Category : Printer + Display Graphics
Archive   : DMORF11.ZIP
Filename : WHATSNEW.DMO

DMORF Revision History

Rel 1.1, 07/12/93 -
o Added a /GO command-line option, which you can use like this:
dmorf bla.msh /go
it'll make DMorf load the BLA.MSH mesh file, process the morph,
and then exit to DOS when it's done. Useful if you want to
run a morph from batch file.
o Built a new executable, DMORFNC.EXE, for folks without math
coprocessors. It uses Borland Pascal's 6-byte Real data type
instead of the 4-byte Single-Precision floating point numbers
used in DMORF.EXE. Borland Pascal's built-in support for
Reals is quite a bit faster than its coprocessor emulation.
On a machine without a coprocessor, DMORFNC.EXE should only be
2 or 3 times slower instead of 10 or 20 times slower.
o Changed the picture and spline display during morphing...
now it shows the results from both passes of the "two-pass
mesh warp".
o Moved "Morph Switches" and "Frame" controls to a new
dialog available with "Settings" button on both
main and Max views.
o Added "Before" and "After" selection radio buttons
... which decide which window some of the other
functions operate on, like Edit, Max, FlipH, Scale,
and Move. So there's no need for two buttons for each.
o Shrunk the main menu so there's only two rows of buttons,
and the picture windows can be larger.
o Added a button for deleting lines from the meshes.
o Found some new spline code from George Wolberg in Dr. Dobb's
Journal... so I adapted it and replaced the previous spline
code. The new splines are a *lot* less prone to going
nuts.
o Because of the stabler spline code, I put back some old
disabled code for remapping intervals between mesh lines
using splines instead of linear interpolation...
I may change this so that splined intervals are a default
that you can turn off.
The result is a more natural looking warp, but I suspect
there are some circumstances where linear interpolation
of intervals would look better.
o Renamed fatpixels to "Zoom". Also added a Zoom button to
the Maximized screen, for fine-tuning mesh control points.
Rel 1.04, 05/23/93 - (beta release, limited distribution)
o Finally "add mesh points" works right... even if you've
moved the points on the borders, the new lines will get put
in the right place.
Rel 1.03, 05/09/93 - (beta release, limited distribution)
o DMorf wasn't saving the Gamma correction values in mesh
files. Now it does.
o Changed "Spline Always" option... now it continues
displaying splines even while editing control points.
Ideally this'd be automatic whenever "Spline Mesh" is
selected, but it works way too slowly except on the fastest
of machines.
o Added "Save As" to Edit screen. Now Save just saves to the
current filename for the picture. Save As prompts you for
a new filename.
When you do Save As, DMorf will change the filename in
the Pictures dialog, too.
o Now if you Edit picture 2 when only one picture is loaded,
DMorf will load in a copy of picture 1... make sure to
use "Save As" when saving it back. Otherwise you'll mess
up the file for picture 1.
o Added a new screen, "FatPixels", which can be accessed from
the Edit screen. It gives a magnified view of a portion
of the picture and lets you edit the transparency mask for
individual pixels.
(Now pixel editing only works on the FatPixels screen,
and area editing only works on the edit screen... it 1.02
you could fiddle with pixels on the regular edit screen,
but it didn't work well except with a tiny picture.)
o Added "ABlur" (Alpha-Blur) button on the Edit screen. It
performs a weighted blur filter against just the alpha
channel... this helps a bit since DMorf's rudimentary alpha
editing doesn't support fractional values.
o Renamed "Zoom" to "Maximize"... since that's what it's really
doing.
o Renamed "Mirror" to "FlipH" (Flip Horizontal)... 'cause I'll
probably add vertical flipping one of these days.
o Added "Show In-between" and "Verbose Status" checkboxes
to the morph switches menu panel. If you turn off
"Show In-between", then DMorf won't update the screen
while it's morphing... resulting in a speed increase.
If you turn off "Verbose Status", then DMorf will display
fewer messages while morphing... no percentages. I thought
this would produce an okay speed increase, too, but it
didn't really.
o I'm thinking of turning "Smooth Resample" off in the defaults...
so that the defaults would represent the fastest options, even
if it looks terrible. Any thoughts, anybody?
o Adding points didn't work right if you used the bottom or right
borders of a picture. Fixed.
Rel 1.02, 05/03/93 - (beta release, limited distribution)
o Fixed message box placement.
o When you edit a control point, DMorf now draws a little
circle around the corresponding point in the other picture.
o DMorf no longer dumps you out to DOS if you type in an
incorrect picture filename.
o Added "Spline Always" checkbox... if it's checked off,
DMorf always displays meshes as splines instead of lines.
... except while editing control points.
o Gamma-correction (for picture display only) works now.
(if your picture looks murky, try File=1.0, Disp=2.0.)
o Fixed some message box glitches.
o No locked mesh points yet, sorry.
o Split "Save" button to "Save" and "Save As". Save will save
to the current mesh-file name if there is one. Save As
will prompt for a new mesh-file name.
o Split "Load" button into "Load" and "Reload". Load prompts
for a mesh-file name. Reload re-reads the current mesh-file.
o Area alpha-editing now works (Select the "area" radio-button
object).
o Pixel alpha-editing now works better (Select the "pixel"
radio-button object).
o The Save button on the alpha-editing screens now works.
... even if you're using a GIF or IMG file, it always saves
the picture as a 32-bit TGA file (so that the alpha information
gets saved), and changes the filename in the Pictures dialog.
No Save As for pictures yet.
o Added a "Mirror" button to the Edit screen... so you can flip
a picture horizontally. Useful for symmetric morphs.
Rel 1.01, 04/25/93 - (beta release, limited distribution)
o Added VESA 1024x768x256 and 800x600x256 graphics modes.
You have to request these modes with the /1024 or /800
command-line switches
(I would have made /1024 the default, but I don't want folks
to accidentally get that mode if it's not supported by their
monitors... I've heard that that this could damage a monitor)
o Changed the mesh file format... it's now a text file
instead of a binary file.
This should make it a bit easier for folks (including me) to
build compatible files in external programs, if they're so
inclined.
Of course DMorf still reads all the old binary mesh files
from earlier versions.
o Added a Hide button, which will make the control mesh
invisible for as long as you keep it pressed.
o If you load a 32-bit TGA file that contains transparency
information, DMorf will display all transparent pixels
(also partially transparent pixels) in a different color.
You can change this color with the Alpha R,G,B controls.
o Moved some of the controls (screen colors, output file
options) off of the main menu and onto popup dialogs.
Changed "Zoom 1" and "Zoom 2" buttons to little Maximize
buttons on the top-right corner of the picture windows.
These changes allow the menu panels to use up less of the
screen, freeing up more of the screen for displaying pictures.
o Added Alpha color controls (in the Screen colors dialog).
This lets you control what color transparent pixels are
displayed in.
o Added controls for gamma correction controls for picture
display (in the Screen colors dialog). Haven't actually
implemented gamma correction, though.
o When saving a mesh, DMorf now appends a '.MSH' to the
filename if you don't specify one, just as it does when
loading one in.
o Added Input filename controls (in the Pictures dialog) for
specifying before & after pictures, and background picture
so you can change pictures without leaving dmorf.
(The background picture feature isn't implemented yet, though)
Input picture filenames are no longer required on the
command-line. If you want, you can start up DMorf
with just the "dmorf" command, and then specify the pictures
in the Pictures dialog.
DMorf also saves the picture filenames into the mesh file.
o DMorf no longer aborts when two pictures are specified
which don't have the same dimensions. But, it will
still refuse to morph two pictures if they are differently
sized. I'm planning on building in scaling so that you
can morph differently-sized pictures, but haven't done it
yet.
o You no longer have to do a '/C' or '/M' to load in a
mesh file... DMorf will assume you're specifying a mesh
based on the '.MSH' extension. You can just type
"dmorf xxx.msh" to load in a mesh, along with the pictures
named in the mesh file. Or you can specify filenames and
mesh with a command like "dmorf xxx.msh file1.tga file2.tga"
or "dmorf file1.tga file2.tga xxx.msh". Of course the
"/C" and "/M" switches are still recognized.
o Moved Message windows so that they cover the menu panels
instead of the pictures. This way it's easier to see what's
going on during the morph. Also, since there's no more
need to store what's underneath the popup (it's easy to
recreate the menus), DMorf uses a tad less memory.
o Added Edit windows... which let you modify the transparency

values of pixels in the pictures.
Still have to add a way to make an area transparent...
with a rubber-band box or something.
The Save button doesn't work yet, unfortunately... so
the transparency only stays in effect if you've "preload"ed
the pictures.
Rel 1.0, 04/08/93 -
o There's only one version of the program now, running in
Protected mode.
o DMorf displays pictures in 640x480x256 mode if your hardware
can do it (and your hardware is compatible with DMorf's
VESA graphics driver). Otherwise, it will switch to 16-color
mode.
If DMorf doesn't work properly with your VESA board or VESA
driver, you can tell it to use regular VGA mode with the
/NOSVGA command-line parameter.
o Instead of listing the current row or column while morphing,
it just displays what percent of the job it has completed.
o Fixed some bugs in TGA output file header.
o Added some controls for selectively turning off nonstandard
features in TGA files. (Well, they're standard according
to the specification, but not all programs support them).
These features include run-length encoding, 32-bit
pictures, and top-to-bottom scanline order.
o Added "Mirror" buttons, which flip meshes horizontally.
o DMorf used to leave a temporary file called "WARP.TGA" on
the disk when it was done morphing... it now deletes this
file.
o (An otherwise undocumented features which might disappear in
the future: Alt-P captures the screen to a grayscale TGA
file.)
o (A last-minute addition... if you use the /QUICK command-line
option, DMorf won't keep updating the screen as it morphs...
this can save quite a bit of time. In the future I'll make
this a setting that you can change on the DMorf screen.)
o (Another last-minute addition... if you use the /PRELOAD
command-line option, DMorf will load each of the pictures
into memory once at startup instead of constantly re-reading
them during the morphing process. This should adds a lot of
speed, especially in SVGA mode, but requires a hunk of
additional memory.)
o Fixed a bug that prevented DMorf from reading Vivid IMG files
without crashing.
o Fixed a bug that caused DMorf to allocate too much memory
while morphing.
Rel 0.12, 12/26/92 -
o Okay, I messed up. Too much "holiday cheer" I guess.
Anyway, in 0.11 I did fix the bugs mentioned below, but
added several others while I was at it. Fixed.
o Added buttons on the zoom screens for switching between
zooms.
o Changed the way keyboard control works... if you press a
letter it'll activate the screen control in question instead
of just selecting it.
Rel 0.11, 12/24/92 -
o Fixed some bugs: (1) there was some garbage in the headers
of TGA files because of uninitialized variables.
(2) Dmorf wasn't able to read mesh files from 0.09 and earlier
which were saved when the meshes were "locked".
o Fiddled with mouse stuff so it behaves more smoothly in
protected mode.
Rel 0.10, 12/21/92 -
o Changed the name of the program to Dmorf (short for "Dave's
Morphing program" ... it seems that "Morph" was already taken
by a Macintosh commercial morphing program).
o Fiddled with the UI some more. You can now click on a number
field and type the number in instead of using the arrows to
increment and decrement them.
o Added a "swap" button... it swaps meshes between the two
pictures.
o Added "copy 1->2" and "copy 2->1" buttons... which make
duplicate the mesh from one window in the other.
These are replacements for the old "locked" setting.
o Dmorf no long exits to DOS when it's done morphing. It just
returns to edit mode. Use the "quit" button or the key
to exit the program.
If you press the ESC key while a morph is in progress,
it returns you to edit mode.
o Dmorf doesn't need to load a whole picture into RAM just
do display it anymore... so you can display pictures and edit
meshes even with the real mode version (DMORF.EXE), and that
means you can use the SVGA mode (with the /S option) which
still doesn't work in protected mode.
For large pictures (or actually, anything but TINY pictures)
you'll need to use the protected mode version to do the
actual morphing.
o You can now select UI controls with the tab key and space bar
instead of the mouse. You can't control meshes with the
keyboard, but any other screen items should work fine.
Also, you can select a control by typing the letter that's
highlighted in its label... for instance, the G in the Go
button is highlighted. If you press the G key, the Go
button will be selected... then just press the space bar
to actually select the button.
o Got rid of "Spline intervals" option. It almost always
produces "pixel rot" (thanks to Eric Kachelhofer for coming
up with that term), and the results were hardly ever
any better than without.
o Dmorf now displays the intermediate meshes while it warps.
Rel 0.09, 12/09/92 -
o Added /C command-line parameter, which lets you preload a
mesh/control file. "morph before.tga after.tga /cbla.msh"
preloads a control file called "bla.msh".
o The maximum value for the "last frame" control wasn't
getting reset properly when Morph read in a control file.
Fixed.
o Added /S command-line parameter, which tells MORPH to use
SVGA (640*480*256) instead of VGA (640*480*16).
Unfortunately, this only works in the real mode version,
because the SVGA256.BGI driver dies in protected mode,
so you'll only be able to use it on tiny pictures.
Hopefully this'll be corrected in a future version.
Rel 0.08, 12/06/92 -
o Fixed two more bugs which in some circumstances caused
runtime errors.
o Changed some of the on/off-type controls to checkboxes.
o Added controls to change the color of the mesh... sometimes
the default red color doesn't stand out too well.
o Some of the on/off-type control values weren't getting saved
in the control file correctly. Fixed.
o Cleaned up the line-adding code... now Morph only pays attention
to the right button if the cursor is in a picture border.
In fact, if you try to use the right button anywhere else, it
lets off an irritating sound. It also sounds a tone if you
try to add a line where there already is one.
o Morph now pays attention to the escape key in zoom mode.
Rel 0.07, 12/03/92 -
o Fixed another memory allocation problem, which was sometimes
generating page-fault errors (runtime error 216).
Rel 0.06, 12/01/92 -
o MORPH wasn't deallocating some memory correctly, resulting
in out of memory errors after a while.
Rel 0.05, 11/30/92 -
o You can halt MORPH at pretty much any time with the key.
o the Warp 1/2 and Fade 1/2 controls weren't working right... no
matter what value was selected, MORPH would use the 50% for Warp
and 75% for Fade. Fixed.
o got rid of all the EMS/XMS/virtual memory stuff... there are
now two versions of the program: MORPH, which runs in real mode
and should work on pictures that are 320x240 or less; and
MORPHX, which runs in 286 Protected mode and should work on
pictures that are up to around 2000*2000 (if you've got 16MB
of memory... even if you've got more than 16M, MORPH can't access
any more.)
I will rework this so it stores only one channel at a time
(red, green, blue, alpha) and can work with pictures four
times larger. This'll make it slower, but I think that's a
fair trade.
Or maybe I'll rework MORPH so it operates on chunks instead
of a whole picture.
Note: to get the protected mode version working, you must have
a copy of RTM.EXE and DPMI16BI.OVL (and maybe DPMIINST.EXE if
you've got an unrecognized 286 processor). These files are
available in another archive, DTAMEM.ZIP. They're in a separate
archive so you won't have to redownload them each time MORPH
(or my other programs, DTA and PDOTS) gets updated.
o MORPH now updates the screen as it's performing a morph.
In each pass of the warping process, for each picture, it
updates the picture in question with the interim results.
It then updates both screens with the actual merged morph
frame.
o I discovered that the cause of a lot of streaking on the screen,
(and probably some crashes) was caused by a routine I was trying
out for figuring out the resampling intervals between mesh
curves using splines.
An earlier version of the routine, which uses linear
interpolation method, is stabler and faster. The linear
method is now the default. You can still switch back to
the spline method if you want (sometimes it produces more
convincing results). This option is called "Spline intervals".
o MORPH will no longer abort if you start it up without a
mouse driver loaded. Instead, it will allow you to type a
few keystrokes. The keystrokes it recognizes are
or "A" to abort, "L" for load mesh file, and "G" for "Go".
Rel 0.04, 11/26/92 -
o Fixed another bug with upside-down TGAs (in zoom mode)
o Fixed a minor interface bug.
o Linked the bgi driver into the executable... so there
shouldn't be "initgraph" errors when you don't have
"egavga.bgi" in the morph directory.
Rel 0.03, 11/23/92 -
o Fixed run-time error that was all that you got from
pressing the Zoom buttons.
o When dealing with upside-down TGAs (first line
at the bottom), MORPH flipped the picture upside down but didn't
flip the control mesh along with it. Oops.
o Copied a bit of interface gunk from PDOTS.