VBOs and VBAs

PlumeriaSC is coming along nicely and should be available at the beginning of 2014. I was planning to get PlumeriaSC out by December but the Beta testers wanted the capability of creating VBAs. So what is a VBA? To understand what a VBA is I will explain what a VBO is first. VBO stands for Vertex Buffer Object. A VBO stores vertices and their attributes in a block of memory. Without a VBO the vertices are updated immediately and not stored in high performance memory. Since VBOs are preloaded into memory you can update larger amounts of polygons. PlumeriaSC 1 and 2 use VBOs but only PlumeriaSC 2 has VBAs. A VBA which stands for Vertex Buffer Array allows programmers to combine VBOs and store them in one block of memory. There is one big problem with some implementations of VBOs and VBAs. It is very difficult to replace, remove, or change the vertices that are loaded into memory. PlumeriaSC 2 allows for easy access to VBAs so the data can be changed or replaced without slowing the performance significantly.

Plumeria Update

PlumeriaSC is almost ready and is in beta testing right now. The lastest project I have been working on is the graphics. If you are still wondering what font the "2" is in the Plumeria Smart Charts 2 teaser video. It is in the Chalkduster font. Why Chalkduster? Because the PlumeriaSC 2 uses a chalkboard GUI.
An interesting tidbit happened the other day. I was testing PlumeriaSC 2 out and it kept crashing so I profiled it. To my surprise the App was running out of memory. I watched the allocations start at zero then sky rocket to three hundred megabytes and crash. What was the problem? My texture engine was not caching textures. Every time I updated the screen the same texture would be added to memory again. I finally fixed the texture leak and all is well. I was also surprised at how little memory PlumeriaSC 2 uses on the iPad. It is usually five to fifteen megabytes. At last check Xcode, which is the developer tool I use to create PlumeriaSC, uses seventy-five megabytes on the Mac.

Fixed Bug

I noticed the other day that one of my older movies of PlumeriaSC 1 was getting a ton of hits on my website. The funny thing is that the features in PlumeriaSC 2 are totally awesome compared to PlumeriaSC 1. It will be interesting to see what people do when the PlumeriaSC 3 teaser comes out! Another interesting thing I have observed is that most of the computers that view this blog are Windows users from France. Yes, Plumeria was named after a guy from France so I would guess that would explain it.
I will give a hint about what type of theme is used for the interface. In my teaser movie the number "2" is in a certain font that corresponds with the user interface.
Also I noticed the Mac OS X version of Be in the Cube had a bug from the OS 10.6 compiler which I fixed in OS 10.7.

PlumeriaSC 2 coming soon

PlumeriaSC 2 is in full development. Some of the new features include a simulator that runs up to 40% faster and flow charts that are up to 1/8th the size. The flow charts have become so condensed that you can fit a flow chart of a 3D square on one screen. So what's the best part about PlumeriaSC 2? It is also in development for the iPad! This means you will be able to create 2D and 3D apps in object-oriented flow charts on the iPad.

New PlumeriaSC

We have been working hard on a new major version of PlumeriaSC for several platforms. Everything has been retooled for this version. I still remember how hard it was for me to write Galactic Space Junk (my first major program) and to finally finish it after two and a half years. The next version of PlumeriaSC will help give confidence to those who are trying to learn programming but find written languages too hard.

Happy New Year!

It has been a while since I have posted on this blog. We have been busy building apps to help enhance PlumeriaSC. Some of the technologies we are working on are flow chart blocks and artificial intelligence charts. The blocks would speed up the development process of flow charts and may even transform the flow charts to a one dimensional chart. Artificial intelligence would bring the flow charts to the highest level of programming possible. It may even take out the need for the project's flow chart creation process. Instead it would generate flow chart projects and then allow the programmer to tweak the charts at the end of the process. These are just some of the ideas coming soon from Solar Fusion Software so stay tuned.

PlumeriaSC 1.6 beta

PlumeriaSC 1.6 is in closed beta testing now and will be the final major version of PlumeriaSC. 1.6 includes networking (yes I finally got it implemented after working on it for a year) and an iPhone simulator with an accelerometer simulator. New changes that come out after 1.6 will be for minor updates and bugs fixes to keep it current.
     It is interesting to look back and see how advanced the ideas for PlumeriaSC were when it was first in development. PlumeriaSC was started in May 2009 on Xcode 3. Back then Apple's developer tool (Xcode 3) made it very difficult to create full and demo versions in the same project. Also the iPhone and Mac applications would only work if each was created in its own separate project. Xcode 3 did not have any easy way to save different versions of the project.
     When PlumeriaSC first started the iPhone had just come out and the iPad was still a few years down the road. Back then PlumeriaSC was really only for Mac with support for iOS devices being added later. When iOS support was added PlumeriaSC was almost totally rewritten and rebuilt around the features of the iOS instead of Mac. Since then PlumeriaSC has had two to three major rewrites. PlumeriaSC has 20,000 lines of code and is still less than ten megabytes. It has been actively developed 750 days, although, not continuously developed every day.