Out of curiosity and to learn about data structures i build this vanilla xy-pad.

In principle it works very well, but when the pad gets bigger than about 100 x 100 pixels, it becomes very, very heavy. This means that clearing the subpatch would take a long time and it isn't even possible to close the window until the patch is cleared. In full size (256 x 640 pixels) it took 9 minutes on my computer to clear the patch.

Also, on my linux machine it crashed my file browser, so this comes with a warning. Better save any open projects before trying this.

pixelgrid.pd

Another approach with nested data structures which is lightweight, but unfortunately there is no click event from the element of the nested struct, only from the struct itself. The missing change event could have been compensated by a metro, but to get the coordinates of the element on click seems to be impossible.

pixelgrid2d-02c2b.pd

There are of course different working solutions for an xy-pad in Pd, e.g. cyclone [mousestate] and iemgui [iem_event].

This is way easier in Purr Data-- there's a [draw rect] object that takes a "drag 1" message to turn on drag notifications. The entire shape responds to the event.

@jancsika Sounds awesome!

I assume that whenever there is a need for plain vanilla patches, in most cases there will be a touchpad involved. So there wouldn't be any actual need for a vanilla xy-pad.

It was just a fun project to explore data structures and it was interesting for me to see the limitations of structs (or the graphic renderer for that matter).

@ingox Hi, I was inspired by pixelgrid to produce this. I was confuse with my early attempts of getting the x and y for the position from float x and float y but this didn't follow the mouse, then it dawned on me the offset was the mouse position
Cheers
Balwyn

xypadtest.zip

@Balwyn Very nice! Thank you!

this is also inspired from pixelgrid, this way its not possible to track every pixel, but its usable as a resizeable sequencer.
roughpixelgrid.pd

@Jona Just great!

I was just looking at some of the tests and found this approach not using data structures, but an array. It is driven by a metro and has some unwanted graphical effects of the array, but it is vanilla and actually works.
pixeltest2.pd

@ingox I see! you want to arbitrarily pick up the x/y position of the mouse click then output the mouse x/y while the mouse button is pressed.
Without the output of the mouse x/y when clicked and no tracked x/y mouse-movement and then no mouse-up x/y, I would say not possible without externals

@ingox I also meant to say, I am very impressed with the novel array approach

@Balwyn Yes. As Jona mentioned in the other thread, we wanted to build a multislider interface, where you can click anywhere and the sliders would react. Just like the "Jump on click" property of the H/Vslider. The graphical representation and the animation where already working, using data structures, all we needed was the mouse position. With iemgui [iem_event] there is a great solution, our question was if it is possible with vanilla alone.

I agree that it is not possible to get it in a perfect manner with vanilla right now. Still data structures are very powerful and i love what you did with our findings!