Descend

The first official version of Descend was released today. You can grab it from the Descend website which was also officially launched today. It's quite a historical moment, as Descend has been waiting for about eight years to be released. You can read a short history of this program and its predecessors here. Also this is the fourth sub-website in the mimec.org family, so I decided to add some nice links on the front page.

What's coming next? As I said recently, I have plans to start working on version 1.1 of WebIssues, but before I release the first beta version, you can also expect new releases of both Saladin and... Fraqtive. Possibly by the end of this year :).

It's been a while since I last wrote a post, but I've been quite busy. First of all, in a week or two I will release the first, official beta version of Descend. It will be quite an event, because I made several attempts at writing it in the last eight years and I've never come that close to finishing it. In case you missed the earlier post about Descend, it's a program for drawing 3D surfaces (and curves) based on parametric equations. It's sort of a conceptual project, so it's not going to have a lot of features, but it aims at being very fast and producing high quality graphics.

Another thing that has been bugging my mind in the past few months is the future of WebIssues. I came to the point where it simply doesn't make a lot of sense to put more effort into it without actually getting something back. I made lots of analysis how to make money from this project, especially focusing on controversies around the open core model. I came to the conclusion that the best solution is to create a specialized, commercial system based largely on WebIssues and dedicated to a narrow group of users, while keeping WebIssues itself a free, powerful, general purpose tool for bug tracking, project management, etc., which it already is, and letting it continue to evolve.

The idea is not new; I've been thinking about profiting from WebIssues since I started working on version 1.0 three years ago, but now I have a much clearer vision of what I'm trying to achieve. Most of all, I don't want to be an outsourced developer for the rest of my life. I got as far as I could in this area in terms of both allowance and career development. I need to change something sooner or later and this could be a great opportunity to do that. Of course, I could just get a highly paid job and forget about all this open source shenanigans; but in the end, what you achieve in life is a matter of much more than just money. So as always I'm choosing the harder way, and it's going to take time, but I think it's going to be worth the effort.

At the moment, however, I'm already planning to start working on version 1.1. The updated roadmap includes a long description field, roles and groups, LDAP authentication and project summary. I have an initial design for some of these features, others may be added as well, the roadmap is not closed yet. I will be posting more information on webissues.mimec.org and might even release the first beta version by the end of the year, but I'm not enforcing any deadlines on me. As long as I do it for free, it's nothing more than a hobby, and as such it competes for my time with other hobby projects, including Descend, Saladin, and especially the new update for Minecraft: Xbox 360 Edition that's coming out soon :).

A long period since my last post indicates that a lot has happened. My son Adam was born on January 11th at about 3 a.m. He's changing a lot, already smiles, speaks various vowels and tries to catch objects and hold them in his hand. It's a great experience to be a father, although it requires a lot of patience. Well, it's never a bad time to learn something new, and I personally find it very inspiring :).

In the meantime I released an update for WebIssues, changed the layout of my web sites a bit and also made some improvements of Saladin (you can expect a new version soon). I also made a pretty good progress with my novel. I will write more about it shortly, but it's generally a story about hackers, magic and virtual worlds. The nature of my day job is rather destructive for my imagination (and for the amount of time I can spend on other things), but it turns out that I'm still able to use it and I have some interesting ideas from time to time.

I'm also very proud that after so many years I successfully revived the idea of Descend. In a nutshell, it's the successor of a program for drawing parametric surfaces which I wrote over 10 years ago. Last year I wrote an adaptive tessellator and I made a working prototype of the program using Qt's built-in JavaScript engine. It worked nicely, but it wasn't very fast. Qt uses the JavaScriptCore engine from WebKit, which is currently developed by Apple and powers the Safari browser. It is one of the fastest JS engines, with a register based vritual machine and built-in JIT compiler (you can find more interesting information about it in this post). However, JavaScript is an object oriented, dynamically typed language, best suited for creating complex AJAX-based applications. It's not optimized for number crunching.

So I designed my own language, which is statically typed and has only four types: boolean, float, 4D vector and 4x4 matrix. I called it Misc, although it doesn't have much to do with the old Misc engine that I wrote 7 years ago (which was dynamically typed and supported complex types like objects and arrays). I wrote a relatively simple compiler which produces bytecode and doesn't perform any fancy optimizations, and a stack based virtual machine with dedicated instructions for vector and matrix operations, trigonometric functions, etc. As soon as I got it working, I performed some benchmarks.

I created three versions of Descend: one based on JavaScriptCore, another one using the new Misc engine, and the third one with equations hard-coded in C++. All three versions were compiled using Visual C++ 2008 with full optimizations and link-time code generation. I measured the total time of generating a deformed sphere which consisted of 43,000 vertices and required calculating 135,000 samples (the tesselator needs 3 samples per vertex in order to accurately calculate normal vectors).

The results are very encouraging: the version using Misc is not only 5 times faster than the one based on JavaScriptCore, but also just 3.5 times slower than the one using native code! Obviously this doesn't mean that Misc code is almost as fast as native code, but the overhead added by the Misc interpreter is not very big, compared to the cost of the tessellator itself and the cost of calculating the trigonometric functions (which is the same for all three versions). In contrast, the overhead of JavaScriptCore is much more noticeable.

Surely there's still some room for improvement, but I doubt I would be able to squeeze more than a few CPU cycles without making the code significantly more complex. So I'd rather start working on the UI to make it possible to draw something more than a single surface. I will publish the first version once it's usable, which may take a few months depending on how much time I will be able to dedicate to it.