Re: [Visualpython-users] Python 2.5

[Scott D. D. <Sco...@Ac...>]

Bruce Sherwood wrote:
> There are two rather different routes toward supporting Visual on Python 
> 2.5. The better route is to work with Visual 4, since that's what we all 
> want to use, given its greatly enhanced graphics capabilities. However, 
> if changing to Numpy doesn't require much effort (I have no idea), it 
> would be good to put that into Visual 3, because there are some serious 
> problems with Visual 4, the most worrisome being the following 
> (extracted from summary in Recent Developments section of vpython.org):
> 
>     1) Mouse interactions on Windows, including scene.mouse.getclick(),
>     are associated with crashes. A tight loop without a rate() statement
>     may crash or be hard to kill.
> 
>     2) Some animations run in a jerky manner due to slow rendering of
>     the scene. The program gas.py is an example. The issue may be that
>     the detail level on spheres needs to be decreased.
> 
>     3) Graphing (from visual.graph import *) works well for many simple
>     uses, but if the axes must be continually adjusted it can be very
>     slow. If you know the extent of your variables and can specify xmax
>     and ymax for the graph, the graphing is very fast.
> 
> I feel competent to deal with 3) and probably with 2) if it is just a 
> matter of reducing the level of detail. But I don't feel competent to 
> track down and fix problem 1), which might well involve tricky 
> multithread issues. (For the graphing issue it is necessary to do some 
> work analogous to some coding I've already experimented with, having to 
> do with supporting different scale factors in x and y.)
> 
> And there's the long-standing issue of finding someone to write a Mac 
> version of the platform-specific files in Visual that handle creating a 
> window and handling mouse and keyset events, so that there could be a 
> Mac-native version of VPython, not dependent on running X11 and fink and 
> difficult opaque installs. Hugh Fisher in Australia indicated recently 
> that he might be able to get free to do this in the near future.
> 
> If we could get over the hump of having a usable Visual 4 for Windows 
> and Mac (as far as I know it works fine on Linux), perhaps we would 
> attract some new developers who could contribute, because Visual 4 comes 
> much closer to offering "professional-grade" graphics likely to interest 
> people in the graphics area.

You might consider offering a bounty for those projects (A: mouse 
interaction, B: run on OS/X, C: move 4 to Numpy, D: move 3 to Numpy).
You might even solicit contributions to the bounty from your users.
Slightly tricky parts would be definitions of "acceptably solved",
though Bruce Sherwood's name has been associated with the project
for long enough that "to his satisfaction" may be an adequate
definition.  I'd be interested in working on the problem, but need
to keep a modicum of cash coming in, and you might well find someone
with the right mix of ability and cheap time to work on it.

-- Scott David Daniels
Sco...@Ac...