Implementing thick lines (and renaming "stroke" to skeleton?)

[davidedc]

Lines are problematic - they don't obey scale (or perspective) in regards to their thickness.

Thickness could be set by using strokeSize but

• still it doesn't obey scaling or any type of perspective, i.e. strokeSize is some abstract absolute value
• it doesn't work at all in Windows (I think due to the WebGl/DirectX translation or whatever)
• the line-cap given by graphic cards is weird, see this example (it's a flat horizontal cut or flat vertical cut depending on the angle of the line):
• where it works, it doesn't work beyond the magic number 7 (I think because the artifacts above would become too gross)

rotate time
strokeSize 7
line

So strokeSize is problematic and scaling lines is problematic. At the same time, changing the current stroke of the primitives to a custom implementation is too difficult (I think).

The good news is that we can fix some lines (the ones we create by using "line" now) by using some proper geometries to draw them (possibly with nice linecap, depending on some lineCap and lineDetail that we might want to set).

So perhaps we should distinguish between "line" + "lineSize" (which we can fix) and "skeleton" + "skeletonSize" (which I don't think we can easily fix)... Thoughts?

[rumblesan]

hah, I'd never noticed that about the end caps.

So I think that making improvements to 'line' and untying it from 'skeleton' would be a good call. I'm not so sold on the name 'skeleton' though. Perhaps 'edge' and 'edgeSize'? or some variation?

[davidedc]

Edge sounds good but I'm worried about burning such a fundamental graphic keyword. Not that I have plans to use it, but still...

how about "wire"? Would people get it?

[rumblesan]

haha, wire sounds pretty good actually. we seem to have this habit of choosing slightly off beat words for everything, so I think that fits :p

[davidedc]

maybe "wires", so it's clearer that you are not drawing a wire?