I am in the process of creating a user interface for setting up constraint systems (for mapping 3D animation), which basically involves a lot of boxes with tabs for input and output and a lot of lines connecting tabs to each other (outputs of one box go to inputs of another). This is what it looks like at the moment:
This is a very simple system I threw together in testing (it doesn't actually do anything useful), and I expect most systems that will be created with this program to be far more complex (10x as many boxes at least). What I want to do is tidy up the display by having the connecting lines automatically arrange themselves in the neatest way they can using right angles only. I want it to be a realtime so that the lines will reposition as the user moves boxes around. I have been told that the GA is the method usually used to solve these kind of systems, but GA uses random functions to generate populations which would mean a realtime update would jump about a lot (I would imagine). The system I am thinking of using to represent the routes is like so: All calculation is done from the input to the output. There are nodes along the line. Each node contains a fractional distance along the line, and a flag to tell it whether it should be drawn horizontal then vertical, or vice versa
Horizontal then vertical looks like this:
node
*-------*[box2] input
| horiz
|vert
|
[box2]* output
Vertical then horizontal looks like this:
*[box2] input
|
|vert
horiz |
[box2]*-------*node
output
The distance along the line of the first node is of course calculated and fixed as there is only two positions it can be and still form a right angle. To add another node, a position is chosen along the line and the line is split:
node
*-------*[box2] input
|
*new node
|
[box2]* output
Then the segment of line containing the first node can be randomly flipped to being either horizontal then vertical or vice versa.
Horizontal then vertical:
*-------*[box2]
|
*
|
[box2]*
Vertical then horizontal
*[box2]
|
*--------*
|
[box2]*
This process can be repeated however many times and the fitness function is a combination of the distance of the line, and how many other boxes and lines it intersects. I would like the result to look something like this:
The problem (as I said above) is that random splits are going to be different everytime, and as it is going to be realtime I can't calculate to the exact best solution, so the lines will jump about unpleasantly. Has anyone here got any ideas about better methods or tweaks that I can use? Thanks alot!! PS. Could someone please tell me how to keep leading spaces so I don't have to use source boxes for ASCII art?!
[Edited by - bluntman on February 23, 2006 10:24:59 AM]
