Software Development

I'm currently finishing up the clipping algorithms. I'm thinking of switching to DirectX for faster drawing as I want to enable animations and faster graphics. GDI is proving to be somewhat slow. Anyways, I hate reinventing the wheel, but there is reasoning behind my madness. For now, I need commonly available code. Later on, I'll be able to use whatever is available on each platform. I'm finding that encapsulation is really annoying though. I'm really, really getting frustrated that everyone tries to hide details. If the source isn't available, I have no choice but to write my own library and that's what's happening now.

I would have liked clipping to be able to switch back and forth between rectangles and regions, but I can't do that in C++. So I use a container that will handle the switching of usage. My kingdom for double dispatch and automatic backlink propagation.

I'm not specifying dates. I'm just gonna list things as I go along.

TODO:

• DONE Clipping (only container wrapper left to do) [7 days].
  
• DONE 2D graphics generic methods (to downgrade automatically on use) [2 days].
  
• GUI system [5 days].
  
• GUI components [5 days].
  
• Selection component (enhanced feature) [5 days].
  
• Basic Runtime API [3 days].
  
• Integer component [1 day].
  
• Math components (Add, Sub, Mul, Div, Boolean, etc.) [2-3 days].
  
• Linkage [2 days]
  
• Custom components (CC)
  
• CC: I/O creation [2 days]
  
• CC: Internal edit [1 day]
  
• CC: I/O triggers [3 days]
  
• CC: Editor API [5 days]
  
• CC: Component Display (Editor only) [2 days]
  
• CC: C API [5 days]
  
• Templates (T)
  
• T: Events [???]
  
• T: Access to component and internals API [10 days]
  
• T: Rules for categories and components to support them [15 days]
  
• T: Error layer [5 days]
  
• Access and repository to DB [5 days]
  
• Distributed GUI system. [5 days]
  

These are estimates. Many of these overlap, so I'm hoping a lot of this will take much less time than indicated. The first release won't have everything. The original release has an estimate of about 40 days (and will only have math components). I'm definitely not working on this every day, so two months is probably right. But I don't make any promises. You'll be able to see the progress live by checking back here every now and then. That way, you can tell just by looking what the likely expected release date will be. BTW, a lot of the above is almost completed. I had to redo much of it, so all I'm doing for many items is just finishing up the cleanup.