Re: .xpm ants and batchmode

[Benedikt Stefansson]

Sven N. Thommesen wrote:

> I've discovered that if one tries to emulate the version of Heatbugs that
> uses the .xpm bitmaps to display the ants, the app will not run in
> -batchmode :-(
> (Nor will heatbugs itself ...)
>
> Is this new in 1.0.3? Is there a fix?
>
> Would Benedikt's fix for collecting 'movie' data in batchmode be relevant
> here?
>
> Sven

Hi Sven,

I haven't bothered to work out a solution to printing out bitmaps in
BatchRaster. It would be a bit messy, probably an afternoon's worth of work.
The basic problem is to read in and store the pixmap in an array and then map
the arrays with other color information into the raster array. At the present
time we can get away with storing only the logical dimensions of the raster
in memory, this would require us to store the array by its physical
dimensions. Since I haven't had any need for this feature myself it has been
filed safely away at the bottom of the to-do drawer.

If someone wants to do it I can help out though.

I didn't quite understand your message. What do you mean by "emulate"
Heatbugs? You also seemed to imply that Heatbugs won't run in batchmode
period (I haven't installed 1.0.3 so I haven't checked this myself).

It strikes me as odd that Heatbugs with pixmaps doesn't run in batchmode,
since as we know HeatbugBatchSwarm doesn't initialize the Raster output and
shouldn't ask the bugs to draw themselves, regardless of whether the pixmap
or the regular method is being used.

Regards,
-Benedikt


----------------
Benedikt Stefansson                 address@hidden
Department of Economics, UCLA       Fax. (310) 825-9528
Los Angeles, CA 90095-1477          Tel. (310) 825-1777



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