9/4/2008

Possible approaches for rendering in Morphic 3

The Morphic 3 project keeps advancing. Very recently I realized that the way Morphic 2 draws the morphs on the Display has several drawbacks. This made me think about alternatives. Now I see two possible paths. Each one has advantages and drawbacks.

One of them is the Morphic 2 way. When it is needed to update the Display, the world first draws the morph behind all the rest. Then it goes drawing each morph, perhaps overwriting the previous one. Each morph, in turn, draws itself and all submorphs recursively. This is called the "Painter's Algorithm". If only a part of the Display needs to be updated, a clipping rectangle is passed around. This clipping rectangle might be used by the drawing primitives to avoid drawing unneeded pixels. Anyway, any pixels drawn that fall outside the clipping rectangle will be ignored by the Canvas object.

This approach have several advantages, bit some of its drawbacks made me look for an alternative...

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If you found this interesting, I'd like to know about your ideas about this problem. Please send mail to me or to squeak-dev.

Thanks for reading.