Shader Engine

[mbastian]

Good, that seems a very good plan. I have few questions.

You said "Another advantage of the procedural generation of the shapes is the ability to apply textures to the shapes."

If I understand well, would it be possible to set images or icons as nodes? That would be useful for social networks, with faces as nodes.

Could you please say some words about labels? How would you render it?

Current labels use JOGL TextRenderer, which is quite efficient and powerful.

Could you please give more details about how update will be done?

We have two update requirement:
* Position of nodes can change continuously and the engine needs to update it very quickly.
* Nodes and edges can be added/removed continuously , the engine needs to update it very quickly

Halo

Halo could also be used to represent clusers. Currently we use hulls. Nodes that belong to a cluster are within a basic colored hull. By drawing an alpha halo around each node, that would have a better design to represent clusers.

[apatriarca]

Good, that seems a very good plan. I have few questions.

You said "Another advantage of the procedural generation of the shapes is the ability to apply textures to the shapes."

If I understand well, would it be possible to set images or icons as nodes? That would be useful for social networks, with faces as nodes.

It is surely possible to set images or icons as nodes, but it wasn't what I mean. In QuteMol the AO values are saved in a texture and then mapped to the sphere. This isn't possible using a simple texture mapped quad.

Could you please say some words about labels? How would you render it?

Current labels use JOGL TextRenderer, which is quite efficient and powerful.

I would use JOGL TextRenderer. Reimplementing it would probably require to much time and I think is better to use that time on other things.

Could you please give more details about how update will be done?

We have two update requirement:
* Position of nodes can change continuously and the engine needs to update it very quickly.
* Nodes and edges can be added/removed continuously , the engine needs to update it very quickly

I haven't yet decided how to implement it in details. I will probably have a copy of the data in system memory and use dynamic buffers which will be updated every frame (or at least when the nodes change). I hope to come with a better idea though.

Halo

Halo could also be used to represent clusers. Currently we use hulls. Nodes that belong to a cluster are within a basic colored hull. By drawing an alpha halo around each node, that would have a better design to represent clusers.

It is possible to do it without much effort.