the Polygon Replicating Bitmap Authoring Tool

[JAS]

It's nice to meet you all!

I'm not the average user on this forum, so allow me to introduce myself. I am an art student studying Fine Arts at Ringling College of Art + Design in Florida, and most of my time is spent making images and reading. I grew up on computers, but never learned much programming until last year.

I would consider myself an awful programmer by this community's standards, but I really enjoy the process. I have made projects with toy and scripting languages such as ChucK, Processing, ActionScript3, and Python. I'm interested in specialized applications such as games and creative software tools. I'm often critical of proprietary operating systems and software for the way they are designed.

I've been working on a project for about 16 months and it isn't necessarily an OS, but I don't know where else to go for some technical, and possibly very useful feedback. It's a drawing tool that can be used for generating ideas and making different kinds of images. It was my thesis project for school and is meant for me to use as a personal tool but I feel like other people may be interested in the project.

I would like to know what people think of it, so I can make small changes to the documentation or to the program itself before I try to send the link to several places. I realize It is a pretty idiosyncratic system of making images, and probably not many of you on this forum draw or make images very often. It may take one a little while to get friendly with the software. It's similar to a bicycle in that it is difficult for a new user at first, but eventually becomes second nature. I have a feeling a forum of OS designers and coders may understand this well.

I read quite a bit while working on this project, and it's design was directly influenced by the work and writings of people like Buckminster Fuller, Marshall McLuhan, Douglas Rushkof, and the working processes of several artists.

Here is the link to the software page: http://173.230.141.150/thePRBAT/ (my personal web-archive is http://173.230.141.150)

And here are some images (out of hundreds) I have made with the program:




I welcome all kinds of feedback, negative and positive, and plan to use this thread to better the project itself, and learn anything I can...

[Brynet-Inc]

Indeed, this has nothing to do with OSDev, it seems to be some sort of Flash applet as well.. with h264 HTML5 video on the front page?

Disgusting.

Yeah.. go away.

[VolTeK]

Please note this forum is programming (Mostly to Operating system development) forum. Any announcements, test requests, or job openings will be with programming, or Operating system development groups that are offering jobs, announcements, or requesting anyone in the forum to test out their release.



You wont find anything about art here, sorry.


The art is nice tho, I take painting and C.A.D classes
If you are, on the other hand, wanting to learn programming, some of us can help you personally depending upon what language you are wanting to learn. If understanding on how it works, C++, assembly. PM me and i will write you some tutorials in my free time

[JAS]

Yeah I realized that about the video this morning... I assumed all browsers supported h.264 but apparently not, so I'm switching it to Theora. I thought there would be some interest on this forum, but I guess I gauged this wrong. I'm not interested in talking about the images or artistic value of my software. Im more interested in the way it has been constructed, how it feels, it's interface etc. In the future I'd like to do a bootable drawing program / specialized OS for a specific and specialized application. So I felt like this would be a good place to start? Anyway, if you still think I'm way off, then you can mark this post for deletion.

P.S. Yes my program is was made in Flash, but it was the first programming experience I had. My opinion of Flash is probably no better than yours. It was a simple way for me to learn, and put theories into the machine without a background in engineering.


EDIT: Yeah, many of those things I am very interested in. I'd like to master C before C++, as it seems more elegant. But I'd also like to learn Assembly, but don't know much about what I should be learning, or which architecture I should focus on... I'd like to create a series of procedural artworks where people can boot the piece from a USB, and I can draw to their screen directly, outside of any specific OS. This is what I mean I guess... I'm interested in creating autonomous software, that doesn't rely on a propriety OS, but isn't in itself an OS either.

[VolTeK]

Now that, is what this forum is for. A bootloader that loads a image and prints it. If its flash.. that could be alittle more difficult.

[JAS]

http://173.230.141.150/thePRBAT/

^ the video should work now... hopefully, now that you see what it actually Is, you'll realize I'm not some idiot.


Yeah, I want to do some basic games in C and Assembly, from scratch. I want to experiment with the binary format, and get to know it as much as possible. I know I'm not the average forum member here and I said that in my first post, but I think I can become a valuable part of the community for these very reasons.

[VolTeK]

Games in windows i can help with, OpenGL that is. But on your own os you will have to implement your own Graphical libraries. No one thinks you are an idiot, sorry if you thought i thought you were though, but i dont think anyones an idiot if they are trying to learn.

Try booting from floppy before usb. As it is alot harder comparably.

I would try google searching " C programming tutorial" and then look up assembly languages, pick one, then look up tutorials for it as well. Im giving you links because this cite references google. You should as well As for the osdevelopment part. We have hundreds here to help, just dont ask a question google cant answer. We want the hard to answer ones, not the easy ones.

It wont be an os, but you want it to boot and load then print your image file

If you want to learn C++ the best site in my opinion is cplusplus.com, and we know now what you want has to do with the forums theme "os development" so you arent off topic anymore as for the subforum, i dont know

[DavidCooper]

It sounds as if what you really want is a really simple OS which boots in seconds and which hands control to your graphics program so that you can start doing creative things without having to wait for some lumbering OS like Windows to grind away for a couple of minutes before hastling you with infuriating messages about local networks and unused icons on your desktop - you don't even want to see a desktop along the way. There are probably several dozen OSes available from people on this forum which could be adapted to do that job and save you a lot of time. The loader called GRUB may actually be all you need to get going. Even so, you're still going to have to write a lot of code to replace the software you've been using up to now.

You're also going to need some way of saving the created images, so your best bet might be to send them to a USB stick using the BIOS. If someone here already has a suitable OS which can set up a decent screen mode and give you the ability to save your images, your best bet may be to team up with them and build your program to run on top of their OS - otherwise you could spend years working on an OS (a job which you might never finish) before you get to the point where you can even start doing anything relating to art. If you decide to team up with someone who has already created a suitable OS, I'm sure they'll be only too keen to take you on board as the code you write will also be available for them to use to make their OS a lot more dazzling in the graphics department. I'd invite you to work with my OS if it was up to the task, but it isn't and probably won't be for a very long time. I'm sure someone else here will have an OS that is up to the task, and unless you're really keen to write an entire OS from scratch, I would think that should be the best road to go down. You can always write an OS later on once you've got it working with someone else's OS, and then you'll have a better idea of how long it's going to take and whether it's worth the trouble.

Whatever the case, you are clearly a real talent, so go for it and good luck.