Project finished--Take a gander?

[Todd Wasson]

Thanks everybody for your help the past few months! You've all been a tremendous help to me. My first commercially available program is now released (Yahoo!!!). This was written entirely using PBDLL 6.0, and without it, this couldn't have been written (by me, anyway!) with my zero previous Windows programming experience. If you'd like to check it out, it's at:
http://PerformanceSimulations.Com

The graphics in the program are handled entirely by Perfect Sync Software's Graphics Tools package, so if you like the charts and stuff, give them a ring. For $50, I was able to do things immediately that would have taken months more to learn. (BTW, I don't work for Perfect Sync)

This project started out in QBasic, and to my amazement, PBDLL6.0 did the number crunching in the program 233 times faster than my QBasic Interpreter did, and more than 40 times faster than VisualBasic 2.0 (Old version, but was fast after using QBasic!) PowerBasic's advertising claim of speed was quite conservative when it came to calculations. I was pleasantly surprised!
Thanks everybody! Todd

P.S. Would have put the link above in as an actual LINK, but I don't know how! How do you do that, anyway??

[Edmund Melerski]

Todd,

I have had a look at your program. It looks very impressive.
I also have the Graphics Tools pakage, but so far I have used it to produce other graphical objects than charts.
I see that you handle charting very nicely.

I have been looking for charting tools that could help me graphically represent the results of my structural analysis (handled with help of PB/DLL6.0).
Unfortunately, the available graphing tools (at least those I looked at) require either ActiveX or COM.
Todd, is there any chance that your charting engine could help people like myself?

Edmund

[email protected]

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[Todd Wasson]

Edmund,
I'd be more than happy to help you with charting for your programs. Unfortunately, I haven't the first clue where to begin in writing a DLL to do that kind of thing (never gave it much thought), but I suppose it's something I could work on, if I knew exactly what you wanted. In that program from the site, I kind of made up each chart on the fly without writing an engine to do it, with some scaling operations to get things to appear correctly (if the car goes 100 mph, the graph needs to go at least that high, but not to 200, etc..)
What do you have in mind? I'd have fun sharing some code to scale things the way you want using Graphics Tools for the actual drawing, since I don't know the graphics API at all. Pens and brushes and objects and message loops confuse me, and I haven't read enough on it! If you're doing structural analysis, the math and little algorithms to do charting would probably be a piece of cake for you.
What exactly are you looking for or want to do? 2-D/3-D graphing? I just assign variables and do operations on them with FOR NEXT loops mostly, then use Graphics Tools to Drawline, Drawpixel, etc.. I'll explain any operations I use or can think of for your situation. (BTW, a 600 line 3-D model with Graphics Tools on my Pentium 60 ran at about 10 frames per second! Pretty cool!)

Would be glad to help,
Todd

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[Colin Schmidt]

Hello,

I'd email this to you instead of posting it here, but you don't have an email address on your web site.

Any ways, I have had many people ask me to produce that same app. Since I have not had the time, I'm glad I can now just refer them to you now, which is much simpler! I wasn’t looking forward to researching all those formulas If I ever get rich I'll order a copy myself before modding my Nissan Skyline (as if I actually have one).

You did inspire me though to translate (well re-do from scratch actually) a much simpler little app I had written years ago in QB. It’s just a Light-Tree reflex timer app for people to practice their lights for the track.

Email me and I’ll email you back a copy. If you like it you could include it as freeware with your app as a bonus or something.

Colin Schmidt
[email protected]

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Colin Schmidt & James Duffy, Praxis Enterprises, Canada

[Todd Wasson]

Sounds great, Collin, just emailed you. Look forward to playing with it.
Thanks!
Todd

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[Edmund Melerski]

Todd,

Thanks for your response and the kind offer to help me handle the problem of graphing.
I hoped that you might have developed a more general charting engine, which could readily be used by other people.

My program produces numerical results that can be represented by 2-D charts.
Hence I need a graphing tool that is capable of producing 2-D charts with jumps (two values of y for one value of x). Ideally, it should also have a piece-wise cubic spline fit option.
I think, I could develop the required routines for curve fitting myself.
I was rather more afraid of problems associated with use of graphics APIs, but you are right that Graphics Tools make this aspect of programming much easier.
In your graphs, you have curves, but they probably are based on functions and not on curve fitting (?).

Thanks again for the offer. Once I start working on this part of the program I will have a better idea about my problems. Then I may try to bother you again. At the moment I have to concentrate on my prime job, that is teaching (engineering students).
Todd, would it be possible to get your e-mail address? These aspects of programming may be of no interest to professional programmers that, I reckon, constitute more than 90% of the PB Forums users. Hence, it could be more appropriate to use e-mail for communication.

Edmund

[email protected]


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