Not quite a skeleton

But something displays. It has something to do with the order with which Processing processes the translations/rotations, and whatnot. The AMC parser works fine at the moment, but I think I just need to debug the recursive display() function I wrote. The challenge is trying to make sure all the functions related to drawing/translating/rotating execute in the proper order and in the correct coordinate system relative to each other, which is getting messed up somewhere currently.

Current train of thought:

The idea is that you want to keep drawing a chain of joints within the same coordinate system as the stem of the chain. Therefore, you need to push/pop matrices so that once you run out of joints in that lineage, you go back to the common ancestor and pop matrix so you start drawing again from that coordinate system. So if you start with the root, you want the left arm to get drawn in succession, but then you can't exactly start drawing the right arm without reverting back to the coordinate system of the root. Thus you need to push matrix right after you draw the root and then pop it when you're about to start drawing the right arm. There's a code sample on page 112 of the book Getting Started With Processing (Casey Reas & Ben Fry) that makes a lot of sense in terms of how the transformation hierarchy works. I think I'm just hitting a block in articulating my thoughts but it makes sense to me.


Will debug today.

Also, I wrote a Frame class that holds a skeleton and a frame ID. I'm trying to make it so that the parseAMC() function creates a new Frame object for ever frame it reads, but right now, it seems as though the program overwrites the same Frame, even though I used a similar code structure for creating new Bones in the parseASF() function and that works fine. This would be where a better IDE (allowing for better debugging functionality) is helpful. That being said, debugging has been extremely slow with the Processing IDE so far. I didn't think it would be as slow as it has been.

I've also been sick for the past week and a half. It's been such that I've had a recurring headache this entire time. Not the worst, but certainly annoying when you have to stare at a computer screen all day. :(