"Kenneth" <kdw### [at] gmailcom> wrote:
> "Bald Eagle" <cre### [at] netscapenet> wrote:
>
> > I have not found GIMP to be user-friendly.
> > In windoze I used wingif, winjpg, Irfanview, and paint.net
>
> Yes, Irfanview is handy. and fast. The others I'll have investigate.

wingif and winjpg are OLD, but because of that, they are tiny programs and FAST.
If you can't find them, I will look and see if I have them archived anywhere.

paint.net is mammoth, and you have to install all of that .net framework stuff,
but I found it very useful - probably what GIMP should be in terms of usability
paired with capability.


> I had to look that up :-O  And Shadertoy. WOW, some *stunning* procedural CG.

I'd say that IQ has such a good foundation in what he does because of the
limitations of what he had to work with.   ALL the fat had to be trimmed and
everything had to be re-used to squeeze as much out of the code as possible.
I learn a LOT from studying the Shadertoy stuff because it's all written from
scratch.  Camera, light source, shadows, geometry, patterns, shading...

> Meanwhile, just for a bit o' fun, I ran my scene code again as-is, but with 5000
> buildings, the most ever-- just to observe the parse/render/computer
> performance. On my lowly Windows 7 box: disk-swap hell!!

Find a used / surplus computer reseller - you can likely get something better
than what you have for ~$100  I haven't bought a NEW computer since .... 2008.
The way people go through technology these days to get the newest flashing crap
- you can pick up their discards for pennies on the dollar.  Yard sales, pawn
shops, Goodwill, classifieds, Ebay, Craigslist, .... I could probably find a
fully functioning laptop at the dump/transfer station up here if I went there
often enough...

It's been a while since I've seen the development of this project, but depending
on the resolution of the images, maybe you could replace some of them with
procedurally generated functions - esp if you're doing 5000 buildings - can you
really see the detail?

ATM, I've got 48,000 tiles making up a whole planet - there's no way I'm parsing
and rendering all of them if I don't have to.   That's the next phase, once I
get done with all of the Bezier editing.

Good work - I'm glad you're back, working on your projects, and having fun.

-BW

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