User:Crdueck/log

This page will contain a log of my progress throughout my project.

30/04/2012:

after having some difficulty compiling BRLCAD from the SVN source due to issues with missing libs, I completed my first successful build. The issue was with the unorthodox naming scheme my distro uses for the lib32 and lib64 directories, and so CMake was unable to find them.

I am now looking for some bugfixes to tackle so I can gain commit access.

09/05/2012:

while looking through the BUGS file, I found that the bug regarding drawing with an attached X session crashing MGED in command line mode unreproducible. Perhaps it was indirectly fixed in a previous patch.

As well, I've been working through the Introduction to MGED and am comfortable using it to draw and analyze all primitive shapes as well as using booleans to combine primitives into more complicated shapes.

21/05/2012:

one of my patches, adding a function to librt/primitives/ell.c that computes the surface area of an ellipsoid, was accepted a few days ago and a patch for libbu/lex.c is pending review. Although I dont yet have commit access, the first official day of coding is tommorrow, so I hope to begin producing patches related to my project and have commit access by the end of the week.

22/05/2012:

added a patch to the tracker for a centroid function for ell. The function is very simple as the central point of an ell is already stored in the rt_ell_internal struct.

24/05/2012:

the next step in my goals for this week is to try to integrate the newly written functions for ell into MGED's analyze command, as well as clean up some of the documentation regarding ell

28/05/2012:

wrote centroid, volume and surface area functions for the tor primitive. like ell, the centroid is stored as a point in the rt_tor_internal struct, and the formulas for surface area and volume use radii values found in the internal struct as well.

29/05/2012:

first day with commit access, committed the tor functions written yesterday with some slight mishaps which resulted in a chance to learn how to revert commits with svn.

Worked on a bug where MGED crashes when running "joint holds" or "joint solve" with a joint file loaded due to a NULL pointer being accessed as an array, although neither command works properly yet, an error message is now printed instead of crashing.

finally, tested the libbu/lex.c patch with the "joint list" command. the output is identical to the pre-patch version so there's some assurance that the patch hasnt introduced any parsing errors. plan to commit that patch tomorrow

30/05/2012:

the previous test for the bu_lex routine was a bit off the mark. the section of code that I rewrote dealt with skipping past initial comments in a joint file which could be C or Bash style, and the test file used originally only contained Bash comments. After adding some C comments and testing again, I found there was an error in the code. Some adjustments were made and the bu_lex routine is now working properly.

Also, i've been looking into the funtabs MGED uses to store its commands as I'll be needing to modify them to make use of the new primitive functions in MGED's analyze command. the funtab in src/mged/animedit.c is a good example.

02/06/2012:

looking into adding new primitive functions to MGED, reading source code in include/raytrace.h, librt/primitives/table.c and librt/primitives/obj_*.c. commited changes to the rt_functab in raytrace.h, adding function pointers for the new functions and made changes to the func_tab array in librt/primitives/table.c as well