Hey, I'm kind of a noob to PD, and I could really use a lttile information on things.

1. The array- is there any way to make it respond ina polar fashion? Or any particular way to graph visually in polar? I built myself some cartopol things and I want to see them. Osciliscope objects?
2. Canvases- What kinds of messages can the recieve and send? Can is their purpose? Can I alter there properties in real time?
3. Is there any object like degrade~ (msp) for PD? if not, any suggestions on how to start building one?
   
   I'm sure there will be more questions later.
   
   Thanks
   
   Sunji

_2) Canvases- What kinds of messages can the recieve and send? Can is their purpose? Can I alter there properties in real time? _

[ ;
[ canvas1 label <insert text here> (

will change the label of a caption of a canvas. this is nice for displaying information. for example, for <insert text here> if you put something like 'sample number: &#036;1' and then have a float message going into to the message box. this will look better and be more informative than just displaying a number box.

i have also found canvases helpful for making more user friendly interfaces for my patches. first i organize my patch into subpatches. for each of these subpatches, i use the 'display on parent ' option and so you can see any gui objects but not all of the connections and non-gui objects....you end up with a 'wireless' patch. i use canvases as a backdrops for the various sub patches because you can color code them which is nice for laying things out and what not..

not sure what else they are good for and i am sorry i don't have any answers for your other two questions except for question 1)--not really. but one thought would be to map the 'cartesian' coordinates of one array to an array of corresponding polor coordinates with some time a transformation function... mathematically speaking you can map the function y=f(x) to the polar function r=f(theta). this could get a little cumbersome though...and it could possibly involve non-1-to-1 relationships if you want to reverse it.

by the way, what does the degrade~ object do?
--zac

degrade~, iirc, is an msp object that will drop the sample rate and bit depth of incoming audio streams. I wrote a few pieces in MSP that had the nyquist fold-over in it, and I'm trying to rebuild the patches.

With regards to canvas- how can I dictate the x_off and y_off, or the w and h of the "visible rectangle"?

BTW, thank you for your reply, zac hilbert

sunji

sunji - i did some experimenting and poking around the Pd source code and figured out what messages you can send to a canvas object. here is the list:

dialog -- not quite sure how to use this one or what exactly it does
size <number> -- determines the selectable size of the canvas
delta <x> <y> -- moves the position of the canvas relatively by x horizontally and y vertically
pos <x> <y> -- set x and y position of the canvas
vis_size <x> <y> -- set the width (x) and height (y) of the canvas
color <number> -- set the color
send <name> -- set the send name of the canvas
receive <name> -- set the receive name
label <name> -- set the label
label_pos <x> <y> -- set the x_off and y_off properties for the label
label_font <font> -- set the label font
get_pos -- returns the x and y position of the canvas to the canvas send name

i think that's all of them. i'll post if i find any more

--zac

Thanks! That's a great list.

zac - i knew i had seen that list of yours somewhere before - you can get it by right clicking on the box at the top corner of a canvas - it's the canvas help file.