I'm always trying to dream up some way to get around the 2D problem. it would be neat if you could see through many planes, but our eyes get overloaded quickly. Is there any way we could make a development tool that can take us into the 4th dimension, so that we could see at least three dimensions simultaneously. That would be a great boon to coding, and simulation, too.
I'm always trying to dream up some way to get around the 2D problem. it would be neat if you could see through many planes, but our eyes get overloaded quickly. Is there any way we could make a development tool that can take us into the 4th dimension, so that we could see at least three dimensions simultaneously. That would be a great boon to coding, and simulation, too.
I think that might require a step or two up the evolutionary ladder.
Wow Chip, my brain hardly has the bandwidth to support 2D never mind 3 or 4.
But I agree, sometimes programming a computer feels like painting a room using a brush with a long thin handle poked though a key hole in the door. You just can't see the whole thing at once.
I have, by chance, a great setup. Samsung 3D plasma TV. My 3D CAD can actually be 3D!
It is amazing for about half an hour. Then, it gets increasingly tiresome.
The glasses run at 60hz per eyeball, 120 hz display. So, it is fast. That is not the trouble. It is all about lack of 3d input methods, and depth fatigue. Actual depth as seen by the muscles in our eyes does not change with the object depth perception does.
People vary widely in their ability to deal with that. I am not bad. Many are much worse. A few seem to be able to go all day.
Just a data point here.
@Rayman I like the section view.
Almost makes the case for user sections, doesn't it?
Just name chunks of code, perhaps with comment right at the top, click, there you are.
Visual Studio 2017 has a cool thing where it shows pretty much your whole code in super tiny font off to the right side...
You can click there to jump to that point. I shows in big font when you hover (see pic).
My first reaction about the 3d thing... you could do it without 3D glasses by embedding your controls in a .ply file and then creating a ply viewer that would allow you to look around the 3D world and select via the 3D location of the tool you want. Very simple to do. It would load the component or whatever by issuing exec commands.
I have already written a ply viewer and it could be easily modified to do this sort of thing.
Once everyone is happy with the way the 2D editor works, I'd be happy to give it a go. Cross compatible too:)
My second reaction... there is probably something I am not thinking about that would take this out of my rorc (realm of reasonable competence).
I remember the '3D' file system viewer from Jurassic Park. I tried it on my SGI (it was a downloadable executable). That didn't live up to expectations (that's an understatement)..
Well, this computer is a bit dated, around 7,5 years old (an i5-2500). It feels sluggish is comparison to eclipse !.Maybe they improved it lately, I'd have to check again.
notepad++ loads instantly for me, no matter what it open in it's tabs.
VS code takes a second or so.
VS pro 2015 takes like 30 seconds or so when loading with a full solution, or about 3 seconds without.
It's madness, all over the place. It's one of the things that drives me the most nuts about PropTool.
Hehe, wow - like those Mechanical typewriters from 100 years ago, that gave the original meaning to tab stop, because it really was a metal tab, that stopped the carriage.
Was trying to add Spin1 support with Propellent dll, but rediscovered issue where newer versions of propellent give me unhandled exception errors when doing "finalize". So, could use old version (1.2).
Trying to use propellent.exe instead. It works, but big thing missing is the "GetSourceHierarchy" call that the dll has. That would take some work to recreate, I think...
This version can now compile and load Spin2 using Dave Hein's P2ASM and LoadP2.
Also, I fixed "save", which didn't work before and is kinda necessary...
For this to work, both p2asm.exe and loadp2.exe have to be in the same folder as the .spin2 file.
I tested this with V32i, which I think is the current version.
Have you tried it with fastspin? That actually does a bit more of Spin2 (i.e. not just the DAT section) than p2asm. Of course p2asm is a faster and leaner P2 assembler . We've got some nice choices in P2 tools now I think. Thanks for your work on the Spin2 editor!
ersmith: Is there a command line tool for fastspin?
I just looked and didn't see it...
fastspin.exe is the command line tool. It's found in https://github.com/totalspectrum/spin2cpp/releases in the fastspin.zip file. I'll attach a copy of the most recent to this post. I guess my directions must be a bit confusing. Where were you looking for it?
Comments
I'm always trying to dream up some way to get around the 2D problem. it would be neat if you could see through many planes, but our eyes get overloaded quickly. Is there any way we could make a development tool that can take us into the 4th dimension, so that we could see at least three dimensions simultaneously. That would be a great boon to coding, and simulation, too.
I think that might require a step or two up the evolutionary ladder.
But I agree, sometimes programming a computer feels like painting a room using a brush with a long thin handle poked though a key hole in the door. You just can't see the whole thing at once.
It is amazing for about half an hour. Then, it gets increasingly tiresome.
The glasses run at 60hz per eyeball, 120 hz display. So, it is fast. That is not the trouble. It is all about lack of 3d input methods, and depth fatigue. Actual depth as seen by the muscles in our eyes does not change with the object depth perception does.
People vary widely in their ability to deal with that. I am not bad. Many are much worse. A few seem to be able to go all day.
Just a data point here.
@Rayman I like the section view.
Almost makes the case for user sections, doesn't it?
Just name chunks of code, perhaps with comment right at the top, click, there you are.
You can click there to jump to that point. I shows in big font when you hover (see pic).
I have already written a ply viewer and it could be easily modified to do this sort of thing.
Once everyone is happy with the way the 2D editor works, I'd be happy to give it a go. Cross compatible too:)
My second reaction... there is probably something I am not thinking about that would take this out of my rorc (realm of reasonable competence).
On the other hand I have been using it on an 8 year old, not high end PC, since it's launch and it's quite fast enough.
Less annoyingly slow than IDE's like Eclipse or InteliJ that are written in Java.
What have you been running VS Code on?
VS code takes a second or so.
VS pro 2015 takes like 30 seconds or so when loading with a full solution, or about 3 seconds without.
Noticed that Chip's spin2 examples have misaligned columns.
Thinking that turning tab characters into 4 spaces would fix it...
Most editors have a tab-setting option & IIRC Chip likes 4
CON blocks: 2, 8,16, 18, 32, 56, 80
VAR blocks: 2, 8, 22, 32, 56, 80
OBJ blocks, 2, 8, 16, 18, 32, 56, 80
PUB/PRI blocks: 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 32, 56, 80
DAT blocks: 8,14,24,32,48,56,80
It's madness, all over the place. It's one of the things that drives me the most nuts about PropTool.
Hopefully, we can just do Tab=4 spaces...
Or, at least Tab=N spaces...
Hehe, wow - like those Mechanical typewriters from 100 years ago, that gave the original meaning to tab stop, because it really was a metal tab, that stopped the carriage.
In 2018 ? best avoided..
Seconded.
User setting [N] field is the common way to do this. Allows easy open of sources from anywhere
See also : this chatter about Notepad++ movements here
https://superuser.com/questions/1162435/where-are-the-tab-settings-in-notepad-newer-versions
by making it language-related, you can have multiple edit tabs in differing languages still tab ok.
Trying to use propellent.exe instead. It works, but big thing missing is the "GetSourceHierarchy" call that the dll has. That would take some work to recreate, I think...
It would be very nice if your Editor uses OpenSpin not Propellent, then a simple switch to fastspin is possible, it has the same call syntax...
Same goes for loading, please use the existing loaders available so that the eco-system gets simpler.
just my 2 cents,
Mike
I really like this "View Info" dialog from the Prop Tool.
Hope it's not too hard to recreate...
Also, I fixed "save", which didn't work before and is kinda necessary...
For this to work, both p2asm.exe and loadp2.exe have to be in the same folder as the .spin2 file.
I tested this with V32i, which I think is the current version.
Have you tried it with fastspin? That actually does a bit more of Spin2 (i.e. not just the DAT section) than p2asm. Of course p2asm is a faster and leaner P2 assembler
Eric
Can also add BST and OpenSpin…
One issue with p2asm is that it only looks the application path for include files and not also in a library or document folder.
Also, it doesn't say which line number the error is on...
I just looked and didn't see it...
fastspin.exe is the command line tool. It's found in https://github.com/totalspectrum/spin2cpp/releases in the fastspin.zip file. I'll attach a copy of the most recent to this post. I guess my directions must be a bit confusing. Where were you looking for it?