I thought I was replying to the OP. I thought the messages simply ran down consecutively. But I guess now I should assume that the indents of messages have some meaning in terms of who I am replying to? Your Gutenberg comment didn't make it clear to me that you didn't think we were doomed. But now that you have clarified that, I'll let the reply stand as it is since it provides a contrast of sorts. Sorry, I offended you. I will delete it if you wish: it is after all just a version of the stereotypical doomsayer standing on the city street corner with the sign around his neck that says "THE END IS NIGH".

"if we have become so reliant on crap, plastic, man-made things that go "beep" in less than 50 years, are we all doomed?" Oh, cheer up. We have always been doomed anyway. Don't go blaming technology now. You've just confused with 'crap, plastic, man-made things that go "beep"' as being a cause, where it is a symptom of our human condtion: of groping at laziness dressed up as competency and convenience without really shaking off the incompetence. Man can always look at all of his finest achievements with awe and wonder, but in the end he knows that the bottom line is that he won't be able to stop raping this world until the brink of destruction is reached. "Are we there yet mommy?". "No not yet son, we'll be there when you see everyone trying to kill each other again for the third time". Wait on, doesn't man look at technology as its saviour? How dare we blaspheme against it. I better go now, the paradoxes are coming. Anyway, it's time for our medication.

I am now thinking my understanding of the term "translation controller" is not what Shoemake meant when he wrote it. Anyone agree? All I will have is conjecture. And I don't think I will ever really find evidence to confirm exactly what Shoemake meant in that statement without actually asking him.

modified on Sunday, September 14, 2008 9:19 PM

Thanks for that Tim. But I have already found that. It seems to actually talk about extending/handling the camera's 6 DOF of movement in relation to something like an Arcball implementation. Where a 'Virtual Trackball/Arcball is used to rotate objects in 3D space", I am looking for an extension of the concept so that something like "Virtual Plane(s) are used to translate objects in 3D space" [bit like what is in the link to my other post(s)].

[Message Deleted]

I am digging deep here: 999 times out of a thousand I can eventually find the information I need without posting on forum(s) [looks like I must be upto the thousand tolerance level :)] "Since a single mouse position has only two degrees of freedom, a pair of positions—the ends of an arc—are used.This part of Arcball has wider applicability, including a translation controller to be described in a future paper." "ARCBALL: a user interface for specifying three-dimensional orientation using a mouse",Ken Shoemake,September 1992,Proceedings of the conference on Graphics interface '92 1992, 16 long years ago.This is about the mysterious 'translation controller to be described in a future paper'. Does anybody know if that future paper materialised over the last 16 years? The last cited Shoemake paper I could find was: "Arcball rotation control",Ken Shoemake, August 1994 Graphics gems IV. And most of his other papers seem to diverge into the discipline of animation. My conclusion so far is that Shoemake never got around to doing that 'translation controller' paper, or my understanding of that term is different to what he meant. OR Does anyone know of published works/papers by other authors that continued in Shoemake's footsteps towards describing a translation controller. Just to clarify: A brief description of my understanding of 'translation controller' can be found in my post(s) here

modified on Tuesday, September 16, 2008 10:56 AM

you can implement such things so users can modify things on-the-fly (i.e. realtime), and from any event that you may wish to be the trigger, i.e. changes in a control (e.g. tab page) reflected in the 'game' realtime, and visa versa. oh, and here is an link to a brief example of how it could be done (seems OP Athos1984 already has it, so placing it here may be a good reference for others too): http://www.gamedev.net/community/forums/topic.asp?topic\_id=499979

modified on Tuesday, July 8, 2008 7:26 PM