea of what to do with the "Rotate Around"-button on movement. It was set to behave like another button, but that wasn't good. Today I finally changed it to do the same as the rotation, but it rotates around its own origin, so it only turns the camera, but doesn't move it.

While doing that I noticed, that my rotations were too fast. That wasn't any new information, but it had never been important enough to fix. But today as I was working at that place I just fixed it and added handling of modifier keys similar to the one of movements. If I move while holding shift the movements get slower, holding the control key makes it faster. So I added similar handling to rotations, now I should be able to control it much better.

I have also finished the other camera setting, I now can define a speed factor for the movements and the focal length (I only allow three fixed settings, 50mm, 35mm and 24mm equivalent to 35mm film). I even added a new setting to define the center of rotation for "Rotate Around" when nothing is selected. So I will have to use the new stuff and see, if it is useful.