From: Geoffrey Irving (irving_at_[hidden])
Date: 2006-03-17 13:27:00
On Fri, Mar 17, 2006 at 03:09:26PM -0300, rodolfo_at_[hidden] wrote:
> On Fri, Mar 17, 2006 at 10:17:53AM -0700, Richard Newman wrote:
> > Is it reasonable to extend the logic to check for 3D shapes (i.e.,
> > spheres instead of circles, etc.)?
> >
> > It certainly would be a reasonable strategy to get the 2D work you have
> > into the library and treat 3D as a later extension.
>
> Well, 3D is a whole different beast, and is not implemented yet :) What
> I have is the following (with my name convention, to be changed...):
>
> geom_t is an abstract base class with basic functions like:
> - center -> return the center point of the geometry
> - box -> return a rectangle encompassing the whole geometry
> - area -> returns its area
It would be better to have a set of nonvirtual classes defining functions
like this inline, and then have a template wrapper class to convert one of
these into a descendant of the virtual class. This way, someone who wants
to use a million spheres (e.g., for a sphere hierarchy), won't suffer from
virtual function overhead.
> then there's the primitive classes that inherits from geom_t:
> point_t -> a single point in the 2D space
> circle_t -> represented as a 2D point and a radius
> rectangle_t -> represented as two points, the upper left and lower
> right.
You should probably think carefully about which basic types to use here,
especially in terms of small vectors types. I'm not sure if boost has a
small vector type yet (I didn't see one in uBLAS), but if so it should
definitely be used.
> I'm planning to add polygon and triangle soon.
>
> There are also operator>> and << to transfer from and to a stream,
> and free functions that returns intersections, unions, etc.
>
> All coordinates are double. Maybe each primitive should be a template,
> like: point_t<double> is a point with double floating point coordinates,
> point_t<int> is with integer coordinates, etc.
Templatization of the float type is good, and again point_t should probably
be a general purpose small vector type.
Geoffrey