Procedural Textures project

Here are a couple of entries from my personal journal about this
project.  There is a page on the Croquet Consortium wiki about this
project at: http://croquetconsortium.org/index.php/Procedural_Texturing

20070718
Andreas has been really helpful with the ProceduralTextures project,
giving me a new alternative to Bert's COpenGLPlayer that won't have
the same drawbacks, and fixing a problem with the loading of OGL
extensions that cut the shader loading time from a couple of minutes
down to nothing. Cool! So now I just need the time to integrate his
changes in my code and doc and then distribute a new version of the
package. Maybe throw in a few more shaders while I'm at it. Yeah,
that's the ticket! And maybe reconsider a building block approach to
the UI ...

20070720
Now have converted over to Andreas' COpenGLPanel/Player and sure
enough, it has a different set of problems.  Dynamic UI elements like
a CColorPicker make the UI layout go a little wacky (because of
spaceFill elements), although it still works.  Fixing this would
require either a rigid layout or another layer in the layout, neither
of which is very attractive.  That and the new "Click me" behavior of
GPUInfo (which is needed because all it does is raise a CDialog
inform:).  Maybe not as nice as working properly in a Tweak Project
Window would be.  I'm a little unsure about driving the OGL render out
of a timer rather than the drawOn: stuff, whatever that is.  So once
again, I'm hesitant about which way to go.  I didn't plan on the UI
being a big deal in this project.  The plan was that the UI would be
driven directly by the parameters of the ProceduralTextures that would
be interesting to interactively control, not by "outside forces".
Hopefully I will have time in the next couple of days to get this
package released.

Cheers,
Dave

The newest package is now on the PublicContribs repository.  From the package
comments:
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Some new fixes.  A Tweak Project Window is now the preferred way of running
this project.

Requires the OpenGL-OpenGL package from the PublicContribs repository to be
installed first.  It is necessary to manually do "OGLExtManager initialize"
after loading the OpenGL-OpenGL package.

The newest OpenGL package from the Hedgehog repository should also be merged.
Thanks to Andreas for a big performance boost.

This package also depends on a fix for Mantis #6553, which can temporarily be a
pretty trivial do-it-yourself kind of thing. Just change VectorColor#asVector4
so that it returns a Vector4 instance instead of a Vector3.

Install the packages, do the couple of manual items above, then in Squeak open
a Tweak Project Window, enter it, get a Workspace from the Tools menu, enter
"GPUInfo new chkGLSLSupport" and doIt. If this says that you have GLSL
support, then enter "Wrinkle1 open" and doIt.
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After all of Andreas' great help with a different Tweak OpenGL player, and
having converted this whole project over to it, I decided to go back to Bert's
OpenGL player and make it work.  So I did.  So disparage me.