Re: [boost] Interest in a tweener library

Subject: Re: [boost] Interest in a tweener library
From: Rhys Ulerich (rhys.ulerich_at_[hidden])
Date: 2012-07-14 16:17:17

>> 2. If you templatize, then I would like to know the kind of concepts
>> accepted by each ease function. This kind of library is very useful
>> when you can use the same code to interpolate, for example, 2D and 3D
>> vectors, instead of just a value. So it is important to says clearly
>> which operations have to be implemented for the value type to work
>> with the ease.
>
> In the case where the tweener classes are templatized, I think that
> the main requirement for the type is to support substraction and
> multiplication.
>
> The easing functions are agnostic with regard to the domain of the
> interpolated values. They just take the fraction of the interpolation
> duration represented in [0, 1] and tell "where" the tweened value is
> in a fraction of the distance between the origin and target values.
>
> So I think that the templatization would need two types: the user type
> T used in tweener classes and an other type E used in the easing
> functions. E should be a type that can represent values in [0, 1] and T
> must accept a multiplication by E.

To me it sounds like your T is a vector in an abstract vector space
and your E is the associated scalar type.

You just happen to have 1-dimensional vectors called "doubles" right now.

> For the case of more complex types like 2D and 3D vectors, I think
> they could be used for T but, as a user, that is not the way I would
> use the library. Instead, I guess that I would write a helper function
> that builds a tweener_group containing a single_tweener on each
> dimension of the vector.

I could see wanting to perform operations against the abstract vectors
directly.  This would permit using SSE-like instructions on long
vectors (through some suitable abstraction, of course).

- Rhys