[ANNOUNCE] Traveller Art, mess 4
Kent Paul Dolan
http://www.anycities.com/user/xanthian/
you'll now find _four_ links to Traveller-derived art.
The fourth set attempts to be more tutorial in nature, so it
includes many images of the raw material used to create the
final images, and not all that many finished products.
Traveller is my Java-implemented Genetic and Memetic
Algorithm-employing Symmetric Euclidian Travelling Salesman
Problem (SETSP) solver, and these images are created in part
from screen captures of the salesman's tour at various steps
along the way to a solution.
Frankly, Traveller is better at providing raw material from
which to create art, than at solving the huge SETSP instances
I give it to create that raw material. Too bad I have so
little artistic talent; perhaps others can do better.
This has given me ambitions to provide Traveller with a
separate, less labor-requiring art image output, which may
make it into the ever-receding-release-dated edition "zeta"
of Traveller. Luckily, point in polygon for polygons with
huge numbers of edges is something I've already done and
just have to reinvent, and is the tool needed to create
such a separate art-input image.
I also, in response to one overwhelming demand, renamed the
images in the first Traveller Art portfolio, and to keep my
volume on my advertising supported "free" web site smaller,
replaced the former *.png images by *.jpg images for the
first three portfolios.
[It is worth noting that some *.jpg images were _much larger_
than the corresponding *.png images, but I made all the images
consistently *.jpg ones anyway. Seems PNG is much superior at
compressing files with lots of detail but very few colors than
is JPEG.]
More is forthcoming, I have the images for portfolio five and
six ready, I just need to create the HTML cover pages. I also
have a bunch of new POV-Ray images to display, an artist's
concept of a hydrofoil sailboat, pretty spiffy for just my
second POV-Ray attempt.
In other news, my Traveller software jar file online at
The Well is definitely pied, something, not having a web
connection of my own, I couldn't easily check. Not only does
it download corrupt via web browsers, which may or may not
mean it is corrupt at my ISP site (I checked pretty carefully
that the file size remained identical under upload), but I
messed up the
Main-Class: Traveller
by spelling it
Main: Traveller
in the MANIFEST file, so the jar file wouldn't be executable
even if it were readable, which of course it is on my laptop.
Apologies and excuses: it is really tough doing this stuff while
sleeping on sidewalks, and without an Internet connection between
the development machine and the web site, but you've all heard
that whine before.
In the fullness of time, I'll move that code over from The Well
to Anycities, since I can maintain that latter site from library
computers, and at that time invite you all to try again.
My thanks to local FSU student Steve Keri, who convinced me to
convince myself that the problem was real.
xanthian.
Kent Paul Dolan
> I thought this cool respite from the sea of flame
> was too good to be true.
Most people would have said that the respite from
Kent's attempts at art was too good to be true,
and taken the flamefest as welcome relief and cried
for it to return.
Speaking of which, as warned, there are now two more
portfolios of Traveller Art linked from:
http://www.anycities.com/user/xanthian/
xanthian.
Gag you with a spoon.