Option to simplyfy a drawing

[hellocatfood]

I discovered alchemy only a week ago and already it's near to being on par with how I use Inkscape. I really do like that all of the shapes are vectors and can be manipulated in a vector editing program. My problem that I have, which is not Alchemy's fault, is that Inkscape get very slow with complex images. I tried loading up an image created in Alchemy that had about 1000 shapes and it took nearly 5 mins to open and a minute just to move one shape. Whilst I do hope that in the future Inkscape will improve its rendering engine and become faster I feel this creates an opportunity for a useful feature in Alchemy

Why not create a module that restricts the canvas to only have a certain amount of shapes on the screen and removes shapes once that number is reached. Allowing users to option to create something using only a certain amount of shapes could be quite interesting and would be a great mental exercise e.g. representing a form using the fewest shapes possible. I can currently think of three ways to decide what shapes should be removed:

*Using the first in, first out rule.
*Remove smaller shapes first
*Using first in, first out then count how many shapes it overlaps. If it fewer shapes than the next shape above it remove it.

I'm sure there's other ways you could do this but I'm no mathematician and only have basic programming skills (a bit of processing, actionscript and python)

Any input welcome!

[Karl DD]

Sorry for taking so long to reply to this...
I'm coming back to it after seeing your(?) blog post here:
http://www.hellocatfood.com/2009/09/10/ ... ff-simple/
Which I really enjoyed looking at to see the whole picture.

Yeah I like the first in first out idea. This could be a nice affect module. and maybe combined with smaller shapes removal.
The artist would give a certain number of shapes and then work from there. This could also lead to happy accidents.

Finding shapes that are behind others (not visible) is a little more difficult.
Because you need to compare each shape to every other shape.
Well there are probably better ways of doing it, but this only solves the complexity from the computer's standpoint (optimising to avoid a big file size etc...) rather than visually simplifying the sketch. Which would be a goal right?

[hellocatfood]

I'm glad someone reads my blog

As for finding shapes that are behind each other, I know that Inkscape has accomplished something like this. To select an object that's behind another object you'd press alt+click. This doesn't select the one that's next in the stack but the one that's behind it. That isn't to say that it'd be easy to implement in Alchemy (for one it's written in C/C++) but it might be worth asking the developers how they did it.

Well there are probably better ways of doing it, but this only solves the complexity from the computer's standpoint (optimising to avoid a big file size etc...) rather than visually simplifying the sketch. Which would be a goal right?

That's the goal I was originally aiming for. As I mentioned in my post I don't think this program is for finished pieces, so the simplifying process, which I see as post production work, could be done in another program.

[Karl DD]

This has been implemented for version 008, using the First In First Out rule.

[hellocatfood]

Great news! I've actually been testing it from some of the beta versions and it works really well. Any ideas as to when 008 will be out?

[Karl DD]

If all goes well, sometime before next week.