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Date:Fri, 16 Apr 2004 23:28:55 +0000 (UTC) 
Subject:Re: Poplog mentioned on LtU 
From:jeffb 
Volume-ID: 

Aaron,

In message <200404161505.i3GF5n37021328@acws-0051.cs.bham.ac.uk>, Aaron 
Sloman <A.Sloman@cs.bham.ac.uk> writes
>I have to find a way to produce more compressed movies.
>
>At present I have make the code frequently dump images to disk, then run
>a program to merge them into a movie. The resulting files are huge --
>especially as nowadays I have to add several copies of each dumped image
>(thanks to a script provided by Mike Lees in Nottingham) to slow down
>the movie when shown on a fast machine.
>
>There must be a better way.

I remember in 1989 writing some substitute procedures to plant plot 
instructions to a file which I used to replace our SunCORE drawing 
procedures when I wanted John Kellett's VEGAN editor to produce a plot. 
I remember that it was absurdly simple to do, given Pop's ability to let 
you locally redefine procedures. I'm sure that something equivalent for 
rclib ought to be possible.

Having just resurrected the code, I can see that it was easy because 
John had a "draw network" function that, effectively called a "draw all 
links" followed by a "draw all nodes", and I was able to swap over the 
"draw link" and "draw node", with plotter versions that planted the 
appropriate graphics primitives into the plot file. I suspect that your 
program has a larger number of equivalent "object-level" graphics 
operations, and so the mapping task could be a lot bigger. Nevertheless, 
something similar might suffice to produce a file of instructions to 
recreate the graphics, rather than many bitmaps, chained together.

Regards,
-- 
Jeff