About that AMD version…
A few weeks ago I promised a version of ShapeShop that would run on AMD processors. I haven’t forgotten. But I have discovered something….distressing. I seem to have…misplaced…the source code for ShapeShop v002.
I really thought I had a backup “checkpoint” (aka zip file) of the v002 source, but it turns out that the closest checkpoint I have is the code I used for my SIGGRAPH 06 paper. The release version wasn’t done for a few more months. Now, I’m not completely clueless - I do use source control, so in theory I should be able to pull the exact release codebase from CVS. Except that I switched from CVS to SVN last summer when I changed universities, at which point I deleted the CVS repository. I do have a backup of the CVS repository, so I might be able to get the code, but it’s not going to be as easy as just re-compiling.
I could do an AMD release of the older code - it has all the interface features that people seem to actually use. It looks like the main thing missing is the XML save-file format. I initially had a binary format, but I realized that was going to be a nightmare for maintaining backwards-compatibility*. This binary format does load in v002, but it probably won’t in v003. Which I can imagine will be pretty frustrating for any users who download it…
Any suggestions?
* You would not believe how much extra work is necessary to release research software, if you want to make it actually usable. This is why you hardly ever see those cool SIGGRAPH demos released into the wild…