A full day working on Argus.
Task one was to work out how to load each texture once even when multiple objects might use it, and free and duplicate these correctly. This involved calculating a unique ID for each one based on the filename, identical filenames mean identical textures. This was quite simple and complete before 10am. The bulk of the many hours of today was taken up developing the Events List, which is hugely complicated and needs 100+ icons.
There aren't many types of Event, but unlike in my music software Prometheus, there are a lot of parameters per Event. We can tell an object (actor) to jump to a specific place at a specific angle, and specific size, alpha (transparency), and texture (frame). For the camera, we only have place and angle, and for lights we also have RGB data, and for all of this we have a bitmask too, because we can choose to tell the program to ignore certain data (which might be important if we record the movement of something in one or two axes but don't want to overwrite the data in other axes). It might be useful to be able mute and mask off these separate streams of data in future... I'm not yet sure, but the bitmask does add a layer of complexity to it all.
All of these possibilities makes for a complex interface. Lots of icons to populate and correctly turn on/off, and there are controls to add new events, delete and move them in the same time index, but not shift them absolutely (at least, not yet, in Prometheus this is strictly forbidden because notes can be modified by future events, here, there are fewer restrictions, so it might be fine to move events about.
A full, full day, and very tired now. I've had an email about displaying some art in Crewe Town Centre. The Coloured Earth Festival continues, I've had about 6 emails requesting review or Twitch copies of the newly released Taskforce, and the new paginated version of the Chinese translation of 21st Century Surrealism.
Finally, last night at 3am or so I developed the outline of a new album, perhaps P for Plastic, or P for Me. I'm so busy I need ten assistants and three brains.
