Chance-based Systems Project Update 05

Today, I found myself exceedingly frustrated with the flob library I'm using. Originally I chose it on the recommendation that it worked out of the box and would scale well to my project, but there's several weak points in its implementation, and the API is somewhat lacking in documentation. Reading the source helped, but not by much.

I was getting strange problems the longer my system ran, and I noticed it especially when there was little to no movement on the system. Turns out, when there's no movement, flob actually resets the id counter for all of its blobs, which I had been caching and using in a number of situations. Ultimately it was causing a lot of blobs to be selected but then ignored and never drawn.

Rather than try to figure out how to recompile the libraries without messing up the rest of the implementation, I wrapped the blobs in a wrapper class and stored my own id on each.

The system is finally stable, and I think most of the remaining tweaks will be for aesthetics.

Here's some shots from today in Studio A (my twin came along as well):

While I really wanted to use the projector I checked out, I remember my original reasoning for wanting to use a screen (besides being easier to test on and truer to color) is that if people are supposed walk in front of this, then it needs to be back projected or projected from the ceiling, and both of those sacrifice visual fidelity, time, and flexibility. It's still my intention to make the project work as a projected installation, but I really just need more time.


I'll finish cleaning up the aesthetics and post some screenshots on a final blog post for the presentation tomorrow. Until then!