A Return of Sorts
This blog has been quiet the over the past year. With this post I’m officially putting the Sanguis project out to pasture indefinitely. I have not worked on the project this past year and I do not expect to come back to it. That said, I’ve been very busy on other projects (and university) and some projects that began as university projects. I had been hesitant to write about my other projects here, because they weren’t Cutthroat Studios projects (in other words, they weren’t Sanguis related). But with the realisation that I won’t be coming back to Sanguis, Cutthroat Studios needs a new project. And I have a few just waiting in line.
Games and graphics are what brought me to programming. They’re what brought me to computers. I still have a deep interest in graphics, and that interest shows in the projects I’ve chosen to take on recently. That said, my interests have expanded as I’ve been introduced to more facets of computer science.
What started as an interest in computer graphics easily turned into an interest in computer vision. Vision and graphics are very related. Computer graphics is the attempt to turn an abstract model of something into a picture of it. Computer vision is the attempt to turn a picture of something into an abstract model of it. The intent and processes are different but I’m just as fascinated by vision as I am with graphics. I am beginning to suspect that I just like doing anything involving geometry and colours. The project that I began in this direction is ZeroRay, an object oriented ray tracer written in C++. As I explored more computer vision concepts ZeroRay grew to comprise more advanced image manipulation such as convolution and fast Fourier transforms. ZeroRay is open source software, released under the BSD license. You can obtain the source code from ZeroRay’s Sourceforge page.
I have also been involved with high performance computing (HPC) which is a blanket term for the frenzy of parallelism/concurrency/multi-core research that is going on right now. On this front I started a project called PolyViz. PolyViz is a tool for visualising n-dimensional polyhedra. This is relevant to HPC because the iteration spaces of nested loops (with certain restrictions) can be thought of as the volume of a polyhedron. There are many ways to manipulate these polyhedra (and analogously, the loop spaces) that improve the performance of algorithms. The problem is that it is difficult to imagine what these iteration spaces look like and how various transformations change them. PolyViz intends to make this much easier by showing you three dimensional renderings of these polyhedra. And if the polyhedra have more than three dimensions, it can show you three dimensional slices through the higher dimensional polyhedron, much as you could draw a two dimensional picture of slices through a three dimensional apple. PolyViz is open source software, released under the BSD license. You can obtain the source code from PolyViz’ Sourceforge page.
I have been developing these two projects privately and just recently added them to Sourceforge. I must say that I am very impressed with the free services that Sourceforge offers. It is much nicer than the non-free SVN hosting service that Cutthroat Studios uses. Of course, the catch is that Sourceforge’s services cannot be used for closed source or proprietary projects. Anyone can download the source of any project hosted by Sourceforge.
With these two projects to talk about and others on the horizon, this blog’s hibernation is over.
Tags: PolyViz, Sourceforge, ZeroRay
