Friday, August 21, 2009

GSoC Krita tile engine wrap-up

The summer has almost gone, GSoC has finished..

I had two aims for my project: the first was to make a new, good, able to swap and compress tile engine for Krita and the second was to make a mipmapping subsystem. They are in trunk now, but they both are in testing state.

Features

Let's take a look what features do they suggest:

Tile engine

I had to refactor most of tile-subsystem code. New tiles can be easily shared, that helps much during saving undo information. Speaking strictly, now we don't have to save this undo information just before painting. This is done in deferred way, in a separate thread. It means that new engine has a very good perspective on multiprocessor systems.

Unfortunately i didn't manage to finish swapper thread in time. Too much time was spent on the second task. That is one of the resons why this engine is still in a "testing" state.

Mipmapping

This task was quite difficult to perform. Adding new canvas caching and prescaling engine caused much code of KisPrescaledProjection to be refactored. So i spent most of the time on that. Now mipmapping stuff itself is finished, but much of Krita merging and threading code must be revised. We've faced with many paint artefacts caused by race conditions in a merging mechanism. That is why at the moment i'm working on that part of Krita. After solving all the issues with threading mipmapping will be a very good option for users to optimize their zooming.

How to activate

As i said these features are being tested for now. This means they are not turned on by default, but if you are interested, you can always try them out!

New tile engine activation HOWTO:

This feature needs recompilation of Krita.

1) svn co svn://anonsvn.kde.org/home/kde/trunk/koffice
2) cd koffice
3) .. edit a file ./krita/image/CMakeLists.txt ..
.. change a line ..
set(USE_TILESYSTEM 1)
.. to ..
set(USE_TILESYSTEM 3)
4) make -j3 install

Mipmapping activation HOWTO:

For mipmapping you needn't recompile anything :)
Just set an option in your kritarc configuration file

useMipmapping=true

This file is usually stored in ~/.kde4/share/config/kritarc

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