Processing 1.0 - Processing Discourse - Will you help out a newbie with first project?

Bojarovski

Will you help out a newbie with first project?
Oct 9^th, 2007, 3:23pm

Hi all,

Sorry if this is the wrong place to post this,
moderators please move it if it is...

First a little background info:
I'm a student in software ingeneering (i'm just starting out, but i allready have some experience in programming).
I'm interested in programming, CG in general but mostly 3D animation, fractals, and almost everything related to these areas..... Hope that makes sense....

I found out about processing a while ago and i thought it was very interesting but i had no, so to say, inspiration to start a serious project up till now...

Project info starts here:

You see i stumbled upon this screensaver called Sonar, which basically displays a sonar on your monitor and pings hosts on your local network - placing them on the display according to their response time.

However, the author of this scrsaver for some reason has only released the screensaver for X11 and MacOS systems and not for windows....
The source code is also released....

So, what i want to do is make a clone of this neat application which would work on windows...
I'm guessing it's probably overambitious for a first project but i want to try anyway...

The things i need to know are:
-is proccesing the right tool for this thing
-what is the right place (or places) on this forum for:
-starting a WIP project
-asking for help
-searching for tutorials and examples
-how hard do you think it will be to make it
-can you think of any previous projects that might be of my interest i.e. with example codes, tutorials etc.
-is anyone interested in collaboration on this project

Here are some links:
-the website where i found the scrsaver:
http://www.jwz.org/xscreensaver/
-the source code and MacOS binaries:
http://www.jwz.org/xscreensaver/download.html

Thank you all in advance,

Greetings,

Stefan.

fjen God Member Offline Posts: 965	Re: Will you help out a newbie with first project? Reply #1 - Oct 9^th, 2007, 3:38pm this is a somewhat similar project: http://r-s-g.org/carnivore/sketch_CP5_example3/ F

Bojarovski

Re: Will you help out a newbie with first project?
Reply #2 - Oct 9^th, 2007, 4:41pm

Ok i tried that, and it looks interesting, but

-i can't quite figure out what it does... i guess it makes somekind of a graph of your network, but it plots the "nodes" according to IP digits from what i could tell...

-i've only run it in offline mode - when i try to run it in online mode i get an error:
-[org.rsg.carnivore.Core] Warning -- can't open device "\Device\NPF_GenericDialupAdapter" (CaptureDeviceOpenException)

Thank you for the help fjen...i'm still open for information and feedback though....

ewjordan

Re: Will you help out a newbie with first project?
Reply #3 - Oct 9^th, 2007, 7:28pm

I took a look at the source for Sonar. Let me just warn you - it is unapologetic old-style C code, and in my experience, porting this kind of code to Java can be obnoxiously difficult for many reasons. I'm in the process of porting a C++ physics engine to Java (Box2D: http://www.box2d.org), and that has been a bit tough even though the C++ code was already pretty object oriented and didn't use much C specific stuff.

My advice is, make sure you know exactly what the purpose of each C function is before you code it in Java. Know what it takes in and what it gives back, and what all the side effects are. If you understand C well enough, you may be able to do a decent port, but if you don't, you're better off recreating it from scratch.

Bojarovski

Re: Will you help out a newbie with first project?
Reply #4 - Oct 9^th, 2007, 8:53pm

Eric Jordan wrote on Oct 9^th, 2007, 7:28pm:

I took a look at the source for Sonar. Let me just warn you - it is unapologetic old-style C code, and in my experience, porting this kind of code to Java can be obnoxiously difficult for many reasons. I'm in the process of porting a C++ physics engine to Java (Box2D: http://www.box2d.org), and that has been a bit tough even though the C++ code was already pretty object oriented and didn't use much C specific stuff.

My advice is, make sure you know exactly what the purpose of each C function is before you code it in Java. Know what it takes in and what it gives back, and what all the side effects are. If you understand C well enough, you may be able to do a decent port, but if you don't, you're better off recreating it from scratch.

Thanks for the input ewjordan,

I actually wasn't thinking of porting that C code, just because well, i thought writing it from scratch in "processing style"(object oriented enviroment, lots of pre-written libraries) could be easier... (even reading through 2000+ lines of some hardcore-hacker's code just to understand what's going on seems painful enough

)

I took a look at your project too, seems rather interesting, i wish you good luck with it Wink

.

Well i guess now is the time to start looking for tutorials about the basic stuff and trying to figure out if it will work out...

To the rest of the community: Please feel free to post any kind of input or comment, it will be much apretiated...

koogy

Re: Will you help out a newbie with first project?
Reply #5 - Oct 10^th, 2007, 1:18pm

ha. i used to use the xscreensaver code as a template for graphical / opengl doodles (i have one included, which means it gets distributed with almost all linux distributions, which is nice) and yes, i feel your pain. that said, a lot of the worst of the sonar code is the parsing of the input file and handling of the pings - all very low level unix socket code. and the low level X11 graphics stuff, that's bad too. still, could be worse - his core xscreensaver libraries do shield you from some of the horror.

(fyi the jwz in the domain name is one of the original netscape authors. and it's not available on windows because it's a grass roots X11 application and there'd be no way of getting windows to run it without rewriting 90% of it. that said, converting individual modules isn't too bad, if you write them cleanly enough in the first place and turn them into standalone apps)