From: kleber@husc9.harvard.edu (Gwydden "Galen" ap Hafgan)
Organization: Harvard University Science Center
Newsgroups: rec.juggling
Message-ID: <1991Nov29.115910.5985@husc3.harvard.edu>
Date: 29 Nov 91 16:59:09 GMT
Subject: "Other" Site Swap viewer

Hi, people.  Having just recently cleaned out the 150 messages waiting
when I first subscribed to this newsgroup (a week ago, after someone hit me
on the head for not reading it already), seems time to post.

I'm the author of the "other site swap viewer" that someone mentioned
on this group a while back.  It's currently for DOS machines (well, IBM-
clones, you know) only; I've been going to get around to porting it
for Mac and Xwindows as soon as I have the time.

The thing is still very much in progress, and as such most of the options
that should be user-modifiable (ie hand width) are hard-wired into the
source code.  The only things that can be changed are (1) number of
anumation frames per site-swap logical "beat", controling speed and
animation quality, and (2) how long before a ball is thrown it gets caught,
whcih is directly related to the current question of average number of
balls in the air at once.

Hewever, what it does do... first of all, no command-line options, as
I want it to be easily mac-portable; it prompts you for a pattern.
Patterns are entered as a string of digits, no spaces between them.
Throws with duration greater than 9 can be entered in 2 ways: first,
it uses extended hex (actually base 36, i guess), so b1 is a 6-ball
shower.  Second, enclosing any number in parens parses to that number,
so (49)1 is a 25-ball shower.  (Actually, white space is ignored, so
you can put spaces in if it's easier for *you* that way...)  Next
significant feature is that putting an apostrophe (') after a number
makes it an outside throw, so 3 is a 3-ball cascade, 33' is a half-outside,
3' is reverse cascade, 333' is tennis, etc.  (note that the pattern 345
looks much better as 34'5, incidentally... and that 444'4' is 4 columns.)
Oh, to quit hit reutn when it asks you for a pattern, btw.  All this is in
the doc file, but most people don't read that far...

As I said, it's still under revision.  First of all, currently it does
perspective acurately, which means that if you type z (35-ball cascade),
the thing is *very* narrow, since you'd have to be *really* far away
to see up that high.  I'm planning on adding an option so that it either
does that *or* keeps the hands a fixed screen-distance apart, but as I
said, user-options are kind of sparse right now.

Oh, right, availability.  It can be anonymous-FTP'd from math.harvard.edu,
in the /pub directory; the files are juggle.exe and juggle.doc (surprize!).
Sorry if it's a name conflict with the other one's PC version; such is life.
For people without FTP access, I'm willing to uuencode a copy and send it,
and I'll do the same for anyone who actually wants the source-- it needs
Borland Turbo C++ (Or maybe Turbo C would work, if it uses the same graphics
commands) to compile, and I'd have to tar, compress, and uuencode the
several files involved, but if you want it, it's yours.

Oh, as for lead-in patterns, it doesn't use them... it essentially just starts
with the "correct" number of balls in each hand, and goes right into the
pattern.  This isn't a problem unless you're a human, who has trouble catching
and throwing while you're still holding balls!

Sorry for the long post.  I'd love feedback on this, suggestions, etc, and
I'll be getting a copy of xjuggle as soon as I get back from thanksgiving
break...

--Michael Kleber                "I don't have an overactive imagination...
  kleber@husc.harvard.edu        I have an underactive reality..."  --EG

