Libweston vs Wlroots

wayland |
You need a wayland compositor library to create a wayland server. Wayland is a protocol, itself, cannot do much, long time ago I used to think the server-side wl_resource represents some structure you can operate on, well it turned out all you do with it is handling messages between client and server. All the logic you need to implement yourself. There were a few attempts to wayland compositing library created. The first sucessful one is wlc.

wl_data_device

wayland |
wl_data_device interface in the base wayland protocol is the most complex one, in my opinion, wayland.xml explains it fairly well, but every pieces are scattered in the file, here I serialize it together, give you quick run through. In brief, data device in wayland consists of four interfaces: The first is wl_data_device_manager, it is the global. The second is wl_data_device, can be created from wl_data_device_manager for a given seat, it is used to set selection(ctrl-c ctrl-v) and drag-n-drop.

May 2020 Status Update

Journal |
Forcing a monthly blog update seems to be a good idea, giving myself a reason to keep paying for this Domain. Also, I don’t usually has a topic to address specifically, a monthly update can fill this role. Anyway, time passes rapidly in quarantine my friends. I hope a few years forward when I look back at this moment, I would not feel I wasted so much time. I don’t actually feel I made much progress through this month.

Busy in quarantine

Journal |
I update this blog less frequent than once per year, which sometimes makes me question why do I keep paying for this site. Be able to update blogs is always my pursuit, unfortunately there were always more code to write. It has been more than one year, last time I was still on how to MSAA on OpenGL 4, somehow it felt like a decade ago. The peaceful developing world took an interesting turn.

Realistic Deferred MSAA implementation

graphics |
Deferred MSAA, always has been a good problem. In the spatial anti-aliasing domain, MSAA is still the swiss-army knife, handle almost all the case. Some other post-processing methods like nvidia’s FXAA, AMDs MLAA, or DLAA. FXAA is rather pleasing in many cases as well, especially if you are a video game developer, as long as your rasterization implementation does not screwed up. But for the case like grass rendering, fur rendering, when you have many layers of thin line, FXAA will fail you.

The wayland project II

wayland Journal |
The last post I laid out the story of me with wayland. Technology is fascinating isn’t it? Every once a while, there are plenty of new projects that aim to start an revolution, getting people excited. Projects like systemd, Wayland, Vulkan make us think how come we did not think of those before, they seemed perfect at the moment. Technologies always work like a rush of hot wave, our sights are limited at the moment we are in, maybe 5 years from now, even vulkan is not sexy anymore.

The wayland project

wayland Journal |
It was a good will. 5 years ago, I read a blog about the future of linux desktop, I was using a window manager called Awesome (one of my friend introduced it to me, I was enchanted by how he opened two terminals side-by-side, one for coding and one for compiling). A voice about next generation desktop was just raised in the linux community , a group of hackers demod the weston project, where you can rotate the application windows.

Rotations

graphics |
Rotation, combined with translation and scaling, are the three affin transforms we do every day in the 3D nutshell universe. The rotation itself, however, is somehow much more complicated than the other two transform, it is one really needs a matrix representation among all three. Representations and computation of it has been developed for years. We have systems like Axis-angle representation, matrix representation, euler angles and quaternions. Despite I have known them for a long time, when I forgot, the rotation is still complicated.

Bone Animation [part I]

graphics |
I have been trying to create a animation system for my OpenGL Project for a long time, one of the reason is I have limited amount of time after starting the full-time job. Another problem was that, I mean, if I intend to keep it a clean project rather than just a school project, building a animation system is like a rabbit hole, 30 lines of code got me another 100 lines of work, it only leaded me deeper and deeper.

Template Deduction for C++

programming C/C++ |
Template is a confusing and hard features in C++ if you want use it well, and I think it is also one of the reason which causes c++ programmers cannot understand each other. Sometimes the Deduction rule for c++ is really confusing, you don’t understand why you code doesn’t work or why it works. And Since STL heavily uses nesting Templates, both your compiler and your mind suffers from that.