White_dune developer documentation

"white_dune", what's that ?

"white_dune" is a continuation of the "dune" project by Stephan F. White.
"dune" is a graphical VRML97 Editor and animation tool with some OpenGL scene rendering capabilities.

white_dune program overview

In princple, the structure of the white_dune program can be written as:

  1. evaluate commandline parameters
  2. enter GUI (Grapical User Interface) mainloop
For details, see the file main.cpp

white_dune GUI overview

The GUI of white_dune consists of 2 parts:

  1. 2D GUI
    This handles two dimensional operations like opening windows, display icons, menus, buttons etc.
    2D GUI operations are seperated in a extra programming level, called swt (Stephan White Toolkit).
    Currently, there are two different implementations of swt written in C, one for Motif/Lesstif (Unix/Linux) and one for Win32 (M$Windows).
    For details, see the directory swt. swt use M$Windows rc files. For details about non M$Windows implementation see the directory swt/rc.
  2. 3D GUI
    This handles three dimensional operations. This is displaying 3D data (rendering, implemented in OpenGL) and manipulating 3D Objects.
    Some 3D operations, like mouseinput and reaction to desktop events (e.g. resize of Windows) are handled in connection with the 2D GUI (see the file Scene3DView.cpp for details).
    Additional, there are other sources of information for manipulating 3D Objects (also handled in Scene3DView.cpp): input from devices like joystick, dialbox or spaceball. Code for input from this devices is located in the file InputDevice.cpp.

The 2D GUI mainloop of white_dune is event driven. Typical events are mouse-movement, mouse-click, resize of window and so on.
Additionally the mainloop can produce timer events.
When a event occures, the matching callback function is started. The callbacks work for every subwindow of white_dune.
The following image shows the subwindows (red text) of the mainwindow.

subwindows of the mainwindow

Some 2D GUI events are distributed to the different subwindows. The distribution of this events is based on inheritance.
The class SceneView define inheritable 2D GUI callbacks like OnMouseMove and is parent class to the classes ChannelView, FieldView, Scene3DView, SceneGraphView, SceneTreeView, StatusBar, ToolbarWindow and PanedWindow. PanedWindow is parent class to the class MainWindow.

The name of classes is identical to the filenames.

A additional callback OnUpdate is used to distribute messages like UPDATE_FIELD or UPDATE_ADD_NODE to the child classes of SceneView. OnUpdate is started by the function UpdateViews of class Scene.

The class Scene can be identified with one VRML file.

The global variable TheApp of class DuneApp can be identified with things that are global to all VRML files.