[Feature] Flatten the canvas

[Karl DD]

When Alchemy starts to bog down from too many shapes, a button/menu item to flatten the canvas down. Turning all vectors into bitmaps.
This should make drawing snappier again.

[q_x]

This is not so cool and you know why. I think Alchemy is slow because of rendering too much *overlapping* transparent objects.
Ideas:
1. Xara's developers are maintaining fastest vector display engine, wich (so they said) will be released under GPL. Cairo is fast too. *Lots* of Xara's code is under GPL now.
2. Delete figures smaller than 1 px. Take remaining drawn figures white and black separately, split them into non-overlapping parts, sample % black (white) of each "parent" part and put it into "child" figure (as a transparency). If transparency is below 1% (2? 3?) or above 96% (?) - delete the shape or make it opaque. finally "add" all objects with the same colour and transparency (within 0,25%? 1/256?).
3. If the above is too hard - save page and then rasterize it. Just to have vector files "for sure". Figures sometimes are changing too fast to do it manually.
Keep on with good work,
Make a Wish,
Luke

[Karl DD]

I am pleased to say that this speed issue has been almost completely fixed for the 003 release.

What I did was split the rendering into two canvases. One of them does a complete redraw, the other only adds a shape as pixels to a buffer image.
What you see on screen is no different, but it is in fact a 'Managed Image' (hardware accelerated image). This way the whole screen only needs to be redrawn at certain times, eg when you use Affect modules that actually change the forms rather than just add new ones.

The good thing is that the vector data is still there and that canvas is used to save the PDF etc...
If you want to test it out, let me know.