toji - Developer IT

Intersection points of plane set forming convex hull

- by Toji

Mostly looking for a nudge in the right direction here. Given a set of planes (defined as a normal and distance from origin) that form a convex hull, I would like to find the intersection points that form the corners of that hull. More directly, I'm looking for a way to generate a point cloud appropriate to provide to Bullet. Bonus points if someone knows of a way I could give bullet the plane list directly, since I somewhat suspect that's what it's building on the backend anyway.

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Distribute pre-compiled python extension module with distutils

- by Toji

Quick one today: I'm learning the in's and out's of Pythons distutils library, and I would like to include a python extension module (.pyd) with my package. I know of course that the recommended way is to have distutils compile the extension at the time the package is created, but this is a fairly complex extension spanning many source files and referencing several external libs so it's going to take some significant playing to get everything working right. In the meantime I have a known working build of the extension coming out of Visual Studio, and would like to use it in the installer as a temporary solution to allow me to focus on other issues. I can't specify it as a module, however, since those apparently must have an explicit .py extension. How could I indicate in my setup.py that I want to include a pre-compiled extension module? (Python 3.1, if it matters)

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Direct3D 11 effect files deprecated?

- by Toji

I've been playing around with Direct3D 11 a little bit lately and have been frustrated by the lack of documentation on the basics of the API (such as simple geometry rendering). One of the points of confusion brought on by the sparse documentation is the (apparent) move away from the use of effects for shaders. In D3D11 all of the effect (.fx) support has been removed from the D3DX libraries and buried away in a hard to find (sparsely documented, of course) shared source library. None of the included examples use it, preferring instead to compile HLSL files directly. All of this says to me that Microsoft is trying to get people to stop using the effect file format. Is that true? Is there any documentation of any kind that states that? I'm fine doing it either way, but for years now they've been promoting the .fx format so it seems odd that they would suddenly decide to drop it.

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Using Javascript to generate and save a file

- by Toji

I've been fiddling with WebGL lately, and have gotten a Collada reader working. Problem is it's pretty slow (Collada is a very verbose format), so I'm going to start converting files to a easier to use format (probably JSON). Thing is, I already have the code to parse the file in Javascript, so I may as well use it as my exporter too! The problem is saving. Now, I know that I can parse the file, send the result to the server, and have the browser request the file back from the server as a download. But in reality the server has nothing to do with this particular process, so why get it involved? I already have the contents of the desired file in memory. Is there any way that I could present the user with a download using pure javascript? (I doubt it, but might as well ask...) And to be clear: I am not trying to access the filesystem without the users knowledge! The user will provide a file (probably via drag and drop), the script will transform the file in memory, and the user will be prompted to download the result. All of which should be "safe" activities as far as the browser is concerned.

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CSS 100% height with padding/margin

- by Toji

This has been driving me crazy for a couple of days now, but in reality it's a problem that I've hit off and on for the last few years: With HTML/CSS how can I make an element that has a width and/or height that is 100% of it's parent element and still has proper padding or margins? By "proper" I mean that if my parent element is 200px tall and I specify 100% height with 5px padding I would expect that I should get a 190px high element with 5px "border" on all sides, nicely centered in the parent element. Now, I know that that's not how the standard box model specifies it should work (although I'd like to know why, exactly...), so the obvious answer doesn't work: #myDiv { width: 100% height: 100%; padding: 5px; } But it would seem to me that there must be SOME way of reliably producing this effect for a parent of arbitrary size. Does anyone know of a way of accomplishing this (seemingly simple) task? Oh, and for the record I'm not terribly interested in IE compatibility so that should (hopefully) make things a bit easier. EDIT: Since an example was asked for, here's the simplest one I can think of: <html style="height: 100%"> <body style="height: 100%"> <div style="background-color: black; height: 100%; padding: 25px"></div> </body> </html> The challenge is then to get the black box to show up with a 25 pixel padding on all edges without the page growing big enough to require scrollbars.

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