[GRASS5] xganim and motif requirement

GRASS GIS GRASS GIS developer
1

I was recently thinking about various GRASS requirements, what with all the GUI discussion. And, I saw Markus' comment on the users list that r3.showdspf funtionality is in NVIZ. One other one I'm wondering about - xganim.

This is the only thing in GRASS (that I can see) that requires Motif/Lesstif. On Mac OS X at least, this is the only reason for installing mo/lesstif, as everything else is TclTk/X11/GL.

So, could xganim be changed to not use motif? Or, like r3.showdspf, is the funtionality included elsewhere now so it's not even needed. I see that NVIZ has some animation capabilities, but they look quite different than simply animating a series of rasters. Maybe with the right options it could do the same?

-----
William Kyngesburye <kyngchaos@kyngchaos.com>
http://www.kyngchaos.com/

"Time is an illusion - lunchtime doubly so."

- Ford Prefect

2

I use xganim a lot to check the results of simulations that produce time series of rasters and to preview
the rasters before doing more complex animations using file sequencing tool in nviz. As far as I know
there is no other command that would produce quick simultaneous animations of multiple raster series
(r.out.mpeg currently doesn't come anywhere close to the convenience of xganim, and you can do only one series).
BUT I would love to see the requirement for Motif/Lesstif go away, so if anybody can replace xganim with
a module with the same (or better) functionality without motif that would be great.
The module comes from times when motif was used for GRASS GUI (just another one that is not around anymore)
and nviz had motif-based interface too.

Helena

On Nov 22, 2005, at 12:58 PM, William Kyngesburye wrote:

I was recently thinking about various GRASS requirements, what with all the GUI discussion. And, I saw Markus' comment on the users list that r3.showdspf funtionality is in NVIZ. One other one I'm wondering about - xganim.

This is the only thing in GRASS (that I can see) that requires Motif/Lesstif. On Mac OS X at least, this is the only reason for installing mo/lesstif, as everything else is TclTk/X11/GL.

So, could xganim be changed to not use motif? Or, like r3.showdspf, is the funtionality included elsewhere now so it's not even needed. I see that NVIZ has some animation capabilities, but they look quite different than simply animating a series of rasters. Maybe with the right options it could do the same?

-----
William Kyngesburye <kyngchaos@kyngchaos.com>
http://www.kyngchaos.com/

"Time is an illusion - lunchtime doubly so."

- Ford Prefect

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Helena Mitasova
Dept. of Marine, Earth and Atm. Sciences
1125 Jordan Hall, NCSU Box 8208,
Raleigh NC 27695
http://skagit.meas.ncsu.edu/~helena/

3

William Kyngesburye wrote:

I was recently thinking about various GRASS requirements, what with
all the GUI discussion. And, I saw Markus' comment on the users list
that r3.showdspf funtionality is in NVIZ.

If r3.showdspf is removed, that eliminates the last use of the GLw
library.

One other one I'm wondering about - xganim.

This is the only thing in GRASS (that I can see) that requires Motif/
Lesstif. On Mac OS X at least, this is the only reason for
installing mo/lesstif, as everything else is TclTk/X11/GL.

So, could xganim be changed to not use motif? Or, like r3.showdspf,
is the funtionality included elsewhere now so it's not even needed.
I see that NVIZ has some animation capabilities, but they look quite
different than simply animating a series of rasters. Maybe with the
right options it could do the same?

I've attached a quick re-implementation of xganim in Tcl/Tk. To use
it, you will need to set imgdir at the top of xganim.tcl to a
directory containing the bitmaps from visualization/xganim/bitmaps.

It probably has a few bugs, but right now I'm interested in whether or
not it's fast enough to be used. It's quite a lot slower than xganim.

If it's too slow, then any re-implementation would need to be in C,
which gets us back to the issue of which toolkit we require. There
isn't any toolkit which is standard on all platforms (some commercial
Unices don't include Athena as part of X11, Windows doesn't include
any of the Unix/X11 toolkits and vice-versa).

FWIW, changing xganim to use Athena instead of Motif would be quite
simple, as they are both Xt-based widget sets. The main difference is
that Athena doesn't include a canvas widget (analogous to
XmDrawingArea) as standard, but it's not hard to write one (you just
need to add resize and expose handlers to the Core widget class).

--
Glynn Clements <glynn@gclements.plus.com>

(attachments)

xganim.tcl (9.43 KB)