Impress: OpenGL rendered transitions

This is the wiki page for the Google Summer_of_Code_2007 proposal by Shane M Mathews and mentored by Thorsten Behrens and Radek Doulik.

Proposal

To add 3D transitions to the Impress application. Transition is an animation where one page is visible in the beginning and another in the end. It is used during presentation slideshow to switch pages.

In the process of implementing OpenGL transitions an UNO API should be added to slideshow code, so that OpenGL transitions engine might be created as standalone UNO component. Current transitions should be refactored to another UNO component.

The engine will get the previous and next pages and should render the transition at given speed.

The participant should also implement at least 5 OpenGL transitions, rendered by the UNO component.

Current Status

Student is quarantining code to separate dynamically linked library, fixing slide position and aspect ratio problems, and implementing two more transitions.

Student Blog

Student Task List

• subscribe to openoffice.org wiki. Done.
• Submit a filled-out copy of the Joint Copyright Assignment form (JCA). Done.
• Successfully build OOo. Done.
• Verify the newly built version of OOo can be installed and run. Done
• Successfully make a minor hack to OOo, preferably to Impress. Done.
• Verify the hacked version of OOo can be run to verify it works correctly. Done.
• Successfully debug the minor hack. Done.
• Create stand-alone demo of transition system. Done.
• Call Demo from within OOo. Done.
• Grab window and pass it to Demo. Done. Flickering problems was caused by Bugs in parent window functions, not my code.
• Grab bits from slide bitmaps. Done. Problem with vcl canvas was a bug in BitmapLayout of vcl, not my code.
• Implement Uno Component. First Draft Done. The demo is officially dead, long live the Uno component XOGLTransitioner!
• Initiate transition just like any other transition. Done. Slidebasechange class rocks.
• Fix slide position and aspect ratio problems. This requires a large expansion of the engine. See Section below on this. In Progress.
• Quarantine OpenGL transitions to dedicated dynamically linked library. In Progress.
• Generalize all Transitions into components.
• Implement 5 Transitions total (20% complete). In Progress.

Backlog

• Generalized Transition components

Very Back Backlog

Write suggestions for the student here!

• Detect the use of a video card to do advanced graphical effects, such as generating a height map based on the colors of the current slide, and casting shadows using steep parallax mapping. Suggested by the student.
• Press tab to Zoom out "exposé-style" to give a view of all slides. Suggested by John Spray.

Random things student has learned

• Keep directory of clean source code. checking out or updating the entire project from CVS takes forever.
• Don't mix sun JDK and gcj in ubuntu. It makes configure very unhappy.
• Choose the easy route to do things. AMD64 + OOo = difficulty.